The small questions you've never asked.

[Rusty Brass]

what came first the paintball or the marker?

The 707 is the earliest marker I know of and it's .68 caliber. I think it was purpose built to shoot paintballs so maybe both happened at the same time?

[Siress]

Cannot be a "marker" without a paintball, so the paintball came first. Air guns, though, date way back... pre-America, and certainly predate gelatin encapsulation. The 68cal airgun, though... now that's a thinker. 68cal is really just 11/16ths of an inch (though the ASTM spec. for size has a LOT of tolerance. e.g. see the text under my avatar). I'm not aware of any other uses for 68cal airguns. And there are plenty of uses for gelatin capsules of such size (bath beads, medicine, chemical delivery, etc). If I were a betting man, I'd bet paintballs came before 68cal airguns.

[Grendel]

Piggy-backing a question onto Doc's very informative barrel history; How did players deal with roll-outs on closed bolt (majority) of markers before the days of aftermarket barrels and bore sizing kits? Were people still doing fishing line, tape, and nail polish mods to stock sniper/cocker barrels? There were still multiple manufactures of paint, and variance in bore size even in the same brand was still a factor. That's one of the only REAL benefits of barrel systems was stopping roll-outs on closed bolt systems.
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All of these can work with either a breech drop or bore drop marker some are easier then the others and by far the best IMHO is nail polish for versatility and durability.

• Technique - keep barrel pointed up between shots to keep them from rolling out. Super easy habit to get into with the paint fwd of the breech.
• Nail Polish - been using that trick since the late 80s when I started playing
• Tape (electrical, coaches, hockey) - a small patch added just in front of the bolt face when in battery or if you have a removable barrel over the breech end of the barrel
• String/fishing line - down the feed neck into the space between the barrel and bolt extending a little way down the barrel and wrapped over the feed so the elbow will hold it in place

As stated in the olden days roll outs where not as big of a problem as they are now. I can even remember paint so swollen we had hard times loading them they were so large with some markers. There were times though that you did get smaller diameter paintballs that gave you roll outs but that was remedied with a quick trip to the staging area.

[DocsMachine]

Polished or Patinaed Brass which is better?

-Patina'ed requires less miantenance. It's also less flashy if your game is to hide & sneak. Polished just looks better, though.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

what came first the paintball or the marker?

-The marker, no question. The markers were around and being used for agricultural purposes, for something like 10-15 years before somebody thought of the idea of making an actual game out of shooting each other with it. (The Nel-Spot dates back to the late 60s, the first known game of paintball was in '81.)

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

Piggy-backing a question onto Doc's very informative barrel history; How did players deal with roll-outs on closed bolt (majority) of markers before the days of aftermarket barrels and bore sizing kits? Were people still doing fishing line, tape, and nail polish mods to stock sniper/cocker barrels?

-Those are exactly it. The nail-polish trick has been around since the mid 80s, according to the magazines, and people at the first game I ever played at, were applying bits of black tape to the breech of some of their pumps.

I also find it amusing that Smart Parts (or Philly Americans LLC), still use their threads on their entry-level (GOG) products, and their flagship (DLX) products, but have conceded to using cocker threads on their (upper?)mid-grade (Shocker Paintball "SP") line of modern RSX and XLS Shockers.

-Not surprising. The entry level stuff rarely gets upgraded. Kids buy those, shoot 'em, and forget 'em in the back of the closet by the end of the summer.

The high-end stuff is bought by the tourney players- the guys that don't care what the barrel thread is, cause they're gonna use the stock one (which these days comes with multiple backs) or an inserted barrel.

The midrange guns are the moneymakers, those sell the best. Higher per-gun profit than the entry level, and more sales in total numbers than the high end. And as noted, 'Cocker thread compatibility is a selling point.

I have given the SP guys a lot of heat over the years- and deservedly so- for their questionable business practices, but they're definitely not stupid. Thy know how the market works.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

-The marker, no question. The markers were around and being used for agricultural purposes, for something like 10-15 years before somebody thought of the idea of making an actual game out of shooting each other with it. (The Nel-Spot dates back to the late 60s, the first known game of paintball was in '81.)

Doc.

-I misread this as 'paintball (IE, the sport) or the marker', and for that, my answer stands.

But THE paintball or THE marker, no. Both were invented at the same time. People needed a way to mark trees for felling or cattle for culling, without having to walk all the way up to each one and slather it with paint with a brush.

So after experimenting with things like high pressure hoses and such (long story short) they came up with a way to make thin wax hemispheres (rumor has it in wooden molds) that could be filled with oil based paint and sealed together. At the same time, they were modifying an air pistol to hold and fire them.

It's kind of like asking which came first, the bullet or the gun? One required the other- to make the gun work, it needed ammo, and there was no reason for the ammo without a way to project it.

Doc.

[Rusty Brass]

http://www.nelsonpaintball.com/about-us/

Says paintballs first but the gun had to have been part of the concept from the get-go. Like you said - they would have been pointless without one.

[Siress]

Yes and no. I have a vague recollection of one of the original players from the first game regaling in the history of it all mentioning the Nelspot as a replacement for sling shots. This was over a decade ago, I was tired, hot, and probably hungover from college exam fatigue - so my memory could be faulting out on me. Jim Lively is the guy I was listening to. To me, it seems just as strange to intentionally choose 11/16ths as it does for there to be an 11/16ths size already in use for encapsulating something else. 0.170cu-in (2.78cc) volume isn't close enough to an integer to suggest it had to do with dosing. It's not like tubing was commonly extruded with an 11/16ths ID. Or was it?

[lew]

On an old-school first-generation Max Flow manifold bottomline regulator, can the second/forward air input port on top of the reg body be blocked off without the manifold pushing out air?

[Knuckle Dragger]

Who was the first company or custom shop to start the mass manufacturing of the ripper milling?

[DocsMachine]

On an old-school first-generation Max Flow manifold bottomline regulator, can the second/forward air input port on top of the reg body be blocked off without the manifold pushing out air?

-Not quite sure what you mean. The early-generation Max manifolds had two ports, both of which connected to the inlet to the regulator itself. That is, the output from the tank, and the two side ports, were all one passage. You could have your fill nipple on either side, and either just plug or fill the other one with a gauge.

The regulator body, too, had two sets of ports, usually just one furthest from the spring-cap end, and then a set of four just below the spring-cap threads. If you had multiple ports at the far end (some did) you could use any one of them for an inlet, and the four outlets in the middle of the reg body, blow the threads, all connected to the same internal chamber. You could put any combination of hoses, fittings or gauges in those ports, in any order- they all went to the same place.

Doc.

[THE SHOOTIST]

Why do lesbians masturbate with a plastic penis instead of a vagina?

[DocsMachine]

Who was the first company or custom shop to start the mass manufacturing of the ripper milling?

-Jim Eaton originally developed the Ripper milling, back in the very early 2000s. They were initially done by special order- you'd send your body in, and when he had enough to consider it a batch, he'd run 'em all at once.

I think he might have eventually made a batch or two in bulk- that is, new, fresh bodies rather than pre-owned ones, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

I do know that it eventually soured Jim on working in paintball- especially individual customers. Kind of the same reason PK Selective got out of one-off anodizing, it got to be far too annoying with individual customers asking for detailed, one-off jobs, but not wanting to pay for the extra time and work.

Jim still has a production CNC shop, with some pretty cutting-edge equipment, but he only deals with industrial-level customers, the kind of guys that will order 10,000 or 50,000 parts at a time.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

Why do lesbians masturbate with a plastic penis instead of a vagina?

-More research is needed. If I'm not back in a week, forward my mail.



Doc.

[DocsMachine]

Yes and no. I have a vague recollection of one of the original players from the first game regaling in the history of it all mentioning the Nelspot as a replacement for sling shots.

-Yessir, but not with paintballs. The early stories- there's a couple books about the first few years- described how guys like Gaines and others, had tried other versions of "projectile tag" before discovering the paintball guns, including using grapes fired from slingshots. By the time Gaines and Gurnesy and the others out the first games together, both the guns and the paintballs had been around for about a decade or more.

Doc.

[Jordan]

Cannot be a "marker" without a paintball, so the paintball came first. Air guns, though, date way back... pre-America, and certainly predate gelatin encapsulation. The 68cal airgun, though... now that's a thinker. 68cal is really just 11/16ths of an inch (though the ASTM spec. for size has a LOT of tolerance. e.g. see the text under my avatar). I'm not aware of any other uses for 68cal airguns. And there are plenty of uses for gelatin capsules of such size (bath beads, medicine, chemical delivery, etc). If I were a betting man, I'd bet paintballs came before 68cal airguns.

I think people are forgetting that paintballs cure and shrink to a nominal .68 caliber, and are not molded in their final dimensions.