If I could go back in time (insignificant edition)

[pintbuster]

According to the gear I play with, I am already living in the past.

[Chuck E Ducky]

This is the way…

[scottieb]

Me to a T.

[Chuck E Ducky]

I wouldn’t change a thing paintball wise. Just wish I hand more money back then so I could play more before life got in the way. Not spending all my money on that dam Fusion F1 that still sits in a box wouldn’t hurt. But honestly if I could go back paintball wise I would just do it all over again.

[MrBarraclough]

Convince my college-aged self to make the effort to find a field and travel to it to play, and not be discouraged about not having the friend group to play with that I'd had back home. Explain that otherwise, I might damned near forget about the sport entirely for twenty effing years and find myself starting again at 38 wondering where the hell I'd been all that time, with no good answer. Might also explain that breaking up with the emotionally abusive, manipulative nutjob sooner rather than later would free up a lot of time for paintball in addition to making life generally happier.

Or failing the above, convince my mid-to-late-20s self to resume playing shortly after moving back home from law school. So many lost years.

More generally: try to convince someone at Nelson to take direct sales to consumers seriously, or at least to market to the emerging online paintball retailers like ANS and Action Village (yes, I know, now the same).

Most importantly: travel to the late 80s just as Schrader valves were really catching on and point out the need to drill a hole or cut a channel in the tank-side valve threads to vent pressure in the event that the valve and tank start to separate. It would not have changed the game, but would have saved at least one life, and possibly more.

[Bigtuana]

If I could go back to my backyard woodsball days I’d invest into a pocket chronograph and mitigate the joy killers of shooting 240fps or 400fps.

[DocsMachine]

[cracks knuckles]

Personal stuff? Whoa, Nelly.

Right at the beginning, I'd have invested in better goggles WAY earlier. I struggled along with single-pane UVEX goggles and a Woodstalk mask- long after such things were obsolete- simply because they were cheap, and little else was available locally. A set of thermal JTs would have been- and eventually were- a huge improvement.

Next, I'd have invested in a mask with ear protection almost immediately. Woodstalk masks have no such thing, and even back then, the X-Fire helmet was available.

I should also have held out for a proper Nelson-based pump, rather than the King Cobra that I got early on. Again, it's what was available locally- a big part of all of this might as well be labelled "I should have gotten into mail-ordering stuff WAY earlier".

The Cobra wasn't bad- I still have it today- but the barrel is something like .695", which was huge even back then, and despite heroic efforts with springs and custom hammers and the like, I'm not sure I ever got it above about 220, maybe 240.

A few years later I got a TASO Spartan, and that was a considerable improvement. Proper velocities, better accuracy, smoother pump, etc.

Also, pretty much the first marker I did buy new, mail order, was a Brass Eagle Ninja Nightmare- which I bought almost entirely because it was one of the coolest looking guns in APG at the time.

Hey, I was a kid. What did I know?

That cost me something like $465. You know what else was available at the time, and cost around $465? The 68 Special. But I didn't know what a semi-auto was.

Years later, I should not have bought that Poison. Which I did simply because it was cheap (Doc has been a broke boy all his life) and because I had a J&J brass barrel for the Cobra that I thought would make the Poison better. (Doc has also not been a particularly smart person all his life. )

There's also a bajillion add-on trinkets for various guns, like "venturi" bolts, "heavy" hammers, custom barrels and so on, that had I known then what I know now, I would not have wasted the money on.

I would, however, have gotten into some of the better tech a LOT sooner. Inline regulators (and something like a UniReg, not that POS RG-1 I ended up with) HPA, agitated loaders (I had a PMI-3 for a while, who needed an agitator? ) proper pods rather than 10-round tubes, proper harnesses rather than modified army-surplus junk (again, availability in backwater, Alaska) and worrying a LOT less about color and camoflage.

I could do a small book on the business aspect- and have been seriously thinking about it.

One of the main ones was that, prior to the business, I wanted a milling machine to make some of the mods I wanted to do to my own equipment. Machine tools are very few and far between up here, but at one point I found a guy that had a cheap, clapped-out JET mill-drill, and a Bridgeport in somewhat better condition. I couldn't afford the Bridgeport, so I got the mill-drill.

I struggled along with that POS for years- dealing mainly with extremely poor surface finishes, along with the usual mill-drill issues like losing ones' "zero" when raising or lowering the head. Had I begged, borrowed or stolen the money for the Bridgeport back then, I'd have been miles ahead.

And the big one- by hook or by crook, I should have gotten into CNC right at the beginning. At least doing a lot more studying and reading, even if I didn't actually own one. I'm only just now getting into it, and 'starting from scratch' has been extraordinarily frustrating.

I had plans, immediately after abandoning the mill-drill for a Bridgeport clone, to convert said MD into a 2D CNC. Mach 3 was a thing back then, and DIY home-shop CNC was starting to boom. But, again, a severe lack of money- and not much more time- kept me from chasing that one, too, down.

Even had it failed- as it almost inevitably would have- I'd have learned a great deal, and thus been considerably further ahead than I am right now.

Doc.

[bored383]

I'd tell my young and dumb self to get elbow and knee pads, and use them

*edit* and to watch out for that one tree root on the fort field at the place I used to play at back in Maryland . . . I really dorked my shoulder up permanently that day