Paintball design concepts you can’t stand

[FeedTheDogg]

I was wondering, what are some design ideas (new or old) that you absolutely hate? For me (easy target) it would be Brass eagles hoppers that are built into their markers or their Co2 changers built into the marker 😂🤣

Honestly, when I was young people hated brass eagle but I see them in a different light now. Dirt cheap, entry level equipment to get people started. Still some of their designs throughout the years were hilarious looking. Remember the Brass Eagle Samurai or Brass Eagle Sabre?

[Toestr]

Using button head/low mount/countersunk screws where it's not ergonomically necessary (ie on a grip frame). Just use full depth socket cap screws so a) there is less chance of stripping out; and b) so I can get vise grips on it when it does strip out.

[markdem]

Center feeds. I like to aim over the top of my guns, thank you

[cheapguitarscheapthrills]

Mark from the top rope with an elbow drop! Swore off angle feeds for good. If any gun was gonna sell me it was my Sterling and I couldn't get along with it.

[The Jayster]

Couldn't hit the wide side of a barn with my center feed Phantom. Then I got an old school Armson OEG red dot that sits behind the feedneck and my hit ration went up dramatically.

[morkrom]

hopper feeds

[PumpMan10988]

These newfangled "constant air" and "direct feed" set ups are ruining the game!!! Don't get me started on "automatic" markers. 😆

[boomersruckus]

Crazy milling in guns. I know I am alone in my thoughts but twister, ripper, blah blah blah, limited edition guns that are functionally identical to the stock brethren but have special milling jobs. Meh..... The new HK CS2 aluminum front grip.... dumb and ugly. When Kingman was using 9.6 volt batteries for their electro Spyders... dumb. The neck gator thingies.....lmao. Apex barrel adapters... meh.

[cheapguitarscheapthrills]

9.6volt is what keeps me from buying back some of those old Spyders

[The Jayster]

Apex barrels are an inexpensive, cool, gimmick. I used to run an SP-1 with a BH board and an L7 bolt with the Apex and use fragile tournament paint. I would go full-auto and rain down shots at long distance. Recball paint wouldn't break at that distance but that tourney paint sure did. After a while I stopped the practice as I was about to be tarred and feathered out of the field!

[morkrom]

PaintballBaroque

[Ecapnation]

Let me preface this by saying by trade a design engineer.... So, yeah.


My biggest design concept peeve?

Number 1 with a bullet......

- Using your customer base as your R&D department. Ok it's an abstract "design concept" but too many companies make things and release them with a great marketing push but when you get the product it either doesn't work, needs tweaks, or is just under tested. Paintball do recalls?! Lol no ... You as the customer but pay for the correction.

Number 2...

- COPYING OTHER COMPANIES DESIGNS! While I was designing all of the Emek bodies I did some were definitely cocker and timmy designs reworked to the emek body and some were firearms that I morphed to work on emeks but being the tip of the spear for that market I was trying to make something work out of nothing. Once I established my market I pushed into my own crazy designs some sold well my best seller was with the emf100 which was loosely based on a tec9..... A first in the market untraditional milsim marker.... In all we sold close to 60 of those kits. Then inception copied it and nuked my market on those.... Then some clown in Canada copied the PewDW body kit I made and started to report my stuff on shape ways as stolen designs..... Except I made mine 3 years years before his

3) Excessive use of non standard seals

4) Excessive use of rubber as important integrated parts.... Looking at you every planet eclipse gun that has rubber and plastic holding in batteries. Paint left on rubber turns it too goo.

[Ecapnation]

Number 1 has nothing to do with Nova believe it or not. Vanguard was what started it for me, they didn't believe edge breaking and deburring things was worth the money. So many guns were shipped with Anno over burrs which was causing problems. I was involved with them briefly to fix issues...... My prognosis was better post machining clean up. Which I did on a run of team guns which worked amazing.

[XEMON]

#1 is baffling to me too ... Unfortunately it's more and more becoming the norm across all industries ...

Nova is just the latest in the paintball world, and unfortunately not gonna be the last ...

[martix_agent]

I see you've met the DYE crowd as well as nova

[uv_halo]

Let's see.
Double Finger Triggers (especially those with grips built around them): I don't need to shoot faster, I need to shoot better, and how you grip is less than optimal.
Center feeds and hoppers above the barrel: Under-barrel feeds could've been done years before the Halo mods and the Rotor Box mags. Sure there was the ATS but, I'm honestly surprised that mechanism made it to mass production as how difficult it was to manufacture and maintain (compared to other gun and feed designs). Think of the warp feed mechanism integrated into the body of a gun for comparison.
The lack of any sighting options integrated into the gun, even a ghost ring.
If you need more than three tools to strip for cleaning (during the day, and after the day) and adjustment, your build's a failure.
Not offering guns in black or other drab colors, I'm not buying a wall-hanger, nor am I entering a fashion show.

[The Great Equalizer]

I'd like to jump on this bandwagon. Tournament guns I get, but there is no reason an entry level Spyder or Azodin should have a double trigger.

[uv_halo]

Doubling down: The double finger trigger was intended to circumvent semi-auto only requirements in tournaments. The only differences between this, and the Response trigger (same intended purpose) was the simplicity of the two-finger design and, the ROF being related to the shooter's 'skill'. What always killed me is that when tourney guns (early electros) started to get double finger triggers the still competitive mechanical markers of the time started to get them, even though they weren't really walkable.

[Txaggie08]

Ive never understood the hate towards a double trigger. Especially on a mag or swing framed cocker.... the bottom of the thing has always been better leverage and I fan it faster. Why are they "bad" on someway...

[Cdn_Cuda]

Jolo Scales hopper.... the scales are going the wrong way.

[BubbleHead87]

Twist 180 in feedneck. Boom right way

[morkrom]

But what if It's a pinecone are they still wrong.

[mooman978]

When I first got a DM8 I didn’t know that the retained air in the gun after taking off the tank would eventually purge itself shooting out the asa pin thingy. The next time I tried to air up my gun nothing… I had to call dye and order a new part. How can something like that even happen??

[DocsMachine]

The original Equalizer would fire when you removed the tank.

Not kidding- they actually did a recall- send your valve in, get a modded valve returned, no charge.

Doc.

[The Great Equalizer]

Doc, oddly enough mine didn't do that. It did however do the thing where it stopped working forever. I've been meaning to send it to you for about 15 years now. Maybe this is the year.

[glaman5266]

Electric loaders with a rear drive cone. So the Rotor, Spire, etc. When all the weight of your setup is either above your frame hand or in the rear (bottle), the last thing I need is a loader that makes my setup even more back-heavy than it is. I don't like having to muscle around something so unbalanced. I much prefer front drive cone loaders (HK Sonic or Speed, for example) or agitated loaders that aren't so back-heavy in the first place. Get that weight to the front to offset the bottle.

[BrendanB]

The aesthetics of the Dye Hyper 3 HPR ...tis fugly

The aesthetics of the NXI Sentinel Cocker ... back block looks like it came off a different gun. Frame lines are all over the place ...tis fugly

shock tech hinge ...tis fugly

just a few of the top of my head... there is a whole fugly paintball world out there.

[SignOfZeta]

The aesthetics of almost everything. Flames. Skulls. Flaming skulls, “tribal” tattoo looking carny garbage. Anything “bad ass” with no backup.

Names invented by a 14 year old who learned English by watching “attitude” era WWF. “Evil Pimp”, for example. What kind of Juggalo came up with that? The endless gags regarding balls and keeping things clean…usage of terms like “mafia”, “killer”, “murder”, all things down that road. The Ball Sack is a modern product with a name as stupid as the 90s, so is the Death Blade trigger for the Luxe. Death. Blade. Moronic.

Milsim

Stupidly small masks that won’t cover your head unless you’re ten years old or have trailer park malnutrition syndrome from your mom smoking while she was pregnant.

[ChoSanJuan]

That Ballsack product is a halfstep in pod loading innovation. They've got good ideas happening there. The thing I HATED about it is that some genius thought it was a good/funny idea to run the lower third ads for it during the WNXL matches last month. I get it isn't about the name and more about the utility of the tool, but cmon...

[The Great Equalizer]

SignOfZeta I'm adding "Carny Garbage" to mental phrase book. I've also got a big noggin and I've had to stick with my JT X-Fire from 1994. The CRBN "More Coverage" options look reasonable, but I haven't been able to try one on yet.

Refoogee "... we're kind of doing the gun equivalent of fencing" I like that, though technically the gun equivalent of fencing was pistol duels using wax bullets as featured in the 1908 Olympics. I've never been a tournament guy and I got into paintball in the 1990s because I aged out of playing "Army" with cap guns... but wanted to keep playing Army with cap guns. I think a lot of new players are like I was and are more interested in equipment and fields that feel more like video games and I think the popularity of airsoft vs. paintball bears that out. Milsim where they try to be completely accurate to real guns like a Tippmann Project Salvo or Valken M17 feels goofy, but something like the EMF-100 is a great limited ammo marker, specifically designed for paintball with a low stock that works for people wearing masks. An EMF-100 feels like a fencing sabre and a Project Salvo feels like a shopping mall fantasy sword. I think we might draw some more Airsoft people our way with more fencing sabres.

[Refoogee]

The Great Equalizer I certainly see paintball as a natural evolution of those Olympic dueling sports. One of my more controversial opinions about the game is, and I feel the beginning of this evolution was pretty immediate, that paintball sort of abstracted itself into a corner in which it stopped making intuitive sense for people. I'm sure a fencing saber is not the optimal design if you wanted to maximize your performance given the rules of Olympic fencing, it's probably something that doesn't resemble a sword at all. I think there's an aesthetic truth that remains in the sportified version of what was combat training, it's the soul of the game, and attempting to completely smooth over that tradition results in something that feels uncanny, or dishonest. Chess would lose something if you turned the Rook into a big rectangle, and called it the rectangle. Nobody was buying that paintball was "just long range tag", and the game suffered for it.

In that regard, I see something like the EMF100 as completely genius.

[scrounger]

ill add two of what drives me crazy

one..
PRE ORDERS.

look i understand maybe , just MAYBE, trying to get some sales to set up some feed money to continue the line
hell even to hype it (though still stupid idea overall)

but then TOO MANY TIMES they come much later than claimed or (like angel eyes mask) DONT EVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.

which leads to a question no one seems to ask or want to answer..
what happens to all the money people paid for "pre order"
do they ever get it back?

overall it could work if YOU HAVE THE DAMN PRODUCT ALREADY FINISHED AND WHEN DATE CLAIMED HAPPENS... YOU SHIP IT

two..
shipping products with KNOWN FLAWS that wont recover even when have great idea"

this one is personal to me.. I believe it was called the torque loader..
it had a revolutionary (a term overused lately) screw feed design with two sensors (before loading and after screw) and very easy to disassemble/assemble.
i got my hands on two somewhere.
but were shipped for christmas KNOWING the manufacturer (oversees) screwed up the programing chip.
it had sensor issues that could not be fixed and on most of the loaders.
one of mine did, the other was glitchy.

they claimed it was too late to stop shipping ..
so let it out and just killed it.

i have one other and dont know if it falls under this but ill leave it here

products that clearly are different, but to try to kill it or stop the makers someone sues and THE JUDGE who (imo doesnt know a paintball from a meatball) lets the case run until one side quits or one side wins, but cant restart the line.

one good case is the PULSE LOADERS.

i had three and yes some flaws in material that were common to all loaders that later gen could fix (feednecks as one).
it had a revolutionary pull out drive tray and first of its kind wireless chips you could buy for your electro to add so your loader/gun were synced
something not seen for years after and rare today.

by the time the judge saw this case was BS and draxxes (think i spelled that right) won..
they could not afford to start up the line again.


Scrounger

[cheapguitarscheapthrills]

DarxXus if you wanna follow their spelling as seen on the cases of paint 😂

[Trbo323]

Stock parts only

There's no more aftermarket. Hell you can't even change out an ASA at this point. If the companies could just decide on one gas through ASA design then it would open up a whole market for aftermarket ASAs and mounting options.

I like drop forwards, can't do it on the market today because not only is making a gas through drop hard but as it sits you would basically need to make one for each marker. Very small margin for profit there so nobody does it.

Bolts, feedneck, eyes, triggers

It's all gone.

For the most part a lot of it was useless, but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun and I like to see what people choose to do when making their marker "theirs".

Anyone can put money on a counter to buy something, it takes some thought and creativity to turn it into something that suits you better

Sent from my motorola edge 2024 using Tapatalk

[Ecapnation]

The killing of the aftermarket was deliberately done if you ask me... Nps/kee started to buy them up and kill them off.

[The Jayster]

The Emek is kind of a throwback to that era. It felt weird when I first got it bones stock and then built it up through the years, because it reminded me of what I used to do as a kid when I first started out. You get used to buying a gun, using it as is out of the box and make no mods whatsoever to it afterwards.

[Tarsun2]

if Kingman was good at one thing, it was that. all the different combinations you could do with stock parts (and even aftermarket). different bolts, strikers, grips, grip frames, asa's, barrels, feed necks, and literally everything else.

[MrKittyCatMeowFace]

Bad seal material. Hate on the cheap Brass eagles all you want. Those seals in the tigersharks and stingrays (and other) are bulletproof!

Does anyone else work on air powered tools and equipment? Do they constantly leak and need rebuilds too? Or do you have equipment with seals from ww2 that just keep on chugging along for some reason?

[The Great Equalizer]

My mid-90s heavily modified Tigershark is still on its original cup seal and valve o-ring, though I have replaced the bolt o-ring due to wear.