Bought a pile of autococker parts once, which include a raw 95 cocker body. Someone bored out the valve chamber so large the front frame screw punched thru it. Had to wrap the frame screw in teflon tape to get it hold air.
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I purchased a Phantom someone smashed the breach end on. So bad the barrel would barely thread on. Seller knew it and sent it hoping to collect on the insurance I’m assuming. Because you could tell the Ano was scratched up on the barrel threads ware he tried to put the two pieces together but claimed it happened in shipping. PayPal gave me my money back after the seller ghosted me. But initially the seller was trying to get the payment “gifted” I payed the fees and the deal that was too good to be true definitely was.Comment
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Local hobby store bought a bag of used gear, asked me to come in and check it out and fix what may be needed. Tippmann Prolite, you could unscrew the barrel, but not pull it out of the foregrip.
Pulled the foregrip and took the barrel out the back- with difficulty- it was bulged. PO had apparently been using it- the gun- to shoot "seal bombs", which are basically a semi-legal equivalent of the old M-80 firecrackers. (Called "seal bombs" as commercial fishermen use them to scare seals away from the nets.) We figured he'd light them and shove 'em down the barrel, then shoot 'em out, letting them explode in midair.
One presumably got stuck, or went off too soon. And it was a J&J brass- I figure if it'd been aluminum, that'd probably have burst.
Same bag, a 68 Carbine. Barrel bore smeared with something brown. We figured he may have been shooting moose turds- for you non-Alaskan/no-Canadians, in the wintertime since moose eat branches and twigs, they poop small nuggets about the size of large grapes. They're basically sawdust- people have dried and sealed them to sell as things like keychains.
But, thankfully we were wrong- it was chocolate. He'd been shooting Milk Duds.
Still the same bag: Set of JT Spectras, with a hole cut in the bottom half so he could play and smoke a cigarette.
Customer sent in a 'Cocker body, in which somebody had milled a P-block. Except it was square- more like an F-block than a P, and the bottom edge of the block constantly hung up on the square lip of the body. It was an auto-misfeeder.
Somewhere around here I have a Sniper body that somebody sifted out of the rubble after their field's gear shack burned down. He gave it to me and one of these days I want to rebuild it.
For a number of years there, I always had at least one Angel with a stripped feed neck on the table. I'd get those in with the neck glued back on with anything from RTV to Gorilla Glue to JB Weld. Usually just getting that crap cleared off without causing additional damage took longer than the fix.
Oh, and misdrilled eye holes back in the early days of adding eyes? I can't count the hundreds of those I plugged and redrilled. (To say nothing of the almost-certainly thousands of stripped grip frame or detent holes.
Doc.Doc's Machine & Airsmith Services: Creating the Strange and Wonderful since 1998!
The Whiteboard: Daily, occasionally paintball-related webcomic mayhem!
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Oh! And the King, the very pinnacle of bad...!
Okay, a little backstory: Around the turn of the century- '99, 2K, etc.- the "holy grail" of the day was an E-Cocker. Neither the Race nor the E-Blade was out yet, and F5s were rare and expensive (and a bit finicky.)
In this market, an "airsmith" by name of Al Mollick convinced a customer he could build him an E-Cocker. The customer sent a gun in, and after a long delay and a lot of excuses, finally got it back. I forget the exact machinations, but I think there was a trade involved, and I ended up with the carcass. I, in a word, was flabbergasted, and posted a few pictures:
The gun was powered off the loader- or more accurately, the loader was gutted and used as a battery box for the gun. As a preliminary indicator of the quality of the work, there's a random stab on the loader, from a hot soldering iron.
The "brain box" was a small plastic snap case like you'd see a little sewing kit in, and the electronics are just scraps of breadboard glued in place with RTV silicone.
That whole mess was unceremoniously bolted- see the screw above the battery snaps- to the side of the loader, and connected to the gun with recycled RC car connectors. (Soldered and black-taped, not heat-shrunk.)
The grip frame was a heavily modified Benchmark Automag 2-finger frame. It couldn't have been much rougher if he'd used a hammer and chisel.
The sear was literally pulled by a piece if dental floss tied to it, and the trigger was frickin' Brilliant. A piece of piano wire was attached to the trigger, and when you pulled it- the trigger- it tightened the piano wire like a bowstring, which pushed a small dome switch- which had been epoxied to the wire- against the frame, theoretically firing the gun.
I am absolutely not joking.
The single-acting, spring return ram had been glued into the frame with 2-part epoxy putty (the whole build used three different flavors of the stuff- the dark grey seen there is the "steel filled" type) and pulled on the dental floss which came through (I mislabeled) an RC car antenna support tube as a guide.
Here's the aforementioned trigger switch.
And finally...
I think we set the kid up with a Bushmaster 2000 or something- I forget the details, it's been a quarter-century!- and I ended up with the gun, or what was left of it, anyway.
I then did this with the frame:
Which eventually became this- keeping in mind this was a full year before the E-frames came out.
Doc.
Doc's Machine & Airsmith Services: Creating the Strange and Wonderful since 1998!
The Whiteboard: Daily, occasionally paintball-related webcomic mayhem!
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Doc I totally remember that Al “McGyver” Mollick cocker! It was so horrible yet interesting at the same time!
I picked up a Defiant 2 a few weeks back, it supposedly had HPR issues! It had issues with everything oring either being rock hard or just total goo.You do not have permission to view this gallery.
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I bought a functional spyder once that had teflon tape as a valve oring. Like it sealed up fine and shot, the oring was just made of twisted up teflon tape.
I bought an ebladed cocker off of someone and they just sent it in a flat rate box. Nothing in the box padding wise, when it showed up the bever tail was sticking out of the cardboard.
Bought a craigslist gear bag sale that included a mummified mouse in the bottom of the bin. That was a bonus item, not included in the listing.Comment
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Other than melted o-rings and old paint residue, I've been fairly lucky when it comes to old stuff. One that sticks out to me is a cocker project I bought that had the LPR piston and spring in it backwards along with a Spyder style cupseal for some reason. Like, ok, I guess. Oh, and the PM5 I got from a buddy's brother that had both regs completely chock full of red axel grease. Just stuffed to the absolute gills. I'm glad I didn't try to air it up because it'd probably would've sprayed grease out of the vent holes. I guess the manual did say to grease it...Last edited by RhoXi; 09-01-2026, 09:27 AM.Comment
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Of all the WTF moments for me, the price has to go to when I was playing in the Swedish National Paintball League waaayyyy back in 1993. At the time semi autos were still illegal in Sweden, so pump it was.
I was playing with a Sterling STP, brand new for the season, and during a match of the group stage the marker just stopped working. Sure, I could still pump the damned thing, but absolutely no response whatsoever. The match didn't end well for me.
It turned out that the front part of the hammer arm had broken clean off, so the hammer simply couldn't catch... Which would explain why the Sterling didn't work, although as to why the hammer arm broke on a more or less new Sterling STP is beyond me. The surface area of the breakage looked like porous pot metal, so I would guess a manufacturing issue.
Second place, albeit not a damage as such, is when I disassembled a stock Automag to clean it after I had tried to dry fire it without luck. I had just gotten the Automag in a deal with some used markers, so I was testing them all at the kitchen table. When I tried to disassemble it to see what the issue might be, I noticed that the on/off-pin didn't clear the rail, so the valve didn't come off.
Aha - that's the culprit, I thought - easy fix. However, when I had unscrewed the body from the rail, the on/off-pin still held the valve firmly in place. But not for long... To my surprise the on/off-pin shot through the room with a loud POP! Apparently the valve held pressure without being gassed up. I have no idea why - feel free to educate me if you know what could be the reason.
Bonus surprise - I purchased a gear bag of misc markers, one of them a Proto SLG UL. The deal was being sold "as is", and the ad clearly stated that the SLG UL came without a bolt. That marker was the low end of the markers, so no big deal.
However, when I got hold of the deal, there was a small tool box with spare parts for a Proto SLG UL. Inside this box was not just one, but two stock bolts for an SLG UL. So I popped one of them in and aired the marker up. It worked like a charm. Just for shitz and giggles I tried the other bolt as well, and the marker just kept going.
The seller really put in minimal effort to offload that deal.Comment
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My most surprising came out of my gray and purple twister R/T cocker. The thing fell out of time and wouldn't rip like it normally does. So I went through the checklist. Looked to see if the hammer lug slipped, if the sear spring was binding, if any of the rods had somehow walked, or if the sear had too much wear. Could not, for my life, figure out why it was off. So I took the frame completely apart.
It was the sear bearing. It cracked completely in half. I had broken it after 250,000 or so shots. That was a first in 25 years.Comment
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Not necessarily damage, but definitely could have been. When I first moved to Southern California, and started playing again. I learned that the field were BYOP and the shops were selling some cheap stuff. I thought they could be acceptable. They were not. The fill must have been some kind of oil-based paint. Out of habit I break down and clean my gear after a day of play. I did have a few breaks and did the usual field expedient cleaning (barrel swab and shoot through). Anyway when I got home and started cleaning, I saw that my seals were getting eaten by the paint and that the metal of the barrel was getting discoloration like corrosion, or a concentrated solvent where the paint was. I clean and scrub the heck out of each and every part, replace the seals and gave every thing a through once over. I swore I would never use that brand again. I guess I was not the only one or that batch was a one-pallet pony, because that brand never showed up again at any store.Comment
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Screenshot_20260902-205636.png This autococker body was sent to a team mate from I&I sports.
It was sight unseen "milled cocker body". There are gouges in the the side. The cuts are uneven, out of square, into the bolt channel, and into the barrel threads.Comment
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Most surprising for me happened three years ago—when I opened a brand new SuperNova N1 on Christmas morning, and later that day my father-in-law decided to play Wyatt Earp and spin the marker around on his index finger, dropping it with such tremendous velocity the barrel got bent and the regulator screw was rendered useless.
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Weirdest for me was a Tippmann A5 that had dead flies in the valve chamber. How that was even possible I do not know.Comment
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