Custom Paintball Guns
Although there are many stock paintball guns on the market today, many players have given their imaginations free rein. Custom Paintball guns add a nice touch of realism to the sport.
The Paintball gun is usually called a marker. This name not only refers to the idea that the target is “marked” with a splatter of dye to indicate a hit, but also harkens back to the origin of the sport. The first paintball guns were not intended for game playing at all. They were developed to provide the forestry industry a way of marking trees from a distance. The marked trees were splashed with paint to indicate which ones were destined for the saw mill. There would have been no thought of custom Paintball guns in these early days. The Paintball marker was a tool.
When some men got the idea of a real cool game that would simulate hunting and battle without anyone getting hurt, someone saw these tools in a catalogue and realized they could be easily adapted to the type of game they were imagining. The first Paintball game ever played took place on an 80 acre wooded lot. Twelve men competed in a game of “capture the flag”, and the sport of Paintball was born.
The first game was played with a Nelspot 007 which was a model of the marker used by the forestry guys. By 1985, paintball guns or markers were being made specifically for use in Paintball games. These new markers reflected some technological advances over the idea of marking trees one at a time in the forest. The major concerns were with increased ammunition capacity. The first Paintball games tended to be played in large areas and stealth was a more important factor than firing rate.
The emergence of the sport changed it. Firepower became an important element of such games as Speedball. The Paintball marker was being adapted to these changes, but it was the imaginations of the players that would take this to the next logical step. Many players were being drawn back to the original concept. This was the idea that the game represented combat and the idea of making it more realistic led to the idea of custom Paintball guns as well as more realistic wearing apparel.
It was possible to make your Paintball gun look like an M-16 and not a forestry service tree marker. The limit on the way the guns could be customized was the imaginations of the players. The one area that was off limits was velocity because this was a safety issue. The industry standard called for a limit of 300 feet per second as a maximum safety velocity and most manufacturers stayed a bit below that. The custom Paintball gun could look more real, but it should not cross the safety line.