Marker Basics, part 1

In addition to my refereeing and basic safety training on handling and filling high pressure vessels, aka "air/CO² tanks", I also have air smith training. Air smithing, the repair and upgrading of paintball guns/markers, has a pretty serious geek appeal to me because I've always liked figuring out how things work.

Folks think paintball markers are pretty complicated, when they aren't, really. You just have to understand how they are are put together.

First a few definitions.

• A valve opens and closes to allow the gas through the system—think of a valve like a door or gate you have to open to walk into the house. All paintball markers have valves of some time to prevent control the gas release to fire the paintball.
• A regulator controls gas pressure. Think of what happens when you turn on your faucet—you can have a trickle or a high flow of water. A regulator does the same thing for a gas. Not all paintball markers use regulators. They are more common on marker systems using high pressure air rather than CO².
• 
  A trigger—what you actuate to fire off the paintball—can either be a mechanical trigger and sear, or an electrical solenoid (switch). The trigger and sear/solenoid, are what start the paintball marker's firing cycle.

To fire the a paintball, you take a compressed, high pressure gas (the air tank), and let the gas out in short bursts in a systematic manner via a trigger or solenoid connected to a valve of some sort. Sometimes, there is a step-down mechanism to regulate the gas pressure between the tank and the trigger, or between other parts of the marker system.

There are about 3 or 4 basic designs, with some complications thrown in for good measure, but the key is learning the path of the air through the marker system, and how the actuators interact with the valves and the gas.

I'll talk more about the parts of paintball markers in my next posts.

About My Certifications

I get a weird reaction out of people when I show them my certifications for paintball. I guess they a) never considered that there might be something like certifications for paintball, b) can't figure out why certification would be a good thing, and/or c) can't fathom why someone not working in the paintball industry would spend their own money and spare time to get certified. I also suppose people who know more about my attitude towards technology certifications[0] probably consider my having paintball certs a bit ironic. I find it kind of ironic myself.

But my reasoning for getting paintball certs boils down to two major things. well...OK, three things:

• I'm a geek—I can't really help it. /me shrugs It's a gift.
• Safety. I wanted to understand all the safety issues and get the technical details and know-how so that I could be safe. Again, as a geek, I like to control my own destiny.

Paintball is safe—one of the safer sports out there, in fact. The biggest danger is spraining your ankle or scraping your knees/elbows via a hard-charging playing style.

However, and it's a fairly big "however", paintball involves high pressure gasses. As one skeptical scuba tech said to me, "You guys are crazy, running around out there with a bomb under your arm." High pressure gas is dangerous, and a lot of folks in the paintball business don't really pay enough attention to safety as far as I am concerned. There are plenty of places that I am fine going to, because I know how to stay out of the way of potential trouble as far as safety goes. But, I wouldn't take kids to these places or recommend them to beginners.

• I want to run a paintball business in the future.

And, yes, I paid for all my paintball training myself. I've never worked for a paintball business, unless you count the comp'd food/beverages/game entrance fees for working scenario games as a ref (I don't—~$60 in comps hardly seems like a "wage" when you end up working close to 20 hours in 100+F heat.) I'm still considering training for other refereeing certifications, as the organization sponsoring my cert no longer runs tournaments as far as I am aware.

[0] In spite of 10+ years in IT, I have no certifications. For the most part, in my opinion, there are only a handful of certifications that are worth the paper on which they are printed.