From:
Behind The AutoMag
Published May 1996
An Article by Mike Wallis
We were sitting at a table under one of the many umbrellas emblazoned with the Airgun Designs logo. Next to us, was the huge trade show of the'94 Masters paintball tournament. Behind us, the Airgun Designs semi rig loomed, with a huge corporate logo on each side of the trailer. Earlier, I had walked the fields and seen the Airgun Designs service crews in their tents, busily fixing guns in the warm Tennessee sun. Opposite me was Tom Kaye, the man behind the AutoMag. I had a thousand questions for him, about his gun, his commitment to his customers and the future of paintball. So read on, to find out more about this man and his company.
Mike: I guess the first thing I want to talk about is the origins of the company, why you became involved in paintball?
Tom: We were manufacturing an air ioniser for a company back in '87, this represented a large portion of our business and when we lost that contract, we approached PMI in order to try and fill that capacity. At the time we were doing plastic forming out of our shop and we said that we could make a full face mask for them. I'd played the game a couple of times and seen the need for a larger mask. At the time, only the little green 'Woodstock' mask was around. Well, they ordered 500 of those pieces. It was a full face like a hockey mask and it became known as the PMI mask.
Mike: Hm.. I think I had one of those.
Tom: Yeh., one of those old black ones. Darth Vader masks guys called them. We made 40,000 of those masks, and that's how we got into paintball. Back then we weren't Air Gun Designs, we were the parent company, Technacore Industries. We used to manufacture air operated feed systems, which were things like turntables to feed parts into a machine, do some operation on them and then kick the parts out. We would go into a situation, find a problem and design a whole system around it. For instance, we designed and built a machine that fed 25,000 gumballs per hour through a printing press, so it would print your name on the gumball. It had never been done before, and we did that. Well a paintball gun is a hand held air operated feed system. So whereas most other people had some sort of a gun background and they tried to make what they knew about guns apply to paintball, which is a compressed air system. We took what we knew about compressed air systems and applied it to a gun. So that's how it all got started.
Tom Kaye receiving a sponsors award
at the 1994 Masters
Mike: And your first gun was actually a blowback design?
Tom: Yeh, in '87 when we were making the mask, we saw the need right away for a semi-automatic. At the time the SMG-60 had just come out. That was a tremendously revolutionary gun. The only problem with that gun was that it had a clip - 15 shots in a clip and we recognised right away that a gravity feed system would be the way to go. So we hacked up a few pump guns and we made a firing semi auto in the end of '87, it was a very crude prototype, but it proved the concept of a gravity feed semi-auto, which was fantastic at that time. From that point we further refined it into what we called 'The Panther', which had the designation P1, for the first one. We ended up selling that design to Direct Connect and Daisy was going to manufacture it. But Daisy ended up screwing up and the whole deal went south. We were under a contract not to produce any other guns based on the sale of that gun. We ended up buying the design back. But by then the design was already obsolete, because field strip screws and quick release barrels had all come into vogue whilst Daisy was trying to produce it. So we designed another gun, another blowback gun and we called that one P2, for Panther 2. That gun was very innovative, but it never made it out of prototype stage. It worked, but it had problems with the blowback not re-cocking the system under all conditions. This was a problem that we had continuously on all of our blowback guns. So, after two designs and two years of working with this, we said, blowback's not really the way to go. But, the second gun that we built did have all the quick strip features and quick barrel release that we were used to. Then, we started working on Panther 3 which became the first AutoMag.
Mike: Did the concept for that gun come from previous experience with the pneumatics industry?
Tom: Previous experience with the Pneumatics industry and building two prototype blowback guns. We knew from the blowback guns that we didn't want a trigger mechanism that was difficult to latch up. We did not want impact on any of the parts in the trigger mechanism because that creates a lot of problems and we wanted a gun that would re-cock at any pressure. The only way to meet those qualifications was to turn the system around and have a spring re-cock the gun. Because a spring will always have the energy necessary to re-cock the system. By doing that you also relieve all the pressure on the trigger mechanism.
Maintenance of velocity was another problem that we had with the blowback gun. So, we set the functioning pressure below what the normal variation would be and those parameters dictated how the gun would look; blow forward, pressure regulator, air chamber etc...
Read the rest of the interview here!
Enjoy...
Behind The AutoMag
Published May 1996
An Article by Mike Wallis
We were sitting at a table under one of the many umbrellas emblazoned with the Airgun Designs logo. Next to us, was the huge trade show of the'94 Masters paintball tournament. Behind us, the Airgun Designs semi rig loomed, with a huge corporate logo on each side of the trailer. Earlier, I had walked the fields and seen the Airgun Designs service crews in their tents, busily fixing guns in the warm Tennessee sun. Opposite me was Tom Kaye, the man behind the AutoMag. I had a thousand questions for him, about his gun, his commitment to his customers and the future of paintball. So read on, to find out more about this man and his company.
Mike: I guess the first thing I want to talk about is the origins of the company, why you became involved in paintball?
Tom: We were manufacturing an air ioniser for a company back in '87, this represented a large portion of our business and when we lost that contract, we approached PMI in order to try and fill that capacity. At the time we were doing plastic forming out of our shop and we said that we could make a full face mask for them. I'd played the game a couple of times and seen the need for a larger mask. At the time, only the little green 'Woodstock' mask was around. Well, they ordered 500 of those pieces. It was a full face like a hockey mask and it became known as the PMI mask.
Mike: Hm.. I think I had one of those.
Tom: Yeh., one of those old black ones. Darth Vader masks guys called them. We made 40,000 of those masks, and that's how we got into paintball. Back then we weren't Air Gun Designs, we were the parent company, Technacore Industries. We used to manufacture air operated feed systems, which were things like turntables to feed parts into a machine, do some operation on them and then kick the parts out. We would go into a situation, find a problem and design a whole system around it. For instance, we designed and built a machine that fed 25,000 gumballs per hour through a printing press, so it would print your name on the gumball. It had never been done before, and we did that. Well a paintball gun is a hand held air operated feed system. So whereas most other people had some sort of a gun background and they tried to make what they knew about guns apply to paintball, which is a compressed air system. We took what we knew about compressed air systems and applied it to a gun. So that's how it all got started.
Tom Kaye receiving a sponsors award
at the 1994 Masters
Mike: And your first gun was actually a blowback design?
Tom: Yeh, in '87 when we were making the mask, we saw the need right away for a semi-automatic. At the time the SMG-60 had just come out. That was a tremendously revolutionary gun. The only problem with that gun was that it had a clip - 15 shots in a clip and we recognised right away that a gravity feed system would be the way to go. So we hacked up a few pump guns and we made a firing semi auto in the end of '87, it was a very crude prototype, but it proved the concept of a gravity feed semi-auto, which was fantastic at that time. From that point we further refined it into what we called 'The Panther', which had the designation P1, for the first one. We ended up selling that design to Direct Connect and Daisy was going to manufacture it. But Daisy ended up screwing up and the whole deal went south. We were under a contract not to produce any other guns based on the sale of that gun. We ended up buying the design back. But by then the design was already obsolete, because field strip screws and quick release barrels had all come into vogue whilst Daisy was trying to produce it. So we designed another gun, another blowback gun and we called that one P2, for Panther 2. That gun was very innovative, but it never made it out of prototype stage. It worked, but it had problems with the blowback not re-cocking the system under all conditions. This was a problem that we had continuously on all of our blowback guns. So, after two designs and two years of working with this, we said, blowback's not really the way to go. But, the second gun that we built did have all the quick strip features and quick barrel release that we were used to. Then, we started working on Panther 3 which became the first AutoMag.
Mike: Did the concept for that gun come from previous experience with the pneumatics industry?
Tom: Previous experience with the Pneumatics industry and building two prototype blowback guns. We knew from the blowback guns that we didn't want a trigger mechanism that was difficult to latch up. We did not want impact on any of the parts in the trigger mechanism because that creates a lot of problems and we wanted a gun that would re-cock at any pressure. The only way to meet those qualifications was to turn the system around and have a spring re-cock the gun. Because a spring will always have the energy necessary to re-cock the system. By doing that you also relieve all the pressure on the trigger mechanism.
Maintenance of velocity was another problem that we had with the blowback gun. So, we set the functioning pressure below what the normal variation would be and those parameters dictated how the gun would look; blow forward, pressure regulator, air chamber etc...
Read the rest of the interview here!
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