[Ben’s] big brother [Brian] has been slowly building up a respectable mini-machine shop in his garage over the past few years, collecting odds and ends off of Craigslist for cheap. Looking for a fun project to do together, they decided to try their hand at building a paintball gun — completely from scratch.
They have a Spyder paintball gun that they have taken apart many times — but it uses a stacked tube configuration for the firing mechanism — a bit too complex for a first project. After discovering ZDSPB.com (which is an awesome site that has animations of all the different styles of paintball guns) they settled on making a Tippman clone.
Trying to keep the budget as small as possible, [Brian] found a free 3D CAD program from the makers of Pro/E — it’s called Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express 6.0, and with that they began designing the gun…
Once they had the mechanism down pat they just had to start machining. Here’s the highly anticipated first test fire — can you hear the joy in the success?
And after a bit more refinement, semi automatic mode.
Fancy something a bit bigger? How about ‘Ol Painless, a paintball mini-gun? Or if you’re more of a sneaky player, why not make your own paintball gun silencer?
If you’re wearing headphones and value your hearing, lower the volume, a lot.
RIP my ears
Very nice.
Except they clearly said it’s an ion clone and not a Tippman clone.
Thank you! Seems like he neglected to read the posts themselves… Thanks for the correction ;)
This is just great. The joy of achieving something cannot be described in words only. It was a good effort to try making a paintball gun from scratch and at the same time they have kept the budget low. They have completed the major part and now smaller work is left. I also enjoy paintball sport and I have got motivation to do something innovative in paintball. I hope I will try some similar technique very soon.