"Players then need to make sure they use the right fill station for their cylinder.
A 3000 bottle should only be filled at a 3000 fill station - you can technically fill at a 4500 fill station if you are careful but you will get shouted at"
I assumed air fills to be a case of hand your bottle in and it comes back filled. Like a rental. Maybe not so?
Self service blowers for walk ons?
Self filling depends on the site.
For a normal rental site you do not self fill, usually the site has a gun rack outside the safe zone. Players leave their rental gun on the rack and staff fill up. Depending on how the site runs their games the rental player either leaves their numbered hopper on the gun or carries their hopper leaving the gun on the rack.
On a walkon each own gunner is responsible for their own equipment. This means they have to turn off / make safe the gun, place a barrel blocking device on the barrel (normally a barrel condom) and takes their gun with them to the safe zone.
Each own gunner will normally self fill their own bottles - this needs to be on the sites health & safety risk assessment, and insurance. There is the matter of ‘operating’ the fill station but its also a concern for the site if they have site staff filling players bottles - the site cannot fully be sure about the condition of a bottle, but they hold liability for the safety of their staff.
When we ran our first scenario event it was at a site that to date had only run rentals and hadn’t yet run formal walkons. The insurance & risk assessments did not allow for self filling.
This put us in a dilemma as it was also the first event of the year and was the first event to use ‘UKSPC’ UK Scenario Paintball Community guidelines, standardising some rules such as chrono velocity, ROF etc and included a ‘training’ brief on air filling, handing out UKPSF air safety guidance and issuing UKPSF air passes. The intention being that if you had an in date UKPSF air pass then you had been shown how to self fill, demonstrated you could do it, and signed off a disclaimer. You could then turn up at another UKSPC event in the year, show your card and fill up.
It was agreed that we could run the session for anyone interested, UKSPC (a collective of sites/event organisers etc) our site and the insurers were happy that self service players could fill as part of the training session under site supervision and we could issue valid passes. But for the rest of the day fill stations were operated by staff.
By the next year the risk assessments and insurance were updated and therefore self filling was allowed
* We actually ran a bottle swap system and had a second in game compressor.
We wanted action to be continuous, but we didn’t think anyone would actually hand us their bottle. We were mistaken!
This meant running up and down hills with crates of the site rental bottles swapping them for players own bottles - popping on a label tag so they could find their way back to the right person after filling. (I thought that perhaps a player may take a rental bottle and keep their personal empty, but they actually did swap)
I do not recommend this - my legs, arms and back took some recovery
