A guy called Mike Cassidy designed and built the Phantom, his company was called Component Concepts I think; I've talked to him a few times re his marker back in the day.
I seem to remember he was actually a dental technician of some description who dabbled in paintball but then in the late eighties / early nineties, his Phantom took off and took over his main financial interest.... and understandably so.
He was a self effacing guy, humble and from what I remember, absolutely not the average paintball type, he was too nice a guy
The Phantom was a slick, simple example of engineering and that's why it was so successful.
And after this dominated the scene, a guy called Tom Kaye started up Air Gun Designs and came out with what I always felt to be the semi-automatic versoin of the Phantom and he called it the Automag, this was another great example of slick and simple engineering with hardly any moving parts.
I used to have many talks with Tom and always remarked he had created a monster in the Automag in that it was gonna be hard to follow up .... for him, it ended up that way because none of his later markers lived up to the sales figures of his original Automag.
The electronic revolution then hit town and we had evolved into the new era of firepower madness that consequently raped our sport of any sanity.
History lesson over
I seem to remember he was actually a dental technician of some description who dabbled in paintball but then in the late eighties / early nineties, his Phantom took off and took over his main financial interest.... and understandably so.
He was a self effacing guy, humble and from what I remember, absolutely not the average paintball type, he was too nice a guy
The Phantom was a slick, simple example of engineering and that's why it was so successful.
And after this dominated the scene, a guy called Tom Kaye started up Air Gun Designs and came out with what I always felt to be the semi-automatic versoin of the Phantom and he called it the Automag, this was another great example of slick and simple engineering with hardly any moving parts.
I used to have many talks with Tom and always remarked he had created a monster in the Automag in that it was gonna be hard to follow up .... for him, it ended up that way because none of his later markers lived up to the sales figures of his original Automag.
The electronic revolution then hit town and we had evolved into the new era of firepower madness that consequently raped our sport of any sanity.
History lesson over
