Old School Airsofters.

[Cr0-Magnon]

Basically I'm interested in hearing stories and seeing pictures from people who started playing 15-20 years ago or even further back. Nowadays we're swamped with Novritsh, clickbait videos, 60 rounds per second and "Gucci guns"....take us back to a simpler time!

[strykerles]

why do I have an image of uncle albert come to mind

 

during the war.............

[Cr0-Magnon]

6 minutes ago, strykerles said:

why do I have an image of uncle albert come to mind

 

during the war.............

 

At least you used a classic reference and didn't just parrot "OK Boomer"!

 

Hey give it 30 years and people will be saying "During the Corona..."

[Tackle]

Lol, the good old days when if you wanted an ar platform you could pick from 2 or 3 brands & maybe 4 models, all of which had wobbly front ends 😂 

 

Picture of me when I started playing 😏

"They don't like it up 'em"

 

[Cromulon1994]

I started in 2012 and I feel alienated by Knobitch and the obsession for RPS.

[Cr0-Magnon]

15 minutes ago, Tackle said:

Lol, the good old days when if you wanted an ar platform you could pick from 2 or 3 brands & maybe 4 models, all of which had wobbly front ends 😂 

 

Picture of me when I started playing 😏

"They don't like it up 'em"

 

 

Blimey, that's you when you started? You must be a real life Benjamin Button then....or typing from beyond the grave 🤔

 

 

6 minutes ago, Cromulon1994 said:

I started in 2012 and I feel alienated by Knobitch and the obsession for RPS.

 

RPS and FPS..."My gun only shoots 335 - 340fps, anyone know how I can get it to 349.9?"

[Skara]

Back when G&P was supposed to be the dog's balls? and when a basic TM was all everyone needed but "ReEeEeE TM EcSpEnSiV"? When you brought a 7.4 LiPo to the game and suddenly you got all the bitches around you and other players were calling you a madman because "holy shit it's so powerful!!"? When the most advanced mosfet was a homebuilt 3034?

 

Don't need to go back 20 years, 10 are more than enough lol

[Jacket]

Started out in 1996 at Rebel Troop / Firefight in Reading. Gun choice was pretty much TM or TM. Don’t ever remember seeing a chrono in those days. FPS limits seemed to be whatever you could get the gearbox to do before it shit itself

[Adolf Hamster]

21 minutes ago, Skara said:

Back when G&P was supposed to be the dog's balls? and when a basic TM was all everyone needed but "ReEeEeE TM EcSpEnSiV"? When you brought a 7.4 LiPo to the game and suddenly you got all the bitches around you and other players were calling you a madman because "holy shit it's so powerful!!"? When the most advanced mosfet was a homebuilt 3034?

 

Don't need to go back 20 years, 10 are more than enough lol

 

it amazes me that nimh batteries are still a thing, i mean i considered them old hat about 5 years before i started airsoft and that was over a decade ago now.

 

although that said people still think 330fps on an 0.4g is the same as 330fps on 0.2g, people are still ree'ing for tm's (just the recoil now), and the systema guys got replaced by the hpa guys.

[Cr0-Magnon]

35 minutes ago, Jacket said:

Started out in 1996 at Rebel Troop / Firefight in Reading. Gun choice was pretty much TM or TM. Don’t ever remember seeing a chrono in those days. FPS limits seemed to be whatever you could get the gearbox to do before it shit itself

 

That's more like it!

 

Was there still a heavy upgrading culture or were most playing stock?

 

 

5 minutes ago, Adolf Hamster said:

although that said people still think 330fps on an 0.4g is the same as 330fps on 0.2g,.

 

I got confused by this when I first started! All my site told me was that the limit is 350fps....not mentioning with which weight. I mean it took about five seconds to explain that wasn't the case but still.

[Adolf Hamster]

3 minutes ago, Cr0-Magnon said:

I got confused by this when I first started! All my site told me was that the limit is 350fps....not mentioning with which weight. I mean it took about five seconds to explain that wasn't the case but still.

 

see new players i can understand, but if i had a penny for every time i rocked up to the chrono running the heavies only to get quizzical looks of "that's a bit low isnt it?", kinda worrying really that sites don't get it.

[Jacket]

Upgrades seemed to be a stronger spring, metal bushings and a higher voltage battery. Didn’t always last that long.

BB weights were .2 or .25 if you were feeling posh.

Metal bodies were well over £100 for a M4, the main main aftermarket parts producer was Systema.

 

[AlphaBear]

Talking of the old days, when the recoils first came out, Eagle6 were the first to stock them. The biggest issue at the time was getting hold of the SOPMOD battery and that at the time was £79.99!!! E6 then created there own version of it by stripping out the TM cells which were low capacity and replacing them with a 7.4v 3200Mah Lipo... That baby cost £119.99!!! I kid you not... I've got the invoice to prove it... What was I thinking in those days lol!! |Come to think of it, I may have had one of the first recoils in the country! Bloody hell....!

 

Oh, site limits used to be 330fps max... I don't know when woodlands went up to 350fps to be honest.. And brand wise, there were only 3 or 4 (TM, ICS, and two others which I can't remember now) oh and Systema! 

 

 

[BigStew]

Nothing has changed that much to be honest. The newbies just keep getting younger 

[Cr0-Magnon]

3 minutes ago, BigStew said:

Nothing has changed that much to be honest. The newbies just keep getting younger 

 

At my local site they occasionally have regular players act as Marshal's. One of them was telling someone he was born in 2006.

[heroshark]

6 minutes ago, Jacket said:

Upgrades seemed to be a stronger spring, metal bushings and a higher voltage battery. Didn’t always last that long.

BB weights were .2 or .25 if you were feeling posh.

Metal bodies were well over £100 for a M4, the main main aftermarket parts producer was Systema.

 

And a massive suppressor to cover the extended km head tb barrel even though you cylinder volume was too small. Started around 2001 iirc.  Closest site to us was the old Phoenix mill site, so we found our own places to hire or borrow more locally. My group still play as a private group to this day . Its how a lot of the long established sites started.

 

 

[ak2m4]

when i first started, around 2003, no one really wore face-masks, just goggles. buy a gun from japan or hong kong, it breaks first game - tough shit! 🙂

[Groot]

I started playing Airsoft when the first AEG TM Mp5's and FAMAS's started to be available in the UK.  

So we are talking 1996ish. I remember the date because I had to lie about my age to get a springer glock from Rebel Troop in Reading.

Airsoft back then was pretty comical. Everyone ran a springer except for maybe 1 person who could afford a famas. 

Very little camo on the whole and people wore those B&Q plastic goggles for protection.

The first game I played was somewhere in Reading. Might have been Mapledurham, but its so long ago now.
I remember the game well. I had 3 mags. Which meant in relative terms, I was the geardo. 

We all ran around and shot each other fairly close because not all BB guns back then had a hop. ( The good hop ones had gold barrels.. oooo fancy )

There was one guy there who had a SA80 Springer and because it had a scope on it. We all thought he was the pro'est thing on the planet. 
There as no chrono but everything else was much the same. 

I did it for a few weeks and honestly, it was kinda lame. Truly no one had AEG's or any real range back then. 
Everything good was crazy expensive. An Mp5 AEG back then was about £280 and we are talking 1996. 

I dropped out for a few years and picked it back up again in about 2001/2. Again went to Rebel Troop and bought a TM M4.
1 Spare Mag, a TN barrel and a silencer cover. Back then people really bigged up the properties of tightbores. 

Ran it for a couple of games. Sent it to Airsoft Armouries for a power upgrade. It came back and had been modded to take a 9.6 3000 battery in a bag on the stock. ( Ghetto ) 
From there I played with the same gun for a long time. Still back them no one chrono'd and the rules of airsoft where kind of fluffy from site to site. 
I finally started going to Stirling Airsoft and they were the best days ever. No real worries about safety or FPS, and no one got hurt as it was still quite a small community. 

About a year after i got my gun back from AA, it was chrono'd at a game and was running 420fps. Ah fun times.
They still let me play at FireFight on that day and just politely asked for me to clip the spring.

So how is that for old school airsoft?

[Tommikka]

Noobs

 

Circa 1983/84 when the guns fired shaped plastic pellets similar to airgun pellets

[Cyberlawyer]

I started around ‘98’. Back then we were all running Marui AEGs and the standard practice was to upgrade to 328 FPS. The Marui ARs were the dogs danglies, but were about £400 - £500 and had polymer bodies (with wobbly front ends).

 

We were all still running ni-cad batteries so fixed stocks were quite common as it meant you could get a battery to last until lunch time. Nunchuck or stick batteries were only good for a few hours.

 

I remember when ICS and Classic Army first came out with affordable metal bodied MP5s which were a real game changer and the excitement when the first 2000mah Ni-cads came out which meant a battery would Reliably last all day (If you had a big stock to put it in).

[Jacket]

25 minutes ago, Cyberlawyer said:

I started around ‘98’. Back then we were all running Marui AEGs and the standard practice was to upgrade to 328 FPS. The Marui ARs were the dogs danglies, but were about £400 - £500 and had polymer bodies (with wobbly front ends).

 

We were all still running ni-cad batteries so fixed stocks were quite common as it meant you could get a battery to last until lunch time. Nunchuck or stick batteries were only good for a few hours.

 

I remember when ICS and Classic Army first came out with affordable metal bodied MP5s which were a real game changer and the excitement when the first 2000mah Ni-cads came out which meant a battery would Reliably last all day (If you had a big stock to put it in).

600mAh for a ‘mini’ or ‘stick’ battery, 1300-1700mAH for a ‘large’ one. 
 

I remember coming home on leave in 2001 and blowing £450 on a Classic Army MP5 from Wolf Armouries.

 

Anyone here play at Airsoft Adventures at Greenham Common. Still my favourite Airsoft site to date. 
 

 

Edited July 9, 2020 by Jacket
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[Impulse]

I started back in 2006 and I very much prefer it when it's simpler. Yes, I'm branching out into converting my own guns to HPA (done a boltie, DMR is next), but I don't understand today's obsessions with fps and rps. My m14 DMR fires at 1.4J and my spring VSR is at 2.1J that's fine by me! It's a limit, not a goal.

 

And you said you wanted some old pictures. I'm fortunate enough to have a bunch of my old photos from back in 2008 or so.

 

Safe zones used to be a lot more simple. Literally just an area of the field marked with tape at this event in Spain. Back then there was very little organised airsoft where I lived. It was mostly just us as a community agreeing "yeah, we'll go airsoft in this place" as there were loads of abandoned / out of the way places to do it. Though this pic is from an event that was at least somewhat organised. I think it was a two day thing in the mountains near a small hotel that we stayed in over night.

 

 

Yes, that's a stock cyma m14 and a stock Warrior L96. I was also firing .25s and it was just fine (where today people would say "WHY NOT HEAVY AMMO?")

 

And a bit of fun at an Easter game

[rj1986]

Classic Army was an up and coming brand because they had metal bodies (totally new at the time).

 

There was a bout 5 big forums, who all hated each other.

 

DPM was al the rage, apart from the guys who ran everything black.

 

Mk5's were about 50p each.
 

And i had to get a train and a bus to a my site as i didnt have a car, or a license.

[AlphaBear]

OMG, I still have a Classic Army MP5 upper which I planned to swap out with the Marui's upper as that was plastic or polymer. I may even get out the TM RAS and give it a spin and see if it still works after all this time... 

 

Oh yes DPM in those days, Solider 95 and of course as @rj1986 said those who ran all in Black... and they were so easy to spot in woodland!. 

[Adolf Hamster]

4 hours ago, Impulse said:

where today people would say "WHY NOT HEAVY AMMO?"

 

i really should stop extolling the virtues of heavy ammo to people, dont want the playing field too level.....