Paintball

[Rayodder]

I have always had a soft spot for a Over/Under double paintball guns, but up to this point my only choice was Palmers Nasty, unfortunately like all Palmer products they were made out of brass, by the time you add a set of hoppers and a tank, you are well over the weight of a small child. Than one day Ken of KPCS posted picture of his new Peacemaker, a double barrel Phantom with a 15 round stock feed and vertical 12 gram changer, I knew right there and than I wanted one!


For those that don’t know Ken very well, he takes a lot of pride in his work, almost to the point that he doesn’t want to let his babies go to just anybody, it took more than the normal amount of PM’s to convince him to let me buy one ;-)

Appearances

Ken managed to keep the original superb CCI finish in tack, other than the slots for the pump arms and the enlarge feed port, you will hardly notice any work has been done to the original bodies. The pump arms are milled from solid aluminum, it accented the Phantom very well, the pump handle is a little bit on the small side, it is made out of single piece of delrin, with 2 semi circular slots to hold both barrels to stabilize the pumping action, it is fairly smooth considering you are pumping two sets of internals.

Testing

The pump stroke wasn't as horrible as I had imagined, I suspect that once it is broken in the stroke would be much better, the auto trigger still works, so if you are firing down from a hill or a tree, you can empty that 15 round tube is no time :P

I ran a few rounds thru at the chrono station, the top tube was shooting like a regular Phantom fairly stable off CO2, but the lower tube was only clocking in at about 180 fps, I spoke Ken about the velocity problem, he mentioned to me that all 4 of them had the same problem, when I asked if Ken had try a stiffer set of main spring for the lower tube, Ken admit that he didn’t realize that CCI has stiffer springs than the stock ones.

During the long flight home it dawn on me, the way Ken has set up the gun, When the lower hammers triggers the upper sear there is enough of a resistance to steal some of the momentum from the lower hammer to prevent the velocity from getting over 200fps, when I got home I swapped out the stock springs with a red Autococker one from a Maddman kit and that seems to solve the problems.

The other thing I notice was the way the balls were feeding to the gun, since it is a straight drop from the feed, once in awhile a third ball would drop almost ½ way into the top breech. when I took the Peacemaker back to Ken he showed me how to take the gun apart, he pointed out to me that there is a wire detent between the lower tube and frame to help hold the two balls in place and prevent the third ball from dropping too far down, so by just bending the wire detent up a little bit more, the feeding bug was fixed and the feed was just as smooth and trouble free as any stockclass phantom.

For as long as I can remember people always claimed that having two barrels so close together the venting gas exiting the barrel will play havoc with the trajectory of the balls, but after putting 30 rounds through the Peacemaker, I didn’t notice any significant effect on the accuracy of the shots and the efficiency off a 12 grams is equal to a regular Phantom's 30+ shots, just at the 1/2 the number of trigger pulls.

The follow photo shows my grouping from 50-60 feet away, I wasn't aiming at one spot in particular, I was more interesting in seeing the relation between each shot, by using the top right splat as reference for one single break, you can see that most shots landed with in 2-3", if not one on top of each other.



Conclusion

Ken claimed that the Peacemaker was just an experimentation of concept derived from a post on PBN, I would have to say he did a remarkable job, it is more than just a showpiece, it is an actual fully functional marker!!!

[Makeshift]

I got to handle one last weekend at SPE and if I had the extra coin I would have picked one up for sure.

Thanks for the review.





Jeffrey

[flyweightnate]

Think a longer barrel on the bottom would help velocity as well? Maybe a 14", w/o a brake?

Overall, HOT little gun! Definitely an ingenious design.

[Not_You]

wow...i love phantoms, and this is just amazing