HomeClassic Paintball ScansDaystate UK's pumps(c.1985-1991?)

Daystate UK’s pumps(c.1985-1991?)

Here are three videos that Tim Firpo of PaintballTek.com and I created back in March of this year. When we filmed these videos we didn’t have some of the information in the article below so there are a couple errors in the video I need to point out.

Part 1: The History and Operation of the Daystate pumps.

I awkwardly discuss Daystate’s pumps and then hand the guns off to Tim Firpo who discusses their operation.

Part 2: Break down of the Daystate .62 caliber nelson based TG19.

Tim disassembles the .62 caliber TG19 and compares it to a standard nelson valve and looks at how the cup seal is integrated into the air reservoir or asa chamber along with a second powertube rather.

He also looks at how the bolt and hammer have been adapted to handle .62 caliber paintballs.
Then we do a fast action speed up of Tim reassembling the TG19.

Part 3: Airing up and testing the Daystate MK III Ultimarc

Tim and I didn’t know the pressure ratings on the Daystate’s Mk III’s lower chamber so we assumed it was around 1000-1500 psi. This is why Tim only airs the MK III up to 400 or 600 psi.

I was later informed by Olly Bell (PGI’s Gun Doctor) that Daystate’s pumps were able to hold 2000 psi or possibly more.
Regardless I wouldn’t air it up past 1000 psi unless we had broken it down and replaced seals.

And now a little information on classic english pump paintguns.

Prior to around 1990 the use of co2 gas was either heavily regulated or banned in some counties of the England. And in Scotland co2 likely wasn’t preferred because of the hazardous it posed to the ozone layer.

Despite the absense of co2 and difficulty in importing popular paintguns built in the US there was still a strong interest in paintball in the UK.

Most UK pellet and BBs airguns during this time had been constructed to opperate off onboard compressed gas chambers (reservoirs) filled from high pressure compressers and innovative paintball gun manufacturers followed their lead.

During this period many oddball pump paintgun brands appeared in the UK and nearly all have been forgotten, even the most widley used paintguns, the Daystate pumps.

Articles on Skirmish’s field gun only regulations. Scanned from Paintball Sports International September, 1991.

Letter to Paintball Sports International about Scotland’s conversion to hpa. Scanned from Paintball Sports International May, 1990 (bad scan so I fixed a few cut off letters in photoshop).

From an article in the September 1991 issue of Paintball Sports International, “Skirmish/Short Timers,” on UK Skirmish’s first allowed use of co2 in it’s tournaments, English writer Andy Fergusun gives a clue on just how widely the Daystate pumps were actually used.

“Skirmish is the name of an all UK franchise using air powered paintguns of .62 calibre. They have 36 sites over the UK and Europe and do not sell their Daystate air reservoir paintguns to the public.”

Earlier this year I contacted Olly Bell, a longtime writer for the UK based magazines, Paintball Games International (PGI), to ask if he remembered the Daystate pumps.

Bell was known as the “Gun Doctor” from his articles in PGI and he responded to me with tons of information and memories about Daystate’s paintguns.

Bell wrote that his “first organized game” was at Foxwood Skirmish and “in the good old days the Skirmish network all used markers made by the British airgun manufacturers, Daystate.”

It’s possible that one company, “License to Thrill,” did market Daystates guns to consumers in the UK, as the Splatoon.

Cover of Richard Cooke’s 1992 UK guide on paintball titled, “Paintball:The Combat Adventure Sport”

Image from Richard Cooke’s, “Paintball:The Combat Adventure Sport” of License to Thrill’s Splatoon MK2. Was the Splatoon a rebranded Daystate MK2?

The Splatoon MK2 can be seen in Richard Cooke’s 1992 guide on paintball, “Paintball : The Combat Adventure Sport,” and features a very similar build to Daystates’ products with a steel barrel, a similar grip frame and a retaining clip connecting the tubes together.

MCB user Justin “Jincay” Temple, wrote me “I suspect the daystate and the splatoon are almost identical guns.”

Justin was from the UK and had played paintball in the late 80’s at Skirmish’s fields, likely using the early model Daystate guns but he recalls them being known as Splatoons. This offers some validation that the Daystate and Splatoon guns were likely the same.

“[These guns used the] same built in lower front end low pressure air reservoir to get around the Chief Constable’s decision on banning or allowing Co2 use in paintball guns. Yes you could go from one county to the next and find that your gun was illegal. I first played paintball in Devon, in 1988 at Skirmish where we played with .62 mark 1 & 2 splatoons,” Justin remembers.

.62 Caliber Splatoon/Daystate TG-19 pistol as Justin received it off ebay (not showing ca adapter).

In 2004 a paint pistol appeared on UK ebay and didn’t sell for much (~64 Pounds before shipping). Although I didn’t bid I was watching this auction and luckily Justin was the winner.

I purchased this .62 caliber Splatoon/Daystate pump from Justin in 2009 for around $300. The markings on the side say TG19. This pump features both a screw in compressor filled resivoir as well as an asa tank adapter.

Unidentified Daystate/Splatoon .62 caliber pistol. Previous owner purchased off the UK ebay in 2004. Markings read TG-19.

The body is all aluminum and the barrel is removable. The feedneck is smaller diameter so it’s likely it was created with the intention of being .62 caliber only and not adaptable to shoot .68.

I don’t have the right fitting to fill the attached reservior but it luckily came with an aftermarket (raw aluminum) adapter to attach a standard co2/hpa tank as well. Another unique feature on this paintgun is that the powertube is split into two parts, the powertube in the back bottle (non asa thread) and another powertube into the reservoir (or asa valve).

This pump also uses the same grip frame as many of the other Daystate/Splatoon pumps in this article which does show that it likely originated from Daystate/License to Thrill.

Notice no spring in the powertube assembly. The second tube in the asa adaptor contains the spring and cup seal. Click to go to part two of the video which shows the breakdown of the 62 caliber pistol.

Using the standard tank adapter, this gun shoots well with .62 cal paint and makes a nice hostered companion when you are playing with your smg 60 or 60 Caliber WGP Sniper.

Other details on this gun remain a mystery, such as what TG19 could stand for…?

Watch Tim Firpo of paintballtek.com explain the function of the .62 cal splatoon and reassemble super fast in part two of videos!

Even after buying the pistol from Justin I still hadn’t heard of Daystate building a pump gun, only their semi auto Sam Patriot which is common on both sides of the atlantic and the TFX which are common semi automatics in the UK.

But in 2010 a UK mcarterbrown user, James “Chinn” Chinn posted a Brass Eagle cobra he was restoring. In the picture along side the cobra was a paintgun similar to Justin’s TG19 but more closely resembling the stack tube Splatoon from Richard Cooke’s “Paintball: The Combat Adventure Sport.”

I got in touch with James and he told me his father had worked for Daystate building these paintguns and had run or worked at a UK Skirmish site. He didn’t want to sell his Daystate but told me he might come across another eventually.

Thanks to James Chinn for helping me import this Daystate UltiMark III. The Mk III is a .68 caliber pump with an air reservoir in the lower tube. It’s precharged to around 2000 psi before a game and would likely last 30-60 shots?

And he did; in March of 2010 James sent pictures of what I would later find out is a Daystate MKIII Ultimarc, likely the last gun Daystate made before Phantoms, Grey Ghosts, Bushmasters, Sterlings and Snipers took over the UK scene. I paid between 200-300 for this gun shipped from the UK to California.

At this point I still wasn’t totally sure what these pumps were but a few months later I was lucky enough to score a small load of early 1990s UK paintball magazines.

The Daystate MK III Ultimarc was finally identified in the January 1990 issue of the UK magazine Paintball Monthly

Paintball Monthly writer Tony Moore records the Daystate in his article on the Tasco Propoint ’89 open tournament. “…Tasco had been busily previewing the ProPoint sight system mounted on the Daystate MKIII Ultimarc. A combination which is truly “state of the art.”

One of these magazines, the UK publication, “Paintball Monthly”, included a write up on a tournament sponsored by Tasco Sights at WDP’s fields in the UK. One picture show an paintballer shooting the same gun (although with a pistol grip) and the author, Tony Moore, labels the gun as a Daystate MK III Ultimarc.

James’ MK III Ultimarc came from Wales. It fires a 68 caliber paintball and the stock is held on in the same style as a sheridan rifle stock with one mounting screw so changing from the pistol grip to the rifle stock would be easy.

A left side view of the Daystate MKIII Ultimarc. The steel body does show rust. The side block attached the pump rod to the bolt and also conceals a spring loaded detent system.

A closer view of the detent system on the left side and the hole for removing the bolt to hammer linkage.

The front figure out holds the barrel to the reservoir. A quick disconnect nipple protrudes from the front of the reservoir for easy filling off a high presser compressor. The reservoir has a check valve to keep the pressure once filled.

The metal piece on the left side connects the cocking rod and the pump handle to the bolt and also contains a spring loaded ball detent so the ball doesn’t roll out the end of the barrel.

The front of the lower tube has a fitting for an on board air cartridge with a check valve.

Based on this written information I emailed Daystate in hoping to get some confirmation and possibly numbers on the models of MK I, II and III pumps and a definition of a Splatoon vs a Daystate.

Tony Belas, Managing Director at Daystate wrote me back with the following message:

“Thank you for your email. Short answer is we don’t know. It all looks a bit handmade, there is bits of a daystate everywhere, what looks like a cylinder from an LR90 airgun, single stage trigger and a cut down beech stock.

But to anybody remaining here we did not make this marker as is. It is possible it was a prototype as Daystate did make thousands of Painball guns in the late 80s early 90s. But they were not like this.”

Belas’ email sounds like the remaining staff of Daystate only remember the Daystate Sam Patriot and possibly the Medusa TFX 2000 made in the late 90s or early 2000s unfortunately so I kept digging in search of more information.

Scan from Olly Bell, likely from a magazine published in the UK around 1990. Picture shows a pistol version of the MK III Ultimarc.

Close up of the pistol.

Luckily I came in contact with Olly Bell, PGI’s “Gun Doctor” who remembered the different Daystate models well:

“The MKI used a bolt action and side mounted tube magazine, the MKII added a pump and direct feed and the awesome (I was young, ok?) MKIII was a larger pump with more capacity and a longer barrel.

All were heavy and solid compared to a lot of the Nelspot clones of the time, built from steel and alloy, and had two other features that made them stand out; they used .62 calibre paint and ran on air at 2000psi.”

Olly went on to say:

“That’s right, air, years before HPA presets and three regulators on a marker the Daystates used an internal reservoir filled with air via a quick-release fitting, giving between 30 and 60 shots from a charge [on .62 caliber].”

Blow up of the trio of Daystate MK III Ultimac shooters from the ’89 Pro Point open Tournament. This is likely how Bart’s Stud Squad and Bad Company UK arrived the NSG Nashville Masters in 1988.

A close up on the paintguns this trio is rockin’. MKIIIs?

Scott Rich who played on the original Ironmen until 1989 remembers playing the 1988 National Survival Games Masters in Nashville and seeing the equipment that European players brought stateside. He wrote me the following in an email describing what must have been Daystate pumps:

“We had two British teams at that match [Barts Stud Squad and Bad Company UK]. They bought guns here to compete with, but they brought their own guns too [from the UK]. They were unique at that time in that they ran on air, not CO2.

CO2 was illegal in England at that time so they had these guns that weighed about 10 lbs with a steel bottle on the front that contained enough air for about 50 shots. What an anchor! That’s why they competed with new guns that they purchased here.”

Here is a scan of a cover of Paintball Monthly I found on a french site. If anyone knows who took this scan please let me know so I can credit them. I believe this is the November 1990 issue and the player looks to be holding a MKIII Ultimarc.

A classy ad for Skirmish Cookhill with a player holding an MK3. This scan is from the July 1991 issue of Paintball Monthly.

Through digging around on the internet and in magazines, more and more informations has come to light about Daystate’s early paintguns but aside from a few scans of European magazines I have done myself and the few that Olly has sent me I have only seen two other actual examples of Daystate’s paintguns surface online and one of those was the other gun James Chinn owned.

Where are the remaining Daystates? Either scrapped, for as one english website says, “manhole covers,” or sitting boxed up in sheds at old Skirmish fields?

More will definitely surface and when they do, I’ll be posting picture of them here!

If anyone reading this has any pictures of old Daystate or other english guns from the 1980s or early ’90s or information please send pictures and I will add them to this post.

I would like to thanks the following for their help in putting this article together.

Justin “Jincay” Temple, for the .62 cal Splatoon/Daystate. You can find Justin’s youtube channel here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/jincay

James Chinn, for finding and sending me the Daystate Ultra Mark III.

And thanks to Olly Bell for gathering his memories of the Daystates models and scanning the several pictures of Daystate’s he found in UK paintball mags.

Bell is now writing for Paintball Scene Digital Magazine out of the UK. Paintball Scene can be found online at: http://www.paintballscene.co.uk/

Olly also has some neat Hyperball videos uploaded on his youtube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/ollytheosteo

And thanks to Brendan Ferguson of the UK for helping me import the load of UK paintball magazines which made identification of the Daystate MKIII Ultimarc possible.

Of course gigantic thanks to Tim Firpo of PaintballTek.com

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facebook.com/paintballtek

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Written materials, pictures and screen captures/pictures copyright Daniel Bacci baccipaintball.com 2012. Scans copyright their original publishers. For permission to repost please ask.

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