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Your first awareness of Airsoft


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Just being nostalgic.

 

Not your first game or your first gun but when you first became aware that something like Airsoft existed.

 

For me, I remember it really well.

 

I was working in Tokyo, I was looking at Gundam's in a massive electronics superstore.

 

I turned at the end of the aisle and across from me was the Airsoft section.

I became fixated with this TM PSG1 that was perched high above everything else.

 

At that moment in time, I thought that PSG1 was the coolest thing I had ever encountered.

 

I asked the sales assistant what all this stuff was about.

 

I stopped being interested in Gundam's after that point.

 

I still have a fixation with the TM PSG1.

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When i was at school in Eversley there was always rumors of "BB Wars" nearby and once we got access to the internet (yeah im old) we found the Ambush Eversley website. Once i got to college many moons later i finally managed to go. 

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Battle Orders in Eastbourne. A legendary catalogue cover with a M134 on it, and inside a treasure trove of RiFs. This would've been around 1993. But, having been to the War & Peace Show since 1987 as a small child, I am sure I picked up on it before even then.

 

My first RiF was, in 1993-94, a NBB TM Desert Eagle .44.

 

Still got it, Still works. #TMFairyDust 

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First discovered Airsoft in the late 80's with the dream of an Academy M16/M203 kit, finally got a springer SIG 220 in about 1991.

 

Discovered you could shoot people in organised skirmishes via an article in GunMart written in about 1997-98....? ish :P

 

Took 'til 2001 to get an AEG and get to a game at Tech Brigade, and have been a regular since.

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Around year 9 at secondary school, I think I stumbled on a link to one of those mini-sized TM guns, i.e. cartoon scale firing bbs at 100fps. Followed the link down the rabbit hole, found a proper store, etc - This was just before the VCRA came in so at the time I thought it was a dream come true - by the time I had money to buy RIFs in a year or so's time, I was a little ...

 

Scoutthedoggie's videos were what gave me a proper idea of what the game's like, although going back to those videos I think it makes things look a little *suitcase* personally! Hard to film from a 3rd person perspective I guess.

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Started buying springers from about 94. I always wanted to do some kind of battle but it never happened. Some of my older peer group were known for having some impressive weaponry, and after seeing one of these individuals TM 6” Colt Python one day this spawned me on to buy bigger and better guns. It wasn't till ‘99 when I came to meet this person again for my first self organised skirmish in some local woods and it all kicked off from there.

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Airgun magazines with TM springers advertised, along with gunmart. Gunmart was... Awesome!

 

Probably early 90s there was an article (in black and white) of an MP5 full auto AEG a writer took to a range and impressed all there.

 

Hooked. First game was 2007 after a friend was gifted a CA M16 (just pre vcra). Even more hooked.

 

Good toimes!

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Way back (around 94 or 95) I saw this KWC M9 on a model kit shop. After a bit of oggling and fondling, brought it home and had a fine time with it.

A few years later I stumbled on a newspaper article about this weird new sport, and the light bulb came on. Still have that old pistol... :)

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I was about thirteen (2002), i was aware of cheap crappy springers, but i was working in shop that sold horror and action movies, hard rock music and everything "underground" related.

And one of the employees had left his Classic Army MP5SD with laser behind the counter.

I remember picking it up and the heavy feel of metal just blew my mind instantly!

I had never felt anything so well built and so totally cool before (lol, calssic army) and was so impressed that it did not have be to cocked/loaded after each shot but instead had very powerfull full auto.

 

Saved alot of money from my birthday and christmas and later bought a Classic Army MP5A2 (the SD version was out of stock and my dad had driven me so far down the country to find the only shop at the time in sweden that sold them, so i just settled with the A2 version instead). 

I have a hard time getting a thrill like that theese days. Probl explains my obsession with building real firearms into airsofts to come as close to it again hehe. 

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It was 1995 and I was 15 years old. We have a store in Sweden called "teknikmagasinet" (the technical magazine) and they where (and still are) known for their thick catalogs of gadgets.

I remember standing by their display window every time I had the chance in the central of Stockholm looking at their thin but awesome airsoft display (plastic springers)

I remember looking specially at a silver Sig Sauer with a working hammer (!!!), wanting it soo bad. But I was 15 years old and they were pretty strict about the 18 year limit:(

I few moths later a buddy of mine (1 year younger than me) told me that he knew someone old enough that could buy the springers for us:) So I told him to please buy the Silver Sig that I wanted so bad, but he came back with a black S&W springer with a non functioning hammer, what a disappointment.   

But it was a lot better than the pea-shooters that we made from coat hangers, those were the times!

TNr8T7.jpg

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Friends from school started doing springer skirmishes and people not owning a gun could play as scouts. Had to see what all the fuss was about. Saved up for my first springer KWC M92FS comp in silver so that I could shoot back. Was not old enough to buy it so I had to drag my  father along. Old hippie pacifist was definitely not happy about this, couldn't figure out why I couldn't just play soccer instead. :) 

A friend of mine owned a large shut down plant nursery and suddenly we could organize bigger events and build obstacles and dig trenches. it was just as much fun as the gaming itself. Tried an old Marui m16 vietnam version (non hop - eg560 motor) and was blown away by the rof.

 

Started coming to a local gun store in Copenhagen to ogle the airsoft guns, can still remember first time I saw someone emptying an entire mag through a Maruzen Uzi. Was completely blown away by the blow back function.

One day the store was cleaning out its workshop and a friend and myself got all the broken guns and parts. Naturally we started trying to fix as many of them as we could. :D This must have been around 96 have been fixing guns ever since. Still buying up old guns that I couldn't afford back then even though they are outdated. 

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Depends on what you count as airsoft. I really don't consider cheap springers to be airsoft, they are 'bb guns' in my mind.

So I'll tell two stories.

 

 

Getting into BB guns was easy back then, I have always been interested in guns of all types from water pistols to firearms. I don't remember what year it would have been but it must have been after 2000 as I was in secondary school. One of my friends started bringing in BB guns into school and I quickly got taken to the headmasters office because someone saw me with one of my friends M4 springers. Well we got out of it because it was 'brought in for his drama presentation' that he wrote in his head inbetween the headmasters office and the drama teacher, who was chill as glass and OK'ed us having guns in school.

 

After that we decided that shooting eachother without eyepro in the trees around our houses was far safer. I ended up buying one from him, a 'gold national match' 1911 spring pistol, possibly a HFC, not sure, I never had the box.

After that we found a market stall in town that sold BB guns of all kinds.

 

 

A few years after that I was looking up the firearms featured in my favourite game of the time, Rainbow Six (the original, you know, back when it was tactical as F*** rather than a COD clone like it is now). My favourite gun of the game was the MP5k, so I was searching for that and found that this site called Wolf Armouries had this fancy MP5k gun that shot in full auto and was legal to own and everything! I then spent a whole bunch of time looking at these airsoft gun things on all sorts of websites.

Well at this point I wasn't going to be able to hide a rifle, the 6 or 7 BB guns I had hidden in my room were all pistols. So I asked my dad again for permission, He finally relented and agreed but with a proviso that I had a legitimate use for it, so I looked around and found Electrowerks down in London and gave them a call.

My dad booked us into a game and bought an Academy SA80 from Airsoft Scotland.

 

I still have the SA80, and I still have the magazine for the springer 1911.

 

I've never owned an MP5k.

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This is a bit roundabout... but sort of bear with me. Loved guns from when I was a kid. Used to shoot each other with Sekiden guns, spring impact guns which fired sort of BBs made of a papier-mache paste painted gold back in the 70's. Towards the end of the 70's I made two 1:1 plastic model kits, googling reveals they must have been LS kits, of a Walther P38 and a Broom-handle Mauser with stock/holster which I bought from the amazing and sadly no longer existing Harrow Model Shop. There were fully fuctional, in that they had magazines with plastic bullets and could be stripped/manually cycled like the real thing.

 

Move forward to the late 80's and I started paintballing. It was some time late 80's early 90's, and I don't know when exactly, that I must have seen my first BB gun in the same Harrow Model Shop. I am not sure what they were but I remember seeing on the box that there was a picture/diagram of some kind of mechanism that allowed them to fire a stream of BBs. I had thought the guns were model kits, that you had to assemble like the LS kits, but I guess I must have been mistaken. Anyway I misguidedly dismissed them as less interesting than paintball. While I stopped paintballing as speedball came on the scene I kept an interest over the years and would look at paintball mags in news agents.

 

Then in 2011 I was flicking through a paintball mag and saw a copy of Airsoft Action on the shelf next to the paintball mags in the newsagent. The first couple of pages had me convinced I ought to put the mag down and step away. Paintball had eaten money and I knew that this new thing would be 1000 times worse if I dared to read further. A year later chatting to a colleague at work and he mentioned airsoft. One thing lead to another and I turned up at Tech Brigade for my first game as a Newbie. I have been hooked ever since and wish I had looked harder at the boxes in Harrow Model Shop back in the early Nineties.

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Airgun magazines with TM springers advertised, along with gunmart. Gunmart was... Awesome!

 

Probably early 90s there was an article (in black and white) of an MP5 full auto AEG a writer took to a range and impressed all there.

 

Hooked. First game was 2007 after a friend was gifted a CA M16 (just pre vcra). Even more hooked.

 

Good toimes!

gunmart..... same here :D . started collecting in 98' after a local model shop got them in and shortly after started to get gunmart and discovered there were events and sites you could go to. would be 6 years later when i went to my first "official" event.

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Not too happy for me.

I was in 2nd grade I think. Was waiting for my ride home to arrive when I saw an older kid pull out a gun. Although I liked guns, I didn't know what airsoft was at the time so I was naturally alarmed; more so when I realized he was deliberately training the gun at me. In a mad dash to get behind cover, I tripped, ate dirt, got shot and laughed at. It stung a bit but I was more emotionally distraught over anything else so I promptly told what happened to my older brother and the rest of the guys in my carpool and they gave the kid a good beating.

It wasn't until first year high school when I came across a stall selling KWC springers when I decided to get one for myself and found out a bunch of my friends had airsoft replicas too and that's when we all started shooting each other after class without eye pro like most people start out.

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This is a bit roundabout... but sort of bear with me. Loved guns from when I was a kid. Used to shoot each other with Sekiden guns, spring impact guns which fired sort of BBs made of a papier-mache paste painted gold back in the 70's. Towards the end of the 70's I made two 1:1 plastic model kits, googling reveals they must have been LS kits, of a Walther P38 and a Broom-handle Mauser with stock/holster which I bought from the amazing and sadly no longer existing Harrow Model Shop. There were fully fuctional, in that they had magazines with plastic bullets and could be stripped/manually cycled like the real thing.

 

Move forward to the late 80's and I started paintballing. It was some time late 80's early 90's, and I don't know when exactly, that I must have seen my first BB gun in the same Harrow Model Shop. I am not sure what they were but I remember seeing on the box that there was a picture/diagram of some kind of mechanism that allowed them to fire a stream of BBs. I had thought the guns were model kits, that you had to assemble like the LS kits, but I guess I must have been mistaken. Anyway I misguidedly dismissed them as less interesting than paintball. While I stopped paintballing as speedball came on the scene I kept an interest over the years and would look at paintball mags in news agents.

 

Then in 2011 I was flicking through a paintball mag and saw a copy of Airsoft Action on the shelf next to the paintball mags in the newsagent. The first couple of pages had me convinced I ought to put the mag down and step away. Paintball had eaten money and I knew that this new thing would be 1000 times worse if I dared to read further. A year later chatting to a colleague at work and he mentioned airsoft. One thing lead to another and I turned up at Tech Brigade for my first game as a Newbie. I have been hooked ever since and wish I had looked harder at the boxes in Harrow Model Shop back in the early Nineties.

 

It was Harrow Model Shop that I too drooled over the kits. Apparently (from the happy thread) they were Academy.

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Back in days of yore (99) I started work at my local GW where they would head out airsofting once every few months.  Naturally I tagged along once and enjoyed it.  Then a few years later I got talking to a security guard at my new job.  He remembered me from GW and mentioned giving up tiny fighting men for airsoft.  I was intrigued and we went a few times together.  But I changed jobs and forgot about it for a few years, plus the TM M16 would have cost me £400 to buy locally.  Then in early 2005 I got back into it bought a TM G36 second hand (for a more reasonable price) and well the rest is history.

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I'd recently come home from Iraq (2004), and was having trouble sleeping. That whole year I'd slept with my M16A2 under my pillow (anti-theft), and was finding it hard to sleep without knowing where "my" weapon was, missing that familiar feeling when laid down my head at night.

 

While catching up with an old school friend at the local mall, I spotted a Well springer M4 in a games store. Immediately I knew I had to have it. First good sleep I'd had in months.

 

About a year later I started wondering if there were organized airsoft games, something like the paintball games I'd done while in the Army.

 

First thing I saw was a video from Operation Irene III, held at Ft. Knox (pre-Youtube days). I knew then what my new hobby would be.

 

8 years later I got the chance to work at an airsoft store. Been there for 3 and a half years now.

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I'd recently come home from Iraq (2004), and was having trouble sleeping. That whole year I'd slept with my M16A2 under my pillow (anti-theft),

Completely off topic, and I apologise for that, but is weapon theft really a thing there?

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I've always had an interest in guns and had a few cheap crappy springers in my teens. I'd also heard there were organised games, but this being before the Internet, I had no idea where.

 

Fast forward to 2004 and while flicking through gunmart looking for a new air pistol I found an article about skirmishing at Electrowerkz. A large chunk of tax rebate spent later and I was going to my first game with all the gear and no idea

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For me the first time I came across an airsoft gun is when an older friend came back from a holiday with what I'm fairly sure was a Tokyo Marui M9 springer, no idea how old I was but I'd guess pretty young as it was pretty hard for me to pull the slide back, made Nerf guns seem pretty naff!

 

Some time after my sisters boyfriend at the time gave me a plastic bag with a Tokyo Marui Ruger KP85 springer in bits in it which he couldn't put back together and was told if I could put it back together it was mine, not very long after it was back together and working but I had to go scrounge some ammo off the friend with the M9, that one springer soon turned into a pretty vast collection.

 

Eventually I discovered what many of us would consider to be 'real' airsoft guns and when I was 15 got a KWA G19 for something like £75 which has been my primary pistol to this day, just before I turned 16 I managed to save enough for an ICS MP5 SD6, in the two months after my birthday and before I even got to my first skirmish at F&O woodland in Matlock I also got a Tokyo Marui MP5k PDW (also still got) and a Tokyo Marui G3 SG1 on offer from Airsoft Dynamics, both partly funded by my education maintenance allowance I got from going to college!

 

Now I'm nearly some years older I think I've got around 35 - 45 guns in my combined personal and business R&D collection, I say think because I don't really want to count, all because one guy bought a springer on a holiday, what a *bramston pickle*, I've been poor ever since!

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