Paintball guns go high-tech

SITE Manufacturing (Redding, Calif.) has taken information attained during more than 23 years of fabricating hi-tech carbon composite components, such as telescope housings and applied it to the sport of paintball. "One year around Christmas, we decided we wanted to do something else," said SITE plant manager Dave Weir. " We spent the next three months scheming and developing an all-carbon-fiber composite paintball gun barrel." The product was the ST!FFI, a tournament-quality barrel with a stepped bore (0.002 larger at 5 inches) available in one of a selection of bore sizes in 10-, 12-, 14- or 16-inch (254 mm, 305 mm, 356 mm or 406 mm) lengths or as part of a ST!FFI SW!TCH kit (with nylon carrying case) containing a 0.695-inch bore barrel with four exchangeable sizing breeches (0.685 to 0.691 inch, in 0.002-inch intervals) used to adjust the barrel to minor variations in available paintball ammo.
Barrels were designed with the help of SolidWorks 3-D design software from SolidWorks Corp. (Concord, Mass.), utilizing woven carbon prepreg permeated with a resistant hi-tech polymer epoxy resin, supplied by Bryte Technologies (Morgan Hill, Calif.) with fiber-to-resin ratio controlled to within