I have always been close to my Automag - ever since I pulled apart my first Minimag and lovingly ran my fingers over the laser etched stainless steel internals. So when Tom Kaye's Air Gun Designs released their first completely new offering since 1990 - the RT Automag, the choice of which paintgun to buy became apparent.

The RT took 5 engineers and six months of development to produce. In all, 35 new parts were custom built. The new marker tried to keep the simplicity of the old Automag design and solve two of the guns major drawbacks - misfiring and drop-off. Many cool external features have been added as standard features for the RT to give a tournament ready paintgun.

New Regulator
Rumours have abounded for the past two years about an electropneumatic marker being researched the Air Gun Designs team known only as the P5. The P5 was actually the prototype regulator design for the RT. The new regulator allows the gun to recharge a lot faster. This completely eliminates drop-off when rapid firing which was a major cause for complaint with the old design. The Reactive Trigger (RT) from where the marker gets its name is the process when the trigger is pulled and bounces back with twice the force with which it is pulled.

Both these features mean the trigger can be pulled really fast. So fast that AGD managed to fire the RT 26 times in one second with no drop off in a laboratory test where a machine pulled the trigger. Just how they managed to feed paint that fast remains a mystery.

Air Only
The RT is designed exclusively to run on air or nitrogen. CO2 will simply not work in the gun no matter what expansion chambers or remotes are used. This is a bold move forward by AGD and one that is bound to be a winner. More and more tournament players are switching to this high performance propellant. Because the RT uses only air all the internal seals have been changed from Teflon to urethane.

The RT has several spare air ports on either side of the gun. AGD have allowed these for the predicted development of a whole generation of air driven accessories. I heard the next big step in tournament paintguns will be to have air forced paintballs delivered into the breach allowing an even faster rate of fire and a lower profile on top of the gun. The hopper would form part of the stock and the air powering the system would be run on remote. Rumour has it that AGD are developing such a system. This may explain how they managed to fire so fast in their testing of the RT.

Internally
Amongst the other changes to the internalsÉ

• New coil springs replace the older style spring packs to give double the velocity adjustment range.
• No power tube spring
• A new trigger sear to give a really smooth trigger pull.

Externally
The RT Automag has been given a complete makeover. These features all come as standard:

• New barrel design with a tulip style chrome muzzle brake and featuring dual nubbins for better ball control. Although AGD advise that standard barrels can be fitted, the several I tried all had problems with double feeding. I'm told that this problem can be solved by experimenting with the nubbin itself.
• Air is fed into the RT via a male quick disconnect attached to the front fore grip. From here there is a stainless steel hard line that feeds directly into the rail not the valve. The field strip screw passes air through it to supply the regulator.
• The main body comes in a standard chrome finish with a new high rise power feed. This variation to the standard power feed is supposed to feed even faster and allows clear sighting down the body of the gun. It also allows the hopper to be more centred and gives more balance. The downside to this is that the last ball is usually always chopped as there is not enough pressure to push it down into the breach. This is not a major problem as long as the hopper is kept full and a motorised hopper is used.
• Stylish sculptured sight rails come as standard and are certainly not going to wobble or fall off as they are held in place by 6 bolts.

Chronographing
Over the chronograph the RT is inconsistent. This fault is currently being looked into and should be remedied by 4 new mods that AGD are coming out with in the near future.

New Vid
Tom Kaye is allegedly employing a professional company to help them make a video manual. Hopefully he will include his out takes at the end like the last video. You may have seen these if you were one of the few people who could stay awake long enough to watch the whole video.

Proof of the Pudding
UK paintball team Storm have their whole 10 man squad kitted out with RT's - it helps having their captain (John Sosta) as European agent for AGD! So far in the first two months of 97 they have won 6 out of 7 tournaments. They are all using stock standard RTs with the only slight modification being to polish the internals to give even smoother action.

So far in the first 2 months of 97 I have played more than all of last year put together. The RT is an awesome paintball marker and like the Automag just keeps shooting paint. Check one out soon.

Paul Mavor
Wild West Paintball
wildwest@compuserve.com

Paint site design and contents Copyright Mike Wallis