more gear

If you've been by the other blog today you'll know that I probably won't be buying miscellany for another little while. But as it stands, my latest paintball gear (paid for weeks ago) finally arrived and Weirdguy dropped off my stuff for me. Firstly is something I wanted because I reacted to the stock neck with "this can't be right, it's so tight it's not humanly possible to put on and take off the hopper." So I bought an adjustable one. Given the choice I went with the first-party "Q-Lock."

As shown above, it's almost half the size of the stock neck bringing the profile of my marker down almost a full inch. Here's a picture of what my marker looks like with the new neck installed. Hmm... maybe I should've put on the barrel to give it some context. My reaction to the neck: what was the point of the lever? I was under the mistaken impression that I'd be able to quickly flip the lever open and close to install the hopper. But not so, it's just there to give the neck a bit of additional clamping power. I still need to have an Alan wrench handy to tighten and loosen the clamp. Kind of defeats the purpose of the lever, if you ask me. There's nothing "quick" about this "quick-release" at all.

The other thing I was glad to finally get my hands on were my pants. I really wanted to take a shot of myself actually wearing the pants but nothing I took turned out so... here they are hanging off a stool in the kitchen.
The odyssey of the paintball pants is a strange one. I knew which design I wanted well before I made up my mind to actually get them. One too many slides in slimy paint-drenched turf convinced me to do so. The problem was that nobody seemed to be sure what size these things were. I read conflicting info about how Empire's sizes were "too large" and even the official product site at InvertPaintball.com is annoyingly ambiguous. I had to Google a sizing chart from a third-party retailer to find out that a 34-inch waist was a "Medium." Which, 90% of the time is correct... unless you're looking at Nike product, which seems to cater to very tall and very slim people.
Anyway, who to trust? I took a chance. And when I tried them on today, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief - they fit perfectly!

You know what gets me going tho? Inside the waist is a label... clearly marked "M - 32-34" which means there is an intended waist size for these! But why doesn't anyone advertise this fact?