This particular Short Barrel tournament special has great looking PMI Walnut grips, a plastic / delrin pump and a speed demon bolt with a standard finish frame.
This tournament special looks to be in okay shape with some staining in the nickel (can be cleaned up with nickel cleaning).
Some dings on the finish and some rust on pump arm and speed demon bolt knurled knob. AGD factory engraving on the left side looks good. Tournament special Barrel engraving does look clear but you can see some nickel staining above it.
Engraving on these and other engraved PMI / AGD Piranhas is very light and delicate.
The Nickel finish does fog up over the years so please keep this in mind along with the fact that this is a 30 year old marker so it will have some blemishes.
The PMI Piranha Long Barrel and Short Barrel Tournament Specials were a very limited run by PMI and likely debuted after the October 1989 Masters.
The Lords of Discipline played Sudden Death in the final game at the 1989 Masters Tournament. Both teams were sponsored by PMI at the time and and the majority of players were shooting Piranha Long barrels (with Youngblood likely being the exception).
Many other teams were shooting the Piranha's at the time and playing off the Piranha Long and Short Barrels success, PMI created the very limited edition Tournament Special.
The Tournament Special model featured Airgun Designs turbo valve, cup seal and hammer setup with the AGD engraving on the side of the marker as well as "Piranha Tournament Special" on the barrel.
I've seen very few tournament specials pop up over the years and rank these as one of the rarest direct feed markers pump markers that PMI produced, along with the factory engraved AGD turbo valved patinaed black Piranha Long barrels and team engraved Piranha Long barrels.
All of the Tournament Special PMI Piranha paint guns being offered currently were custom built by the factory for the top PMI sponsored professional teams like Lords of Discipline, captained by Bill Zoll and PMI Piranhas’ Captained by Caleb Strong, one of the first NSG franchisees, first indoor gamefield operator and subsequently a minority shareholder in PMI.
These particular Tournament Special guns have been retained by Jeff for his own use (a couple used and a couple never used) as he was a member of both of these teams at different times.
These guns were hand made in very limited quantities and were “state of the art” in their day, used by the best paintball teams in the world which was integral in how the Sport Of Paintball was built.
