Paintball Barrels

Paintball Barrels: Your Gun’s Accuracy Limitation

No matter what anyone tells you, there are no paintball barrel tricks you can use to make your paintball gun more accurate, farther ranging, or in any way better than it already is. Here’s the problem: in a regular gun, the barrel is grooved with what’s called rifling. Rifling makes the projectile used spin when it’s fired, sort of drilling a hole in the air in front of it. In a long gun like a rifle, the long rifling in the barrel sets a very even spin, making these long-barrel guns more accurate. But you can’t rifle the paintball barrel; it would ensure that your paintball would break before leaving the gun. Long or short paintball barrel, it doesn’t matter; paintball guns are about as accurate as the person using them.

How Paintball Guns Work

My brother once made a potato gun. It was very simple: a potato was shoved down a beveled piece of PVC piping, and a coffee can at the bottom of the gun with a flint sparker was sprayed with a quick spritz of hair spray. One quick twist of the sparker, and boom! the potato shot out of the barrel, followed by blue flame, well out of sight.

Regular guns use bullets and gunpowder, but work much the same way: a sudden explosion causes intense pressure behind the bullet, ejecting it from the barrel at a high velocity. Paintball guns, on the other hand, work more like a BB gun. They use CO 2 or liquid nitrogen capsules to provide the high pressure and eject the paintball through the paintball barrel. Your two replaceable parts in a paintball gun are the CO 2 capsule and the paintballs.

Here’s the deal: lots of people say that longer paintball barrels are more accurate. But without rifling, and considering you are shooting a round pellet that’s more likely to tumble than rotate anyway, the primary difference is in the shooter.

Paintballs

Paintballs themselves come in a variety of types, from target-shooting grade to professional grade. The lowest grade are not perfect paintballs, and may not seat well in the paintball barrel; this leads to more breaking than with any other type of paintball. The next grade up is fine for everyday shooting; the grade after that is winterized; and the final grade of paintballs, costing about double the lowest grade, is professional grade, ideal for tournament play and for rapid-fire shooting.

The highest level paintball is also the one most likely to be accurate, all other things being equal. Instead of depending on your paintball barrel, depend on practice and on your good-quality paintballs. Even though your paintball barrel may do more to look cool than to improve your game, when you have the money get a good grade paintball marker. When all the parts work together properly (as they do in a good paintball gun) the result is more accuracy and less jamming.

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Paintball Barrels