Delving Inside The Paintball Gun
OK – so let’s now get down to the nitty gritty of a how a paintball gun
Under thrust from expanding gas a paintball is pushed through a paintball gun barrel
The main components of a paintball gun comprise a body, barrel, hopper
Great care is taken to ensure that the paintball gun can be easily carried around the field and so light-weight materials such as carbon fiber and aluminium are extensively employed in the body production process.
A hopper is the small tank used to contain the paintballs to be fired. These can be fed into the body either by way of gravity (gravity feed hoppers) propelled agitation of the paintballs (agitating hoppers), stick feed which employs rocking of the marker to load paintballs into the barrel and force feed which utilizes a spring, belt-fed system or a propeller. Gravity feed is the most basic type of hopper whereby you are limited to only 8 balls per second. Stick feeds are limited to 20 paintball capacity. Arguably agitating hoppers come out tops for reliability because of their disinclination to jam.
Longer barrels will fire quieter than shorter models, but a paintball gun owner should remember that irrespective of barrel length, the paintball can only travel a set distance in order to break. A longer barrel may look intimidating and offer better accuracy, but it may not be especially effective since it requires a larger back thrust of air to propel the ball faster to make up the distance within the barrel itself.
The tank is a chamber which contains the gas – usually Co2 although in more expensive models sometimes compressed air.
Generally, paintball guns fall into two categories – mechanical or electronic. The electronic ones are embedded with a microchip which regulates the release of paintballs into the barrel. They also require some type of compressed gas.
Paintball guns can be classified into the following groups:
Stock class: Significant characteristics are that these must be pump-action; they cannot hold more than 20 paintballs at a time; they must be powered by 12-gram CO2 powerlets and the magazine tube must be parallel to the barrel so they can be tilted to feed the next ball in the barrel.
Pump action: require manual recocking after every shot.
Semi automatic: require the player to pull the trigger for each and every shot.
Electropneumatic: utilize a pneumatic solenoid to actuate the hammer and/or bolt’s movement.
Fully automatic: will continue firing until such time as you decide to release your finger from the trigger.
Common first paintball gun purchases are the Tippmann 98 custom, BT 4, Tippmann A-5, PCS US-5, Smart Parts Ion, or Kingman Spyder models.
In your search for a cheap paintball gun you will not be wanting to compromise unduly on quality and for that reason may perhaps choose a pump-action model rather than one of the popular semi automatic models. Low-end models are not only cheap (often a major consideration when you are just starting out), but they require the player to re-aim with every shot and thus also enhance shooting skills.