Paintball Care
Good paintballs will make or break your day. Bad paint sucks. It is the bane of a paintballer’s
existence. Don’t waist your time on cheap paintballs, you will only end up cleaning your gun and
your barrel in the staging area.





The only problem is that just no matter how good the manufacturer is, sometimes a bad batch of
paintballs slip through. Chance of this happening with the more expensive paints is very rare,
however. You do pay for quality. Another thing you’ll see is that the weather plays a big roll in
affecting your paint. Try to keep your paintballs out of the elements as much as you can.

Another thing to be careful of is DO NOT store your paintballs packed inside your tube. Some people
like to sit around the night before they play and fill up their tubes ahead of time. Forget about
it, this is not good for the paint. Another thing I see is people that have 20 tubes, fill them all
up at the start of the day and they switch their full ones for empty ones as the day progresses.
Don’t do this either. The paint stores better in the bag.

Dimples
Your paintballs are not perfectly round, they do have tiny imperfections, but for the most part
this does not affect accuracy. Some paintballs even have dimples on them, which many paintballers
think is horrible. If you pull out a handful of paintballs and some have a dimple on them, don’t
worry about it. That is usually not enough to effect accuracy. But if you see just about all of
them have LOTS of dimples, you got a not so good batch of paintballs. Not much you can do usually
but grin and bare it if it happens to you.

To an extent, you can prevent the “bouncy ball” problem by leaving your paintballs in the bag
inside of your car with the AC running. If you have your paint in a harness, in between games put
your harness and gun in the care and let it cool down. This may be a little extreme, but every
little bit helps.

Bouncy
If you are using hold paint, or paint left out in hot/humid or wet weather, chances are most of
them will bounce. I’ve had referees tell me that my paint was bouncing off people’s goggles and
nitrogen systems before. We won the game, so I was not disturbed, but it would sure suck to loose
on the account of your balls bouncing.


Brittle
If you seem to be breaking a lot of paint, either the paint sucks and is a very low quality, you
have a bad batch, or it is extremely cold outside. One thing to note, try not to use a stainless
steel barrel in cold weather. Stainless gets very very cold and the ice cold metal will make your
paint very brittle. If possible, have your car running with the heat on (not too high) and toss you
paint in there when you are not playing.

Freakshow
If your paintballs are a bunch of funny shapes (from ovals to squarish) and look like they belong
in a circus act, you are basically out of luck. The paint you are using is either a very bad batch,
or most likely you are using cheesy paint. Spend a couple more bucks on paint or yell at the field
owner/tournament promoter for using garbage for paintballs.