Chris Schneck

The Myth : A frozen paintball is a hard paintball.

What I think : Because of the ingredients that go into making paintballs, I don’t think they will freeze and become hard as rock. I think they will shrink, become dimpled & deformed and will overall be very useless. 

Make sure to read : Paintballs - A tasty treat

I’m going to prove how freezing paintballs will effect them by sacrificing a bag of paint and putting it in the freezer over the weekend. The paint is new, non winter formula and in an airtight sealed bag.

The paint was put into the freezer on Friday, February the 1st @ 1pm.

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I retrieved the bag of ‘frozen paintballs’ from the freezer on Monday, February the 4th @ 10am.

Ready for a surprise? The paintballs were NOT rock hard, they were in fact a little squishy-er and extremely brittle. So brittle in fact I’d say they would be near impossible to use, even in the most gentle of paintball markers. The shell was not hard, and the fill was still very much a fluid. I would not be afraid of playing against someone who said they had frozen their paintballs, in fact, id encourage them to use them as I don’t see how their marker will function for very long with all the broken paint in their breach.

I will admit, there might have been a time when paintballs could have been freezable, but the general recipe for modern paintballs doesn’t seem to contain enough water to make them dangerous or near lethal. So the next time some one starts going off about how they froze some balls and it was rad, you can call them out and get everyone to laugh at them for being a big fat liar.

The term bore size and calibre or caliber are interchangeable words. Calibre is the interior diameter of a tube, or in this case barrel. A barrels calibre is measured in hundredths of an inch. For example a 50 calibre rifle, often denoted by .50 calibre, is fifty one hundredths of an inch, or half an inch.

Paintballs tend to be a larger .691 calibre to a smaller .682 calibre. The calibre of the paintball will not effect its performance, however the match between the calibre of your barrel to the calibre of the paintball will effect both performance and efficiency of the marker and the accuracy of the paintballs.

Having a barrel calibre larger then the calibre of the paintball allows for air or evaporated c02 to move around the paintball instead of getting directly behind it. This means it requires more propellant to get a paintball to reach the desired velocity as it leaves your barrel.

Having a barrel calibre smaller then the calibre of the paintball is potentially much worse. Imagine trying to push an egg through a garden hose, yeah you get the idea.

Ideally having a barrel kit, with multiple choices for which calibre to use, is the best solution. Most kits come with a bore sizer, so you can check your paint before you play, and choose your barrel back or insert depending on whats needed.

Here is an old paintball bore / calibre size chart. Keep in mind the calibre of a paintball might change from batch to batch, and this chart shouldn’t be relied upon.