Continued from Part 1... (which discussed types of paint and methods used to evaluate paintballs)

Now that you have some paint...

First, check that the bags are sealed.  Paintballs suck up water like a fish, so any holes in the bags are going to allow the balls in there to get spongy.

Next, look for broken balls and fill in the bag.  You're paying for 2000 USABLE balls, and broken ones can�t be used.  (If you find one of these, most reputable stores will offer to swap the bag of broken paint, swap the case for another one or lower your price.) 

There's a trick here though.  Some paint (usually lower grades) sometimes arrives with mold-release oil/curing oil in the bag.  This may look like beads of moisture on the inside of the bag, paint smears or a puddle of translucent fluid in the bottom of the bag.

If it really is oil and there's just a small amount of it, no biggie;  by the time you get that paint home, most of it will have been absorbed into the shells of the balls and will not affect performance.  A huge puddle of it - I'd want to swap the bag, but other people aren't bothered by it - your choice.

But how do you tell oil from fill?  It's pretty easy, actually.  Oil is translucent (you can see through it) and, when you rub it around in the bag, it beads (makes small droplets).  Fill, on the other hand, is opaque (you can't see through it) and when rubbed, it smears.

Next, check for dimples and flats.  Dimples are cavities or craters in the shell.  Flats are usually found at the bottom of the bag of balls - the balls that were resting on the box and being crushed by all of their brothers packed in above them.

More often than not, visual defects such as dimples and flats have little effect on performance - unless the dimples look like moon craters and the flats are really crushed balls.  I wouldn't worry about a few of these in a bag of paint - you can pick them out of the bag and throw then away (for dimples) and you can rotate the box and leave it overnite to eliminate most, if not all, of the dimples.  However, if a good percentage of the balls look like this, chances are its very old paint and you probably don't want to buy it.  ($10 for the case of crappy looking paint - sure, no problem)

Next, look for footballs and peas.  Footballs or eggs are oblong shaped balls - an error in manufacturing and quality control.  Peas are majorly undersized balls.  If you see more than a few - dump the case - as chances are that the rest of the paint, while it looks okay, is wildly varying in diameter, which is going to effect your performance.

Finally, look at the seams, the general overall color of the balls and anything else you might see in there.  Seams should be smooth, straight and have no -flash (little rags of gelatin hanging on them).  They shouldn't be weeping (fill leaking through) as that is a sign of bad seams.

Color is sometimes an indication of whether you are getting seconds or first run paint (muddy colors can be an indication of re-used gelatin);  fading of the shell color can sometimes tell you that the paint has been sitting for a while - but other times can be a reaction to sunlight (what was my paint doing in the sun?) or a reaction of the fill dyes to the gelatin dyes.  None of these is necessarily a bad thing, but its good to know when you actually start shooting the paint.

Last but not least, you can gently pinch a ball or two - but in reality, that's not going to tell you much - unless that ball is very, very spongy.  A little give is normal and acceptable, a lot means a rubbery, usually won't break, probably swollen from moisture, ball.

(Some players mistakenly believe that if they can pinch and break a ball between their fingers, it will tell them something about the ball.  What, I don't know, unless it's that they can get sticky fingers in a unique way.  A sphere is one of the strongest structures known to mankind as stress is naturally spread out over a very large area, and few people can exert enough force with two fingers to equal the impact of a ball flying at over 200 mph.)

Which leads to "drop tests", another mistaken belief on the part of players.  Pro players will often be seen grabbing a handful of balls and then dropping them from head-height onto a hard surface and then looking to see how many balls broke on the first hit and how many broke on subsequent bounces.  While it is true that very brittle balls will usually break easily under this test, it really tells very little about the ball's performance on the field.  The surface its dropped onto affects results, the height affects results, the spot on the ball hitting affects things and, all-in-all, it's a non-scientific measure of a ball's potential performance.  Use a drop test if it makes you happy, but don't rely on it to reveal a whole heck of a lot about performance out of the gun.

So, now you've gotten your paint at a decent price and its time to hit the field.  Whoa, hang on a second there.  Where is your paint?  How are you storing it? 

Paint is supposed to be stored at temperatures between 55 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit;  its supposed to be stored at 50% humidity and out of direct sunlight and

You're supposed to rotate the damn box on a regular basis.  Remember the flats we talked about?  Once you get that case of paint, if it was stored upright in the store, flip it upside down, right away.

Throwing paint into the back of the car and letting it sit there overnite is a bad idea.  Sticking it in the closet with the moldy pile of socks isn't good either (biological action is probably heating those socks up to near combustion temperatures).  If the paint is in your car, cover it up with something.  If it's a hot day, turn on the AC;  if its really hot, stick the case (or better yet, the bags of paint) under the AC vent.  If it's cold, turn on the heater.  Use the vent again if necessary.

When you get to the field - find a good spot to store your paint, out of the sun, under cover.  If its really cold or really hot, leave it in the car with the appropriate environmental controls running.

Once you open the box - don't open all of the bags at once.  Anything left open in the staging area is going to be sucking up moisture while you're playing.  Sure, its fun for both you and the paint (paint LOOOOVES water) but you're going to pay the price later on during the day. 

If you are going to purchase multiple cases at the game or field and won't be using it all at once - ONLY PURCHASE ENOUGH TO COVER YOUR IMMEDIATE NEEDS.  Let the field or event store the paint under proper conditions for you.

DO NOT leave paint sitting in your hopper or tubes between games.  If you stick your gun or pack in the sun, guess what?  Your paint is BAKING. 

If you're camping out over nite at the big scenario game - don't store your paint in the tent in opened bags, pods or hoppers.  There's a little thing called DEW that happens every morning and dew is WATER, which your balls will happily lap up like a wino with a case of muscatel.  Put the paint in the car.  Don't use the balls in the opened bags.

Now, when it comes to guns, the first rule for paintballs is - "its never the gun's fault, its always the paint's fault".  Even in the face of everyone else using the same marker and having excellent results from their paint, YOUR gun is fine, you must have gotten bad paint.

Let me clue you in on something; lean closer, I don't want anyone else to hear:  most times it's actually the gun, the shooter or the weather; it's hardly ever the paint.

Paintball guns have a large variety of different methods for accelerating a ball from a standing start to 300 FPS in a little under 8 inches of travel;  that's like accelerating your car from 0 to 60 in less than one rotation of your tires, and, no matter how you slice it, that's pretty darn rough.  Astronauts don't experience those kinds of forces - but then again, astronauts are not paintballs, so that's a relatively pointless analogy.

The point here is that paintball guns do some pretty tortuous things to paintballs and we really ought to be wondering how we get a few intact ones out the end of the barrel, rather than trying to figure out why one or two break in there.

continued in part 3