Tech Topics - Marker Upgrades - Barrels

Barrels

Perhaps the best thing you can do for your gun is to buy an aftermarket barrel. You can have a lot of fun with the barrels that come with the gun you purchase but in most cases, there is not a lot of TLC put into them. What can an aftermarket barrel do for your gun? Well, a good aftermarket barrel will do two important things for you. It will improve the accuracy of your gun and it can make the gun quieter.

To increase the range of your marker you have two options:

1. You can turn up the velocity. However, you will run into the speed limits of the field or tournament where you play. Additionally, you do not want to go above the manufacturers' speed limit for your gun - 300 feet per second or less - and you will increase the amount of ball breakage in your gun if the velocity is too high.
2. You can use a flatline™ barrel. This type of barrel which is made by Tippmann and is available for the 98, the A-5 and the X7. Additionally, you can fit an A-5 flatline™ onto a BT-4. These barrels add about 100 feet to the range of your marker. Don't expect that you will be as accurate at this increased range as with a good barrel at closer ranges, but you will outdistance the competition. The flatline™ barrel is a curved barrel that puts a tremendous amount of back spin on the ball and this (a) makes the trajectory of your shots a lot flatter (hence the name) and (b) adds the increased distance to the shot.

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How long should my barrel be?

Well, here is a case where longer is not always better. The length of the barrel you use should consider the type of player you are. If you are a sniper type player - one who takes long shots, then you should consider a longer barrel. The longer barrel will give you better accuracy and quiet your gun. By longer, I mean 16, 18 inches or longer. If you go much beyond 20 inches you will run into problems of barrel friction slowing down the ball and potential difficulty in carrying your gun around. One other advantage of a longer barrel, say 20 inches, is not that it is any more accurate than a 16 or 18 inch barrel but it can help you poke through tall grass or bushes that are immediately in front of your position. It is not much fun firing your gun at a distant target and having the ball hit a twig and exploding right in front of you.

Sometimes a short barrel is better. Again, the length should reflect how you play. If you are a "bunker charger" or front man, then your targets are usually closer to you than the sniper or back position player. When you jump up to a bunker or your opponents’ cover, you don’t want to have to swing your 20 inch howitzer around. You want a shorter barrel that you can quickly turn to cover your target, so a 12 inch or shorter barrel is more appropriate for this type of player.

What about the player that does some of each - sometimes taking the long shot, sometimes you are almost on top of your target - well, as you can guess, a medium length barrel is best for you. Something in the 12 or 14 inch range.

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Porting

Most barrels have porting. Porting are the holes in the barrel. A couple of things to consider about the porting of a barrel:

1. If your gun had no porting it would be very loud. So porting helps reduce the noise of your shots.
2. If your gun had porting starting at the back (gun end) of the barrel, the efficiency of the gun would be reduced. Once the ball reaches the porting, most of the gun’s ability to push the ball is eliminated. The barrel is still guiding the ball but it is no longer "pushing" the ball because the pressure is going out the ports instead of pushing the ball.
3. Some porting is needed to minimize turbulence at the end of the barrel. This will improve accuracy of your shots.
4. In summary, too much porting, especially if it starts at the back end of the gun will make the gun inefficient. No porting will make the gun loud and create turbulence at the end of gun. Some porting will improve the accuracy and reduce the loudness of your gun.

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Barrel Materials

1. Aluminum is light and you will find it to be the most common material used to make barrels.
2. Carbon fiber is another material that is being offered by more barrel makers. This material is lighter than aluminum and very strong. We have suspended these barrels between two supports and had staff members stand on them without causing any breakage of the barrel. The biggest plus for these barrels is their light weight - not significant if you hold your gun for a few minutes in the store, but when you are out playing for hours and hours you will appreciate the weight reduction.
3. Brass was commonly used in the past but suffers from the problems of weight and softness. Brass is much heavier than steel. There are few models on the market - they are usually short barrels to minimize the weight issue.
4. Ceramic barrels are actually ceramic coated barrels. These barrels are usually aluminum and then coated with ceramic which is a very hard and which reduces barrel friction.
5. Stainless steel offers high strength and the ability to be polished to a mirror finish. The disadvantage of this material is the weight.
6. Combined material barrels are, obviously, a combination of the material listed above. Sometimes the materials are combined with a core of one material and an outer layer of another material. For example, there are barrels that have a brass core and a fiber outer layer. Another approach is to use one material for the back and another for the front. Typically a steel back with an aluminum front, this allows for the use of high tolerance steel in the back of the barrel where the tolerance is most important and a lighter weight front to reduce the overall weight of the barrel.

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Paint to Barrel Sizing

Most paintballs are .68 caliber which means that they are a nominal 0.68 inches in diameter. However, the actual size of paintballs varies from brand to brand and even from batch to batch. Ideally the paintball should fit the barrel (we will discuss how to test the "fit" in the Paintball Basic section of Tech Tips). If the balls are bigger than the barrel they will break as they are shot down the barrel. If they are much smaller than the barrel, the pressure behind the balls will escape around the ball causing them to be inaccurate and making the gun inefficient. A good match will maximize the efficiency of the gun (more shots from your tank) and give you better accuracy.

Now the problem is that how do you get the inner diameter of the barrel to match the paint, if the paint varies from box to box? Well, two ways to do it. One is to buy a lot of barrels with different inner diameters and the second is to get a barrel that can change the inner diameter. This has been done by a variety of barrel manufacturers in two ways. One way is by making barrels that have a removable, interchangeable sleeve. Each sleeve has different inner diameters. Another way manufacturers have addressed the problem is to make different backs with different inner diameters. A standard front is then put on the back.

Studies have shown that much of the "push" of the marker on the ball is done in the first few inches of the shot. Because of this, the inner sleeve or barrel back does not have to be very long to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the gun.

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One piece versus two piece barrels

Each of these approaches offer different pluses. A two piece barrel, and I am talking about barrels that allow you to change the fronts and/or backs, gives you flexibility to change the length of the barrel and/or the inner diameter of the back to give you the barrel you want for differing conditions of play.

The one piece barrel avoids the problem of a seam in the barrel that the ball must cross. This reduces wobble in the shot and can improve accuracy.

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What about Rifling?

"Real" bullets are elongated and can easily grab the grooves in a rifled barrel. This is more difficult with a round bullet (or in our case, paintballs). The grooves in the barrel can grab the paintball but, because the ball can rotate on multiple axes it is not as effective on a round projectile as it would be on an elongated projectile. So rifled barrels do offer some improvement in accuracy, they do not offer as dramatic an improvement in accuracy as they would if the paintballs were not round.

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Barrel Tips

Some barrels have interchangeable tips. By tip I mean the front end of the barrel - sometimes called the muzzle break. I am not referring to barrel FRONTS which can change the total length of the barrel. These tips come in a variety of patterns. These don’t really do much but they sure look cool!!

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