Paintball is a fun and addictive game. However, nothing is more frustrating than having your paintball gun quit on you when you need it most.
Picture this: you’ve snuck around your opponents, through bushes mud and poison oak. You’ve gotten within easy killing range, you pull the paintball gun sight to your eye and squeeze the trigger…instead of the satisfying thump of a hit, your paintball gun erupts in white noise as the CO2 starts spraying out of your paintball gun. You’ve blown something within the paintball gun and now you’re an easy target.
This scenario happened to a paintball buddy of mine just the other day. I was his intended target, but he soon died under my barrage of paintballs shot from my 150 dollar paintball gun…his gun cost 2000 dollars.
I’ve had my gun for 5 years and have hardly done anything to maintain it. He’s had his 2000-dollar gun for less than 3 months and he’s had to tweak and repair it multiple times. Before each game he spends at least ten minutes tweaking and messing with the automatic paintball gun. All I have to do is refill the hopper with paintballs and I’m ready for action.
Granted when his two thousand dollar gun is working well, it can shoot an awesome amount of ammunition fairly accurately. But my semi-automatic gun can shoot just as straight and takes virtually no maintenance.
My paintball gun is a Tippmann Custom 98. It is one of the most reliable guns on the market. In fact many paintball centers use the Custom 98 as a rental unit because of its reliability. The paintball gun shoots straight, doesn’t break balls and doesn’t require any sort of TLC while out in the field.
I have had my Tippmann Custom 98 for 5 years and the only thing I have done as far as maintenance is oil the trigger and the blowback unit. I haven’t even had to change out any of the O-rings. Granted, I don’t play paintball every weekend, but I have shot thousands of rounds through the gun and never had any sort of maintenance issue. Occasionally I will break a ball in the barrel but that’s usually a paintball quality problem rather than a gun problem.
When I’m done using the gun, I wipe off any paint, oil the trigger and blowback and throw it into a box in my garage and forget about it. It will sit there sometimes for months, but when I’m ready to use I know it will work just as well as the first time.
The only thing I changed on my Tippmann Custom 98 was the barrel. The barrel the gun comes with is short and stubby. I replaced it with a longer sniper style barrel. It greatly increases the accuracy and range of the paintball gun.
There are ways to upgrade the gun. It can be transformed into a fully automatic shooter easily. I don’t see the need for such upgrades however, I think the Tippmann Custom 98 is perfect the way it is.
