Ball's & Barrel's

[elroy]

I'm a 40 year old newbie, I have been following certain posts throughout this website [which I have found to be the best paintball website yet.] and I have a few ? s if ya'll don't mind me squezzing your brains a little.
I'm getting a stock spyder SE, and I have been looking at barrels and have found them to be numerous indeed. I intend to play as a rec. player for now unless i become competition material,so my question or questions are , which barrel,what diameter,length,I don't want to spend a fortune on it , so which barrel is best for the money i want to spend[30-40.00] ? The second ? is ,which ball brand is the best and has the lowest percentage of breakage ? Do ball's come in different diameters ?
Thankz - Randy

[infil]

This is a tough one.
From my experience in paintball, i've found the freak to be the best option, however its a $225 investment and probably not the best option for someone just getting into the sport.

The OTP G1 barrel, which is available in quite a few different lengths and threads, is an excellent alternative. It uses 3 collar inserts to give you the equivalent of a breech sizer for the paint, allowing better accuracy and less breakage. Mine was $80, but that was last year and it was on sale, I'm not quite sure of what the retail price is.

Some other barrels that are pretty good are the Custom Products, and JT one and two piece barrel's. Those would be anywhere from 50-130 depending on what you get.

Length is a matter of personal prefrence. I like a 14" barrel primarily because the length gives me a descent sight plane, and doesn't stick out ungodly far. I have also used 12" occasionally, but length is totally personal prefrence.
With something like the G1, 12" or 14" would be a good length, with the JT or Custom Products, you could go as short at 10" without sacraficing much accuracy, or as long as 16" which would give slightly more accuracy and velocity, but overall, length is up to you. The range, accuracy and velocity differences wont be signifigant enough to make a difference in my opinion.


On paint, Personally i've found Marbelizer to be the best. Consistently round, consistent size, rarely bounces, rarely breaks in the barrel. I have used every bore sleeve in my freak(679, 682, 684, 687, 689, 691, 693, 695) at one time or another, so paint is usually a different boresize. I've found 689, 691 and 687 to be the most common ones i use, and my primary paints are RPS Polar Ice(691), Marbelizer(689 or 691 depending on weather), and occalsionally Diablo Blaze(687).
Overall I'd have to say any of the higher end RPS paint is going to be good. el tigre, all star, marbelizer, polar ice, are all excellent paints, as are pmi premium, proball, and blaze isn't too bad.

Personal prefrence will play a large part is alot of these decisions. If you can, get out to the field and play around with some other peoples equipment on the target/chrono range. See what you like, and see what feels comfortable to you.
Hope this helps,

[Silent Knight]

ok, well i will try to help you out

as far as barrels go that price range is a little hard to mess around with. for a little more then 50, a decent barrel to look at would be the J&J ceramic, maybe the ACI zero gravity barrel, custom products single pc barrel, smartparts progressive, or smartparts teardrop barrels. those are several you may want to take a look at. In the past I have had very good experiences with SP barrels, and I highly recommend them to other people who are also looking for barrels. The best thing about the SP barrels is that the standard bore size is .689 and that is a bore size that is right in the middle. The best thing about that bore size is that you can shoot a lot more variety of paint rather then if you got a barrel with a extremely small bore sizes, you will be limited to the more expensive types of paint. The better paint would consit of the RPS line up, JT, diablo, proball. those are all great paints to shoot. but if you do opt for something with the .689 bore size you have a much more variety of paint to choose from. you can even shoot team colors, or powerball, and still get good results...

as good as aftermarket barrels are, they cant pull off miracles, dont expect anything from shooting BE paint.

[elroy]

thankz guys for the help.
I have also heard how balls will roll out of the gun , this, I would guess, is from a big bore barrel and a small size ball. Do I take it that the smaller size paint is more exspensive ?
Thankz - Randy