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Paintball Gear You Didn't Know You Needed!
Paintball Equipment You Didn't Know You Needed!
10 Must-Have Pieces of Paintball Equipment for Your Gear Bag!
Once you start your adventure playing the game of paintball, it becomes clear fairly quickly that simply grabbing the best paintball gun you can buy and heading to the field isn’t enough. To be truly prepared for everything the game of paintball can throw at a player, whether at the local level, major scenario events like Skirmish ION or Fulda Gap, or at competitions and tournaments, you’ll need a paintball gear bag stocked with all kinds of paintball equipment – some of which you’d never have any idea you should have until the need arises. Avoid frustration, solve problems when they pop up and be ready for any challenge at the paintball field with Valken Paintball and our list of 10 lesser-known, but must-have paintball gear items you should always keep in your gear bag!
Barrel Kit
To an experienced paintball player, the thought of having a complete paintball barrel kit such as a Freak barrel kit or a Field 1 Acculock barrel kit like the ones used by Dynasty to win NXL events is common sense. However, to new paintball players, it may not have clicked yet. A paintball gun comes with a barrel already, so why by another paintball barrel? Anyone who’s played paintball even a few times knows the answer – paintballs. Even the best paintballs in the game can vary in size from brand to brand, batch to batch and even case to case! Sure, they’re all supposed to be .68 caliber paintballs, but what about that next decimal? Some paintballs can be .688 and others might be .683 and this difference is enough to drastically affect accuracy and consistency! Add variables like humidity, temperature, wet weather and direct sunlight to the equation and you get paintballs in all kinds of different sizes that can even vary from morning to afternoon during a day at the field, all shooting at different velocities and flying in different directions if you can’t adjust the bore size of your paintball gun barrel to properly fit them! That’s where a paintball barrel kit comes in! Paintball barrel kits enable a player to literally tailor their barrel to fit the paintball’s they’ll be shooting in order to produce the best mix of accuracy and consistency possible in different weather conditions! It all means one thing – to shoot straighter, break less paintballs and win more games, grab a paintball barrel kit!
Paintball Goggle Visor
While more players are using their paintball goggle visors than ever, and some paintball goggles are even standard with little visors you can’t even remove, may paintball players still don’t use a visor game-to-game. And that’s fine. At least, it’s fine until the moment it isn’t fine. Paintball visors aren’t just there to keep the glare from the setting sun out of your eyes, though they can actually do that – they’re also extremely useful for keeping rain and moisture out of the ventilation holes at the top of your paintball goggle frame and that’s where they really shine. Seriously, go to a paintball tournament on a rainy day and watch the players scramble to dig through their gear bags looking for that visor they SWEAR they had, or run to their goggle maker’s vendor tent if they have one, desperately looking for a visor to keep the water out of their goggles. Why put yourself through that when you can just keep your paintball goggle visor somewhere that you can find it, snap it in, and get back to the business of winning paintball games, water, fog and glare-free!
Clear Paintball Goggle Lens
Sure, that mirrored gold paintball lens might look great in your new paintball goggles and it might have been expensive so you’re going to show it off to make sure everyone sees how good you look. And that makes sense don’t get us wrong! But what if that’s the only thermal paintball goggle lens you have and you find yourself having to finish a game or two at the big tournament as the sun is setting and you get the bad end of the field, so you can’t see? Or what if it’s a super overcast day and you’re playing woodsball, so it’s already shady in the woods, so the minute you hit the tree-line it’s like playing paintball in the dark? That high dollar mirrored paintball goggle lens might wind up causing you not to see the guy you needed to shoot, or make it so dark you don’t see the ball coming in you could have snapped back in to avoid before it put the old cycloptic optic on your goggles! Keep a clear thermal anti-fog goggle lens for your paintball goggle in your gear bag and be ready to swap it out when light conditions get difficult. The one ball you avoid or the one extra body you eliminate might be what gets you to the top of the podium!
Microfiber Towel
Getting shot is a part of paintball. It’s probably everyone’s least favorite PART of the game, but it’s there and it’s going to happen. That means at some point you’ll be cleaning your goggle lens and other sensitive items and the best way to clean your paintball gear, by far, is with a nice microfiber cloth or towel. Designed to be absorbent yet not abrasive, a microfiber is ideal for cleaning sensitive paintball goggle lenses without scratching and is also great for cleaning loaders, paintball guns and just about anything else covered up in splatter and shell! If you don’t have one, you’ll be borrowing one, and if you give ours back covered in paint you won’t be borrowing it again!
Pod Squeegee
Paintball players often scroll through paintball gear for sale on popular online stores and laugh. Until they need it. That’s absolutely the case with an item like a paintball pod squeegee. Nobody actually wants to own one, but when you stagger off the field having just been bunkered up the back and he blew apart paint inside your loader or pods and you try cramming your hand into a pod with a paper towel, you’ll realize why it’s a lot easier to clean a pod with a device designed to clean a pod properly – a paintball pod squeegee. You’re going to need those pods later, and you need the paint in them to shoot straight and feed through your loader, so get all that muck, paint and broken shell out of your paintball pods with a paintball pod squeegee and get back in the game!
Air Tank Thread Protector
Is there a worse feeling in the world that getting to the paintball field for a day of shooty ball, opening your gear bag and finding your expensive paintball air tank regulator bent or cracked and damaged because you didn’t take care of it? Protect that high-dollar investment you trust to power your paintball gun with a simple, inexpensive air tank thread protector so if it does happen to ding against something, or get dropped, the threads will remain intact! That ten-dollar part might save you hundreds on a new tank or regulator later!
Air Tank Fill Nipple Cap
You trust your paintball air tank regulator to feed consistent high-pressure air to your paintball gun so you can blast the bad guys – why not protect that investment by helping keep dirt, grime, paint and who knows what else from getting into your regulator every time you hit the air station with a simple, affordable fill nipple cover? These simple little devices cover the fill nipple of your paintball air tank regulator and keep the outside world from coming inside every time you dive, crawl, creep or get shot, helping keep your air tank regulator working like it should!
Spare Batteries
It may seem like common sense, but look around the paintball field in the morning and look how many people are begging or borrowing batteries or headed to the pro shop to buy them. The best paintball gear for tournament paintball runs on batteries, including paintball loaders and electronic paintball guns, so don’t start a day off by pulling the trigger and not getting a ball out the barrel! Check your batteries and keep some spare 9volt batteries and AA batteries in your gear bag! Don’t skimp, either. Cheap AA batteries and 9volt batteries won’t deliver the power you need to feed your paintball equipment – use the high quality paintball batteries or you’ll wish you did!
Dry/Clean Clothes
Fair weather paintball isn’t always easy, but it’s a lot easier on you and your gear (and the car you rode into the field) than paintball in nasty weather. Crawl through a mud hole or dive and slide into a huge puddle at the snake a few times and you’re soaked head to toe, covered in mud, sweaty and nasty. Now the games are over and it’s time to drive home. There’s no better feeling at this moment than dragging off nasty clothes and putting on clean, dry clothes even if it’s just a dry paintball t-shirt, a pair of Valken mesh shorts or a dry pair of socks for the ride home. Don’t get into the new ride with all that slop dripping off you.
Spare Parts
Paintball gear like a paintball gun and paintball air tank are mechanical devices, and as great as they are, all mechanical devices fail from time to time. Don’t let a blown o-ring or a popped burst disk at the air fill station keep you off the field! Keep a few basic spare parts in your paintball gear bag, even if it’s just a baggie of basics like paintball air tank o-rings, replacement burst disks for your paintball tank regulator and some of the basic paintball gun parts like o-rings and ball detents so if something does get a little sideways with your gear, you’re not stuck borrowing gear while you should be playing the game you love!
