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The next morning, I told my son to put on a sweatshirt and long pants. I reassured her that the paintballs would sting a little, but wouldn't hurt that much. When we sat down for dinner that night, my son started asking questions like, "Is it going to hurt?" Still trying to discourage him from getting involved in the game, I said, "Imagine your worst pain and multiply that by 10." My wife gave me that you-better-not-hurt-my-baby-or-I'll-kill-you look. The first marker I shot was about 250 fps the second one, however, was more than 320 fps - and that was right out of the box! I adjusted our markers to about 280 fps (?10 fps) so we could play the next morning.
![paintball chronograph paintball chronograph](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0247/4385/products/v6_large.png)
While chronographs used to be really expensive, you can now pick up a good one for less than $100.īeing a conscientious father, I went into the garage and retrieved my shooting chronograph to measure just how fast those little paintballs were traveling out of the barrel. There are also radar chronographs, such as the kind law enforcement officers carry to look for speeders. Well, you can't, unless you have a chronograph, which measures the time an object passes between two sensors and calculates the speed in feet per second, miles per hour or whatever measurement standard it is programmed to clock. You're probably wondering how you check the velocity of paintballs. The instructions stated to never shoot someone with the marker set higher than 300 fps because serious injury or death could occur. The packs included a marker (also known as the paintball gun), mask, safety plug for the barrel and carbon dioxide (CO2) bottle. (Just for reference, 300 fps equals 200 mph.) Still, I went out and spent $200 for two starter packs that had everything we'd need to play paintball, or so I thought. I figured my son would probably want to quit the first time he got hit with one of those gelatin balls traveling at 300 feet per second. I read some things about the sport and learned a lot of new paintball-specific rules. My son kept bugging me about paintball and I eventually gave in to him. I thought the paintball guns were frustratingly inaccurate, expensive and unsafe. I'd experienced paintball several years earlier at a competitive pistol shooting event and really didn't care for it.
![paintball chronograph paintball chronograph](https://www.evike.com/images/large/chrono_mb_v2.jpg)
(July 20, 2016) - So your 10-year-old comes to you and says, "Dad/Mom, I want to play paintball." How would you respond? I found myself in that exact situation a few years ago, and I'll admit my initial response wasn't the greatest.