If you could start a paintball rumor or urban legend...

[FullContactUSA]

Or the time Jeremy Salm borrowed a matrix, hid in the woods and shot out players from an opposing team during that NPPL event. A day which shall live in infamy, but was a hell of an advertisement for Gen- E.

Sometimes truth is better than fiction.

[Brokeass_baller]

Oh yes. Gained a great reputation for being quiet and accurate.

[FullContactUSA]

Heck yeah, I switched to a matrix a season or two later and have shot a trix all but one season since.

[Tarsun2]

kingman is bringing back the spyder, but as a spooler....

i remember people talking about freezing paintballs back in the day.
do people still talk about that one?

[DocsMachine]

"This one time a guy I knew put his paintball in the freezer and it shot like marbles..." And every other frozen paint story.

-I've lost sleep over this one.

Everyone either suggests doing it or heard of someone doing it. And I mean literally EVERYONE.

The lady cutting my hair when I tell her I build custom paintball guns: "What would happen if somebody froze the balls?" The gruff biker at the field for the first time, as part of a bachelor party: "I was thinkin' about freezing some ammo and bringin' 'em out..." The waitress at the diner when she heard us talking about a game: "My uncle said he froze some balls, got kicked off the field." The oilfield guy when he heard what I did for a living: "I'd freeze the paint!"

The mechanic at the auto shop, the counterman at the gun store, the girl at the pizza joint, the old high school chum I ran into at the grocery, the convenience store clerk, the guy at the hardware store, the guy at the welding supply shop, pretty much everyone at my local metal supplier, the dudes at the computer store...

Pilots, fishermen, schoolteachers, mechanics, cashiers, bankers, you name it. If the conversation strays towards what I do for a living (or paintball comes up some other way, which it does, because, hey, Doc) then it's literally inevitable- without fail- that they will mention something about frozen paint. Either wanting to try it, afraid of someone else trying it, or with some friend-of-a-friend anecdote about someone else that did it.

Every time.

The only exception being that if the person had, at some point, either actually played, or was closely related to somebody that played. (Spouse, kids, sibling, uncle, etc.)

I would dearly love to know what part of literally everyone's reptile hindbrain contains that little reflexive, automatic response. It can't be the paint- everyone thinks it's actual paint, and yet I don't think anyone assumes paint can freeze like a glass of water. Best I can think of is everyone automatically associates the sport with throwing water balloons or something.

Doc.

[MrBarraclough]

Brokeass_baller don't you mean polyethylene glycol? Polypropylene is the stuff the nets are made from, and the MSDS for it says it's not for internal use in humans.

[MrBarraclough]

This has got to be some weird, specific instance of the Mandela Effect.

[Brokeass_baller]

MrBarraclough, no, I meant propylene glycol. Not polypropylene. Propylene and polyethylene glycols are both food safe.

And for what it's worth, it wasn't IN the food, just near it. It was at a bread factory, and the glycol was used to cool the mixers. The mixers mixed 2000 pounds of dough at a time, and the glycol would go out at at -30* and come back at 60*F. Crazy how much heat is created just by the friction of mixing.

[Tarsun2]

lmao wow didnt know that would strike a cord.

i just remember hearing about it growing up. not so much any more but back then, it was deff an urban legend.

i remember actually putting one in the freezer and when it never froze, kindda figured it out for myself.

as i got older, i realized that almost everything effects the paintball and how precise it has to be to even remotely work correctly. when i was younger i didnt realize that paint made the biggest difference in performance. more than anything you could buy at the store and slap on your marker.

think about how sensitive the paintball is. if its oblong it wont work correctly, if its dimpled it wont fly correctly, if is humid it wont break on impact, if its oily it wont fly right, if its hot it wont fit correctly, if its cold it wont fit correctly. literally everything effects the paintball and the paint ball makes the biggest difference to how the marker performs.

if you try and freeze paint, the moisture and the temperature, and the condensation, and the warping, and the dimpling will all prevent the ball from working in the marker. hell, it probably wont even make it out the barrel. lol

where did the rumor start even lol

[fullofpaint]

One I almost pulled off, for an April fools joke back in 06, maybe 07, was posting pictures of myself using my old Golden Eagle at the 05 IAO Owners Group division and convincing everyone it's a new revolutionary tournament gun from JT called the Aquila (Latin for eagle of course)

Haha, we did this to some guys at our field one of the first years at PB Extravaganza. I think it was the year Tiberius was showing off their updated version of the Angel Eyes. We were at the show and sent some friends photos of it along with photos of a raw gun that was supposedly a "reborn Angel". Even got some of our vendor friends in on it and my friend posted it to some groups. Boy was he pissed when he found out it was just a Pikkadoll like a couple weeks later hahaha.

[DocsMachine]

where did the rumor start even[.]

-That's just it, it's not a rumor. It can't be. It's not a scene everybody remembers from an old movie or TV show. The closest thing I can think of to that was the movie Clockstoppers, where they used paintballs that had been drained and refilled with liquid nitrogen. (Just roll with it, the whole movie was that way.)

The only way it could be as widespread as it is, is if more people saw Clockstoppers than have seen Star Wars. I'm not joking or exaggerating in the least when I say that everyone has some "freeze the paintballs" tale.

As above, the best I can come up with is that the average non-player, most of whom probably haven't even seen it on TV, automatically try to associate it with playing with water balloons. That is something that nearly everyone- yes, including us Alaskans- has done at least once in their life. AND... has probably heard the usual schoolyard rumor that some Mean Kid had frozen a couple, and clobbered some Poor Innocent Kid with them.

That, or, now that I think about it, snowballs. There was also always the tale of the Mean Kid throwing ice balls rather than snowballs, so maybe there's part of that lurking in people's heads, too. Snowballs in the snowbelt regions, water balloons in the sunbelt regions. (We sure do like hucking things at each other, don't we? )

Doc.

[Cdn_Cuda]

Actually never heard someone mention frozen water balloons.

[MrBarraclough]

You're right that it is too widespread to be a rumor. That's why I think it is a kind of Mandela Effect, or something similar. Freezing paintballs just feels plausible to someone with no knowledge of paintball composition or actual experience handling them. And if you assume they are water based (not merely water soluble), then freezing would make them hard. And paintball is an aggressive sport, or at least is aggressive looking, so it would then stand to reason that some asshole somewhere surely would have done so. Or if the person thinking about it is themselves a bit of an asshole, it might seem like the kind of thing they would want to do, so surely others have done it.

This phenomenon has probably been reinforced in many instances by someone seeing paintballs stored in a cooler and assuming that it was because they were frozen.

[FullContactUSA]

That's an interesting thought, I do keep my paint in a cooler in the summer so it's not baking in the sun. Never figured I was contributing to that which drives me nuts.