Clean Spots Review

BOHICA:

6mm PAINT BALLS (BOHICA's after action report concerning the use of 6mm paint balls in Hop-up mini airsofts.)

1. This is my personal evaluation report on the 6mm paint balls for use in the Hop-up minis:

a) Good points:
-Inexpensive.

b) Bad points:
-Extremely fragile. Double feeds can quickly cause an unpleasant jam. The minis are not designed for use with paint balls. In INFRARED's review of minis you will recall him saying that I only had one complication with mine. That was the time. It had double fed and when the rear paint ball collided with the front paint ball while exiting the barrel they both burst creating a jam. Not realizing what had happened I continued to fire several more shots that increased the size of the jam. It was a very nasty mess.

2. Overall:

Do not use 6mm paint balls with any Hop-up. As for other models, read INFRARED's review.

INFRARED:

I would tend to agree with BOHICA except I don't know how he considers them inexpensive. As I recall, the particular ones we got were around $15-$20 for a little container of 250 shots, which is more expensive than regular paintballs (usually around $10 for 200).

I got these 6mm paintballs from a place in England called Battle Orders, and part of our troubles may stem from the shipping process. If paintballs freeze, they may burst. Our shipment may have frozen in transit, because the inside of the plastic jar our paintballs came in had a thin film of pink paint (the color of the paintballs). It was kind of a mess. Most looked intact, but the whole container was now in question. At any rate, I've tried these in several spring airsofts (all non-hop-up), and they work fine as long as you don't load too many into the magazine. The spring tension can burst the paintballs inside the mag, which makes for a very difficult cleanup operation. I also tried the paintballs in the KSC Mk23 SOCOM pistol, and experienced a nasty multiple feed much like BOHICA's that took a while to clean out. I think this was due to the Hop-up placing tension on the BBs. I adjusted the Hop-up all the way down (so it was not protruding into the barrel at all), and it seemed to work fine after that.

The accuracy of 6mm paintballs is not good. They're lighter (I think) than standard .2g BBs so they're more easily taken off course by minor factors like wind. Also, it seems that the paint is not evenly distributed inside the paintballs, so the consistency of the shot groups is not so hot either, even indoors under controlled conditions.

In addition to the above factors, these paintballs don't break unless they hit a hard target at a relatively high velocity. Out of a spring gun you basically have to be within seven to ten yards in order for the paintball to burst. Out of a gas gun, you could expand that range slightly. I've had mixed results getting them to burst against soft targets (i.e. people), and you pretty much have to be within five yards to make sure they will burst if you're firing at a person.

Overall:

I'm not impressed. Perhaps these are an older design and newer ones address most of the issues BOHICA and I covered. At any rate, the price doesn't justify their purchase, and they're not effective, and their use is severely limited by several factors. I would never use these in an electric gun. A spring gun is best (because it's cheaper), and a gas gun is usually fine. Remember: if you've got an adjustable Hop-up, make sure it's adjusted all the way down so there's no pressure exerted on the paintball when it's being fired. If you've got a non-adjustable Hop-up, stay away from paintballs. If anyone has any experience, good or bad, with any brand of 6mm paintballs, please email us. We're curious.

Continued....

Airsoft paintballs continue to be a work in progress. After trying three different brands of airsoft paintballs under controlled conditions, my opinion has improved somewhat, though there's still some difficult distance to go before 6mm paintballs become a viable alternative for training or tournament use.

I recently received a small sample of newly-developed biodegradeable 6mm paintballs from a company called AIM (I don't know who actually made them; AIM acts as distributor). And since that made three flavors of paintball in my possession, I figured it was time for some tests.

The tests were conducted as follows: five rounds of each brand at seven yards, first with a Marui H&K P7M13 springer (non-hop-up), and then repeated with a Marui Glock 26 GBB (with hop-up). Here's how the tests turned out:

Clean Spots - These are the original 6mm paintballs that I got from England about five or six years ago. These are the ones that gave us a lot of trouble in the mini airsofts. After this series of tests, I think the minis are just harder on BBs than your average airsoft (being gravity-fed AEGs), so paintballs are not a good idea. Upon close inspection, the Clean Spots appear to be fairly round although many do show seams and flaws in the outer casings. The amount of paint inside any given Clean Spot is variable. Some appear full while others can be almost a third empty. Clean Spots fed and fired flawlessly in the P7M13 and nearly so in the G26. The fifth round in the magazine broke under pressure before it even fed into the chamber, leaving the magazine feed lips and follower trimmed in pink. This, I think, was more a function of magazine design than weakness of BB; but as I said before, these paintballs do appear to have flawed construction. The hop-up did not appear to break any paintballs during the firing process. As far as accuracy, at seven yards the five-round group was approximately twelve to fourteen inches across, which is barely acceptable for CQB situations. They don't provide the level of accuracy that standard BBs do. Clean Spots broke reliably on a semi-hard target (standard cardboard box) from both guns. They did not, however, break when fired at about four layers of shirt flannel hanging in front of a door, even when fired at close range. We'll have to try some person-on-person trials to see how they really work.