Ball breaks, chopping and other

[EyeMaster]

I am just curious to know... how do you know when you're chopping or what actually happens to the ball?

I assume that a chop is when the ball doesn't get completely down and the bolt comes and cuts the ball from the feedneck.

My friend has an old Spyder (extra I think) and on one ball chop, the bolt actually got stuck. We had to disassemble the gun and push the bolt back with a screwdriver! hardcore... :)

I've got the RS and I love it. Here's what happens to me.

I don't notice anything except that at the end of 1 hour of play (I've shot around 2000 balls so far with the gun) there's some paint leaking out of the porting holes. Not a lot, just a bit. I'm thinking it's probably a ball break while being shot? Meaning the bolt strike or air striking the ball?

[Master Tech]

There's a good possibility the paintball broke on its way out the barrel and was not a chop at all. This does happen occasionally and you'll get some paint ooze out of the barrel porting.

[irishwarrior]

You can generally tell if it's a chop or a barrel break. If there is a whole mess of paint in the hopper, bolt and part of the barrel it was chopped. If it's mostly in the barrel and maybe some on the bolt it's a barrel break.

[Ratchet]

if your using your gun as a paint thrower(paintball version of a flame thrower) where it just sprays paint out of the barrel, means that either your fps is way high or your using cheap ass paint, or both. other wise a common "chop" is when like you said, your firing so fast that the ball doesnt drop in time and the bolt slices it in half. if this happens you'll normally have paint in the hopper.

[Hazmat13]

you can usually tell if you have a chop when there's paint oozing out of the eye covers and cascading out of the feedneck. a barrel break is signaled by paint coming out of the porting in the barrel

[EyeMaster]

Looks like it's a barrel break then. No chops. It's very little paint, so I'm not spraying paint aka flame thrower... ;)

Good to know it's normal! Cant' wait to keep playing.

[vikingshadow]

Barrel breaks are usually called from a bad paint to barrel match. If the paint is too large for the barrel, it's going to break as it's forced through. Bad paint is also a reason.

That's why you need to check paint throughout the bag you bought them in, not just one or two off the top of the paint. I prefer to overbore a bit because of this reason - I size my paint, then go one, maybe two sizes larger.

[Hazmat13]

paint-make sure you got some good quality paint, no broken balls, or dirt on the balls

Barrel-make sure it's clean everytime (though i don't reccomend looking down it)

Size-make sure your paint is smaller than your barrel by about .003