How Paintballs Are Made

Paintballs are made entirely of non-toxic, food-grade ingredients. To make the hollow shell, water is poured into a giant, heated mixing bowl. A sweetener, a preservative and a secret combination of food ingredients are then added. Finally, the key ingredient that gives the shell its shape – gelatin – is introduced.

All the ingredients are mixed together for around half an hour before the gel is transferred from the mixer into a heated vat called the ‘gel tote’. Once the filtered gel is securely in the tote it is lowered into a giant blender where food dye is added and blended for about 20 minutes.

Elsewhere in the factory, the same method is used to dye what’s called ‘the fill’ – that’s the ‘paint’ that goes inside the shell of the paintball. It’s made of polyethylene glycol, the same inert liquid used for cough syrup, before being thickened with the same wax found in children’s crayons.

The gel and the fill are brought together in what’s known as “the feed room”. Here, the vats of gel and fill feed a soft-gel encapsulation machine one floor below. This machine is the same kind used by drug companies to make soft gel-cap medicines like cod liver oil.

First, the machine spreads the gel on to a cooled drum. This creates a continuous, thin sheet of gel called a “gel ribbon”. The cooling process cures the gelatin to the point where it can be moulded into the hollow shell of the ball. The machine presses the gel ribbon into a cast with half-circle pockets, each forming one half of a ball shell.

The machine does the next three steps in one shot: it aligns two half-shells together to form a hollow ball, injects the fill, then seals the two half-shells together.

These newly-minted paintballs are still quite soft and if they’re not carefully dried, they’ll lose their shape. To stop that happening, they fall down on to a conveyer before rolling into a tumble dryer to be pre-dried while airborne. From here they’ll go onto a bakery-style rack to dry by a carefully controlled amount. The exact drying protocol is a carefully guarded trade secret!

To make dual-coloured paintballs exactly the same process is used except that two colours of gel ribbon are fed into the capsulation machine, one colour for each half of the shell.

The finished paintballs go through a precision, automatic-counting machine. Manufacturing this messy ammunition may be a “paint-staking” process, but is well worth the effort given the many thousands of people who love the game of paintball.

Invented just 20 years ago, paintball’s caught on in more than 40 countries worldwide, so it seems the factories churning the balls out will be busy for some time to come! Source: Draxxus Paintballs, Quebec, Canada.