PAINTBALL STORY: part of the new ”Don’t try this at home” series…
For all you paintball junkies out there, I know you have all had that need and desire to build a paintball tank. The ultimate machine, portable doom. Well, my friends and I, having the lowest of budgets, ascertained to meet this fantasy. Don’t try this, it didn’t work.
We got a refrigerator box. We got some styrofoam. We got some wire.
We cut a hole in each of the four walls of the ‘tank’. We glued the styrofoam on the inside. We cut four more, larger holes at about face level, then covered the holes with the thin wire , to prevent the paintballs from going through. Over the ‘gun holes’ we laid strips of cloth over the holes, then glues them down. The gun barrel could be pressed in between the strips, but a paintball would burst. Our ideas were flying, it seemed as if there was no way anything could go wrong.
Have you ever shot cardboard? Have you ever shot styrofoam? Cardboard tears from about forty feet. Styrofoam explodes into tiny little bits.
One of my more ballsy (or dumb) friends braved being the first to try it out. Testing without someone in it, of course, was out of the question. Well, he started running in the opposite direction with that thing, and we opened up.
Inside the tank, the paintballs zipped through our ‘armor plating’ losing nearly no velocity. At the same time, styrofoam was flung everywhere inside the tank. My dear friend lost his bearing and began running towards us, and being the assholes we are, we kept shooting. Our ‘tank’ no longer was a ‘portable doom’ it was a flashing, enormous target.
My friend swears he would do it again and that he had fun anyway.
–John Da Host
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