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Since its introduction in the 1980s, paintball has become a worldwide phenomenon. Enthusiasts have formed teams, set up leagues and organized game tournaments. Paintball is still a long way from the popularity of older sports like basketball or football, but new paintball playing fields and organizations are popping up all the time.

The main thing that sets paintball apart from other sports is the equipment involved: You don’t find guns and paint projectiles in too many traditional sports. In this article, we’ll look at this equipment to see what is involved in a paintball attack. We’ll also find out about the basic game of paintball, as well as some of the other uses of paintball equipment.

The Way of the Gun
In the last section, we saw that paintball guns propel paintballs with a quick burst of compressed gas. In the animation below, you can see how this process occurs in a conventional pump-action gun.

The most basic piece of paintball equipment is the paintball itself. Just as in tennis or soccer, the ball is the central element of a paintball game. But unlike these older games, paintball has dozens, often hundreds, of “balls” in play at any one time. As the name implies, these balls are actually tiny containers of paint.

Paintballs have an incredibly simple construction. They’re actually a lot like gel-cap pills, or bath-oil beads. They consist of a glob of colored liquid encased in a gelatin capsule. The “paint,” which comes in many colors, is non-toxic, biodegradable and water soluble (so it will wash off skin and clothing).

Basically, a paintball is like a small water balloon, weighing only a few grams and measuring only 0.68 inches (1.7 cm) in diameter. The capsule holds up if you handle it or drop it from a short distance. When you shoot a paintball from a gun, however, it bursts on impact and leaves a 6-inch (13-cm) splatter of paint.

The job of the paintball gun, sometimes called a marker, is to get the paintball moving at a high rate of speed. In the basic gun, the propulsion system is compressed gas. This gas, which can be compressed carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrogen (N₂) or ordinary air, is stored in small cartridges or larger tanks that can be attached to the gun. The gun is also attached to a hopper, which holds the paintballs. Read the rest of this entry »

Today there are amazing robotic devices that do all the pin setting. The automatic pinsetter, first patented by Gottfried Schmidt, was introduced by the American Machine and Foundry Company (AMF) in 1946. This first pinsetter was a monster, weighing nearly 2 tons (1.8 metric tons) and standing 9 feet (2.7 m) tall.

Modern pinsetters are but a fraction of a size of their predecessors and much more intelligent. In this article, you will see how bowling pinsetters are able to pick up standing pins, clear the lane of any knocked-over pins and accurately reset the pins after every ball.

Bowling Basics
Many different versions of the game exist around the world, but the most popular is tenpin bowling. You roll a bowling ball down a slick lane to knock down 10 pins, which are in a triangular arrangement facing you. On either side of the lane are gutters that will trap the ball if it veers too far to either side of the lane.

A set of 10 pins is known as a rack. A game is made up of 10 frames. The job of the pinsetter is to create each rack at the beginning of each frame, and clear away knocked-over pins so they do not get in the way. Most modern bowling facilities have computerized bowling lanes that display your score automatically throughout the game, and the electronics and sensors in the pinsetter also help keep track of the score.

Now let’s learn about the machine that sets up the pins after every roll. Read the rest of this entry »