Paintball on a Budget - Part 3

It’s easy to look at all the amazing paintball gear in the game, like thousand-dollar paintball guns that talk, high-tech electronic paintball loaders, barrel kits or goggles that cost hundreds of dollars and be concerned there’s no room in the game for a paintball player on a budget. But there’s nothing to fear! Paintball is packed with amazing, affordable paintball equipment that can help anyone enjoy the game they love without having to resort to cheap paintball gear that may not perform very well! Let Valken help you gear up with affordable paintball gear that works well and ball on a budget!

The Valken Blackhawk

There’s not much more rugged and easy to maintain in affordable paintball guns than the Valken Blackhawk! Built around a solid, time-tested inline blowback system that works well in any weather or temperature with CO2 or compressed air, the Valken Blackhawk paintball gun shoots as fast as a player can pull the trigger and offers plenty of standard features! With little more than a few drops of oil and a wipe-down after a long day of paintball, the Valken Blackhawk just keeps shooting, and its A5 barrel thread means there are plenty of options for barrel upgrades to improve accuracy and consistency. The clamping feed neck will hold onto just about any hopper in paintball, and it’s removable for easy cleaning and access to the breech. The bottom line air adapter accepts any paintball CO2 tank or compressed air tank, and the gun will work just fine with either propellant. A picatinny rail across the top of the paintball gun allows a user to add a sight or scope if they would like, and another accessory rail at the bottom allows the user to adjust the included vertical fore-grip. Simple, affordable and reliable, the Valken Blackhawk makes an excellent first paintball gun, or a great choice with a few upgrades for playing recreational paintball with friends at the local field or in the back yard!

The Valken Blackhawk

There’s not much more rugged and easy to maintain in affordable paintball guns than the Valken Blackhawk! Built around a solid, time-tested inline blowback system that works well in any weather or temperature with CO2 or compressed air, the Valken Blackhawk paintball gun shoots as fast as a player can pull the trigger and offers plenty of standard features! With little more than a few drops of oil and a wipe-down after a long day of paintball, the Valken Blackhawk just keeps shooting, and its A5 barrel thread means there are plenty of options for barrel upgrades to improve accuracy and consistency. The clamping feed neck will hold onto just about any hopper in paintball, and it’s removable for easy cleaning and access to the breech. The bottom line air adapter accepts any paintball CO2 tank or compressed air tank, and the gun will work just fine with either propellant. A picatinny rail across the top of the paintball gun allows a user to add a sight or scope if they would like, and another accessory rail at the bottom allows the user to adjust the included vertical fore-grip. Simple, affordable and reliable, the Valken Blackhawk makes an excellent first paintball gun, or a great choice with a few upgrades for playing recreational paintball with friends at the local field or in the back yard!

The Right Barrel

Just because there are paintball barrel kits out there costing hundreds and offering players the ability to fine-tune their barrel to their paintballs, doesn’t mean you need one to improve the Valken Blackhawk’s accuracy and consistency to make every shot count! The HK Army XV paintball gun barrel is a great choice for a Valken Blackhawk barrel as its porting reduces the sound of the firing gun, and its internal hone and extra length provide improved accuracy over all ranges! Plus, a slightly longer paintball gun barrel is a great choice for woodsball, as it allows players to push their barrel through brush or holes in stacked log bunkers to make shots while remaining behind cover! Adding the HK Army XV barrel to your Valken Blackhawk will instantly improve its performance in a big way, making it a must-have for serious players looking for an accurate paintball gun!

The Right Air Tank

While the Valken Blackhawk will function well on CO2, most paintball fields, and indeed most of paintball, has converted to compressed air as it is a much cleaner, more consistent power source for paintball guns and the Blackhawk is no exception. Using a paintball compressed air tank with the Blackhawk paintball gun means it will perform better in colder conditions, velocity consistency and accuracy will be greatly improved, and paintball gun’s internal o-rings and components will work better, longer. That said, there’s no need to slap a hundred-dollar paintball air tank on the Blackhawk, either! The Valken V2.0 48 cubic inch, 3000psi paintball air tank is a great choice for the Blackhawk, as its combination of size, weight, and price combine to provide plenty of shots per tank without breaking the bank! Properly filled, a 48/3000 paintball air tank should provide hundreds of shots before running low and to use it, all you’ll have to do is thread it into the Blackhawk’s air bottle adapter!

The Right Hopper

It’s rare that anyone recommends a cheaper option over something more expensive, so enjoy this while it lasts: you don’t need a hundred dollar paintball hopper for your Valken Blackhawk paintball gun! The Valken Blackhawk can shoot several shots per second, it’s true, but most players will rarely shoot the Blackhawk faster than 4-5 shots per second at most, relying instead on careful, well-aimed shots to send opponents back to the picnic tables to wipe off. That means that while a basic, five-dollar paintball hopper like a GXG 200 round paintball hopper will work, perhaps the ideal paintball loader for the Blackhawk is the Valken V-Lite hopper! The V-Lite hopper holds around 200 paintballs but unlike basic paintball hoppers that allow paintballs to jam at the feed neck, the V-Lite has an internal tray that helps prevent feed stack jams, reducing broken and chopped paintballs and improving feed rates, with no complicated electronics or the need for batteries! The best feature of the Valken V-Lite paintball hopper? It’s under ten bucks.

So there you have it! A reliable, durable and affordable Valken Blackhawk paintball gun with a great hopper, a compressed air tank and an accurate barrel for just a tad over two hundred bucks! It really doesn’t get much better than that for paintball you can afford and gear you can trust! So use all the money you saved to buy some extra paintballs and get out there!