Save Your Money...
Make Paintball Grenades at Home!!!

I began the quest to make paintball grenades at home about 3 years ago as my friends and I started playing more and more paintball and as we decided to have a paintball war.

I realized very quickly that I couldn't afford paintball grenades as I looked at even the cheapest on the market.

So, this is what I've come up with after searching for and trying a few methods (inventing some myself).

Check the bottom of the page for instructional videos and plans to make paintball grenades.

Water Balloons are awesome because they explode on contact and make an awesome mess of a person. But they're difficult to keep from exploding while transporting. They also proved difficult to tie after a making a few.

Surgical Nylon Tubing proved to be the best choice. This is a little more expensive and doesn't explode all over a person like a water balloon but travels well and is refillable.

PAINT FILL -- This one was fun. I had a list of requirements for what I wanted to use for a paint fill:

• The fill couldn't wreck the environment.
• The fill needed to disappear on it's own (kinda like paintball paint does).
• The fill couldn't be harmful to anyone's health or destructive to property.
• The fill couldn't stain clothes or people.
• The fill had to be heavy enough to launch at someone in a shell.
• The fill had to be annoying so that when you were hit you'd know it.
• The fill had to be easily transferable to some sort of shell.
• And the fill had to be cheap... the cheaper the better.

After this, my first idea was to mix cornstarch and water together to create that awesome stuff made in science class in elementary school. This filled a lot of the requirements I had set... but it was difficult as heck to get into a water balloon.

Despite the awesome mess I created using cornstarch, I decided to search more.

I figured out that liquid handsoap filled all of the requirements... it was not terrible for the environment, could be washed off easily with water, comes in a few colors (something not quite as important to me), doesn't stain clothes, and can be bought as off-brands in large quantities for pretty cheap.

Not to mention how annoying it would be like to have liquid soap all over you in the middle of a paintball match or what it would do to your morale to have a water balloon lobbed at you in the middle of a firefight. :-}

After testing... this worked out well. but I still needed to find a way to get the soap into the shell.

METHOD -- I tried funnels, I tried a suction method (my own device, very much more complicated than it was worth), and I think I even destroyed some of my mom's kitchen gadgets trying to get liquid soap into a homemade paintball grenade. Here are the ideas that worked...

• Most people use a squirt bottle top to fill their paint grenades when they make paintball grenades. This method works. I just didn't like the lack of portability and mobility of this system. I wanted something that could be used in a flash in the field.
• A pressurized sprayer was my best idea, such as a poison sprayer. BUY A NEW ONE OF THESE... DO NOT USE ONE THAT HAS BEEN USED FOR POISON. It can be charged up and used to fill multiple grenades. It's portable. And they're fairly inexpensive. I got mine from Wal-mart for $15 on sale.
• Team Sawzall and Justin Matthews have also designed a paintball fill station to help make paintball grenades a cinch. The video for this can be found below as a video titled "Home Made Paint Grenade Filling Machine".

Make paintball grenades at home. Click here to download plans for the paint grenade filler seen above.