Paintball guns are readily available from many different companies. If you really love doing things yourself, and know your stuff, it's possible to build a paintball gun out of common hardware store materials. However, the big question is whether it's worth it in the long run.
While building a gun can be fun, it's often not much cheaper than buying a less expensive model. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, your homemade gun may not work, and can even be dangerous. Finding the right materials can be tricky, too. Using other people's plans can be a start, but you have no guarantee that their attempts to build a paintball gun were really successful. There's more to a good paintball gun than the ability to make a ball of paint explode out of the barrel.
Self building means you'll probably sacrifice a lot of accuracy and reliability, unless you use top of the line parts and have a great deal of experience. People who have that experience and the ability to get those parts probably already have great paintball guns of their own. If you're just looking for a basic marker to get you started, a manufactured, carefully calibrated model will give you much better performance. It can be pretty frustrating if you can't hit your mark much of the time, due to the irregularities that creep up in a homemade gun.
Should you decide that building a paintball gun is the way you want to go, it's best to treat it like a science experiment. You may not get the results you're looking for, but you'll probably learn something in the process. Only if you're really lucky will you turn out a paintball gun that really works. Building your own might be a source of fun, and a way to figure out how a marker is put together, however. Just don't expect to make something as high quality as a commercial marker out of bits of PVC and plumbing parts.
Of course, there's another way to build your own that's just fine. If you decide to modify an existing gun, or assemble one out of commercial parts, chances are that you'll get one that works. Just remember to choose parts from the same manufacturer, and learn a lot about them before you start building. Otherwise, you could spend more money than you intended, without getting really high quality results.
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