Paintball

[Do Little]

Well, I'm a barrel whore. I've always been fascinated with barrels, and have had a chance to shoot a lot of barrels(Lapco, Longbow, J&J, Dye, Evil, Freak, Stiffi, CP, Empire, OTP). I picked up a Redz kit a while back for cheap, I had been wanting to try them out.

They come in a really nice case, which could survive any part of your gear bag. They have stretchy sleeves that hold the pieces securely in place. There's even a flap in the middle to keep the pieces seperated so they don't scratch each other. I have also found you can set other barrels (12 inches or under) in the case between the kit pieces and it holds them securely. I have 3 extra barrels I carry in the case with the kit.

The kit comes with 4 backs (.687, .689, .691, .693) and 2 fronts (14 and 16). The backs are 8 inches long, which is one of the longest for a 2 piece these days. It sticks out well past the pneu's for you cocker guys. (As far as any performance gain from the length, I don't care enough to get enough barrels together to test it.) They all fit together real well, and looked to be centered quite well. The bore looks nice and shiny, with no visible blemishes. They are pretty light to, comparable to Ultralights. The milling on them isn't to fancy. The only real milling the backs have is the word Redz. The fronts look like tubes, kinda of reminds me of the old school All Americans. They have 3 straight lines of ports the entire length of the barrel, with chilli pepper porting at the top of each line (about an 1" long). They also have little chilli peppers milled into the side (non ported, about a 1/2" long). With the gloss black anno, the peppers are hard to see from a distance, it's more of a close up detail. I personally think they look kind of nifty, and bought a chilli pepper barrel condom to go along with it (I can't remember who was making and selling them on here).

Performance wise, I was pretty impressed. I've had great results with mine, and it's been one of the better shooting kits I've had. I don't have any accuracy patterns to report, but I'd give it a 9 out of 10. They're decently quiet, about a medium low on the noise scale. They clean through breaks as well as any other decent barrel. I have had some slights problems getting paint out of the chilli pepper porting at the field, because the porting is extra small on those, but they don't hold enough paint to leak back into the barrel. It's no problem in a kitchen sink though.

The main problems I see is not offering a smaller back. I have several closed bolt guns, and some days it would be nice to have a .685 back. Also, they are a real tight fit on my full sized cocker body. It's not tight enough to mess up the anno, but tight enough to make a screeching sound, which I don't like. That could just be a quality control tolerance, on the part of the barrel or the gun, since we're talking about a paper width differnce or less. Also, it only comes in gloss black. That can be bad if your looking for a differnt color, but black goes with everything.

Overall, I highly recommend this to anybody looking for a new barrel kit. They're going for around $120 on the sights I checked, which is a great deal for this kit.

(I'll add pics later if anyone is interested)