Camo tape on 98C barrel

It's called porting. And yes, it's there for a specific reason (to let air vent out of the barrel). So I'd suggest cutting the holes out, or it will make the barrel a lot louder than it already is. I'm not sure if it would do anything to performance though. So just cut the holes out.

Cool.  Thanks for the info, that's exactly what I was looking for.

spudcrazy wrote: Porting, if done correctly (at least with firearms) also reduces recoil, by venting the gases backward, thus creating an opposing force and wanting to push the gun forward rather than backwards.

This doesn't apply to paintball since, at least on most barrels, the porting is directly out to the sides.  This is in addition to the fact that a 3 gram paintball (this number comes from JT) moving at 85m/s (280fps) only generates 255gram meters of force.  The M98 (not counting a hopper with hundreds of paintballs), weighs 1315g so, it only gets .1939m/s of acceleration (a whopping six inches in one second).  The gross majority of what people experience as recoil is caused by the movement of the guns internals.

The orginal patent for porting on a paintball gun was to smoothly relieve the pressure building up in front of the ball as it accelerated down the barrel.  This was supposed to reduce the turbulence a ball experiences when it leaves the barrel.  However today, most people believe that the biggest benefit of porting is the noise reduction.

KillerOne wrote: Either way what you really need is a flatline for that 98 - i'm sure you can get on from e-bay, buy that and you wont have to worry about any porting.

Hazaa!!

what i don't get is why there is porting in the middle of the barrel...you don't need those porting holes there. I would just tape over the middle ones and leave the ones on the end uncovered. But that is just my opinion

Yeah, but on the stock 98 Custom barrel, even that little bit of porting will really do nothing. On other barrels, where they actually take the time to design something that works, porting plays a role in performance. But it doesn't work on that piece of crap pipe that they call a barrel.

I suppose that might work, but I have a feeling that even if it did, you'd barely notice the difference.

^^^Ohhhhh, so demanding!^^^