Where can i fill up a hpa tank for paintball?

What kind of part do I need to get in order to fill up my hpa tank on my paintball gun using a oxygen tank?

• I have a Invert Mini paintball gun with a Pure Energy HPA tank. I want to buy a oxygen tank so I can fill up my air tank on my own instead of going and spending money filling it up. ...show more

• Answer:

  First thing you need, is a life insurance policy in good standing. Funeral expenses being what they are these days, your family will thank you for it (posthumously). Assuming you still intend to commit messy suicide after that not so subtle hint of mine, there's several problems with what you intend. One of them has to do with physics, another has to do with mechanics, and the third has to do with chemistry (and is the one that will (not might, will) put you in the morgue). First problem is that a CO2 tank runs around 800-1000 pounds per square inch (psi) of internal pressure. HPA tanks come as either 3000 psi or 4500 psi. On the other hand, a "high pressure" oxygen rig runs about 150 psi. Most paintball guns work at around 800 psi internal pressure, while so-called "low pressure systems" run in the 150-250 psi range. So, to use oxygen, you'd either need an industrial air compressor (in which case, it'd be easier to just use regular air) to get it up to 30 times the normal pressure found in an oxygen tank, or you would need a VERY finely tuned low-pressure rig on your paintball gun. Just connecting an oxygen tank directly to a paintball gun with an adapter will result in about a 5 foot range and I'd hope that's a pump gun, since a semi-auto won't have enough pressure to cock the bolt. And you'll get about 10 shots per tank. The second problem is mechanical. This is the one you've experienced already, the air fittings don't match. You could probably rig up an adapter, but if you do, that brings us to the problem of your death, problem three. The third problem is one of chemistry. In a pure oxygen environment, such as the inside of your paintball gun, assuming you somehow solve problems 1 and 2, many things that normally do not burn, instead become highly flammable. For example, at 20% oxygen environment, human skin burns just as well as gasoline does in our normal atmosphere. At 100% even bones will burn like they were soaked in gasoline. The most immediate problem, is that every gun lubricant will spontaneously combust in the presence of pure oxygen, and petroleum-based lubricants will actually go off like high explosives. This will absolutely destroy your gun, but depending on exactly what sort of gun you have, it may also blow your gun into bits of shrapnel, and/or blow your hands off. Neither one is likely to be survivable. The next problem is that even at 150 psi, pure oxygen is pretty combustive. At 3000-4500 psi, you'd be safer with a bottle of nitroglycerin, because if that gas tank leaks, everybody within 5-10 feet is probably going to die. If you're extremely lucky, there will be enough left of you for your family to bury...but it will absolutely be a closed-casket funeral. All that said, you'd be better off buying a large HPA tank, the sort of thing you see in paintball shops. You can rent a 5000 psi compressed air tank relatively cheaply from a welding supply store, and the fill station parts most paintball stores carry are designed to attach to that sort of large tank. The reason you think you need an adapter for an oxygen tank, is because the fittings are deliberately designed to prevent people from doing what you want to do, because it almost always kills the person trying it.