A paintball fort
Anyone who owns a few acres of wooded lot can open a private paintball field. The defensive advantages of solid cover coupled with the limited range of paintball guns makes wooden forts a serious tactical obstacle. With just a few basic considerations, these are easy to build out of scrap materials.
Instructions
1. Site the fort near a likely zone of heavy traffic. Except for "capture the fort" games, placing a fort in an isolated location is a waste of time and materials.
2. Keep in mind the local terrain when building the fort. It does little good to build the fort at the foot of a slope or in a ravine where opponents can easily shoot down into it.
3. Use pen and paper to draw up a plan. Most paintball forts are crude, but building a good one requires a little planning to match your materials to the site.
4. Try to include a protected entry point for the fort, either a door, a tarp-covered opening or a blind entryway.
5. Try to use trees in place of fence posts as much as possible. This will cut down on material costs and overall work.
6. Set fence posts where necessary by digging a 1-foot deep hole with a mattock and post-hole digger, setting the post, refilling the hole with dirt and firming it up with a tamping rod. People will be slamming into the walls of the fort, so the supporting posts need to be firm.
7. Use wood scraps to build the walls of the fort. Pretty much anything can be used in this role, so long as it fits between two trees or posts: old pallets, sheets of plywood and lumber scraps. Use hammer and nails to fasten them to the trees/posts.
8. Use a handsaw and coping saw to cut gun slits and crenelations into the wooden walls of the fort. These will provide protected places for shooting.
9. Paint your fort in camouflage colors if desired. However, a couple of years of weathering will probably do the same job for you, and the truth is that a permanent fort is always going to stand out on a paintball field.
Tags: walls fort, fence posts, hole with, paintball field, trees posts
