Friday, October 23, 2009

PALLETS vs PELLETS

For some reason in this part of the world, some players, tournament promoters and field operators refer to paintballs as "paintball pallets" e.g " you will get 500, 1000 pallets" or "I ate paintball pallets for breakfast". Google "Paintball Pallet" and you'd find websites from specifically this part of the world.

This all started when somebody confused the word 'pellet' with 'pallet' and as monkey see monkey do, this has snowballed into a monster.

To clarify once and for all for everyone:


These are Pallets

PALLET

A "Pallet" is actually a wooden or plastic tray that supports boxes that is lifted by a fork lift or a manual jack. Ironically Paintball boxes are stacked and shipped on "Pallets" which adds to the confusion. In America "Pallets" are referred to as "Skids" and paintballs are delivered to fields and tournament sites on "skids". Each skid holds 100 boxes of paintballs. Professional teams with sponsored paint usually go and collect their paint in "skids" i.e. as in by the pallet. The trick is to select the 'skid' that has best or freshest paint.


Here is a picture of a skid of paintballs i.e this is picture of a pallet of paintballs

For further reading click here for wikipedia's definition of "Pallet" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet


PELLET
Is a small non spherical object which is usually "non-spherical" (not round). Airsoft ammunition and shotgun balls are commonly referred to as "pellets" and so are things like dried animal feed for pets, fish, birds and livestock.
For further reading click here for wikipedia's definition of "Pellet" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellet

In conclusion - a paintball can be referred to a a "pellet" as shotgun buckshots are refered to as 'shotgun pellets'. However the using the word "paintball pallet" in reference to a paintball is technically wrong.

So please stop using the term "paintball pallet" unless you mean to say that you're supplying (or eating) a whole skid of 100 paintball boxes.

4 comments:

Janek said...

Actually, different companies stack different amounts of boxes onto pallets/skids. A common one is 100, some do 108, others 120 or even 150.

SEBURO said...

Thank you for your contribution Janek.

Matthew said...

yeah it is really irritating actually. it's not paintball pellets it should just be paintballs ! paintballs stacked on a skid or pallet is fine.

Gilbert said...

Totally agreed on your posting. I too wonder why there are many that writes pellets as pallets.
Guess some just assumes that pallets is the correct one & they just don't bother to check the right one.