Ball locks or pin locks

[Dogwood]

I have acquired a bunch of kegs. About half pin lock and half ball locks. I am thinking of making them all the same. I have had the ball locks leak a bit of brew making the bottom of my cooler messy and Im tired of trying to put the wrong line on the post. I have one line in for a pin lock (4 taps) and have never had a leak. What say everyone, which is best?

 

[Hawkbox]

Ball locks are easier to find parts for, but as you note pin locks are harder to screw up. I have all ball locks and personally have no real issue with leaks or misusing the posts so I like ball lock, but there is really no wrong answer on this one.

It's fairly trivial to get a conversion kit either way and connectors. So do as your heart guides you.

 

[Nosybear]

There's no correct answer so go with what you have. Down side is fewer parts but they are available.

 

[thunderwagn]

I have acquired a bunch of kegs. About half pin lock and half ball locks. I am thinking of making them all the same. I have had the ball locks leak a bit of brew making the bottom of my cooler messy and Im tired of trying to put the wrong line on the post. I have one line in for a pin lock (4 taps) and have never had a leak. What say everyone, which is best?

Speaking from exactly what you're dealing with, the leaks aren't ball or pin specific. Typically, those leaks are easily taken care of by replacing your post orings.
Now, I chose to go all ball lock recently and purchased conversion kits to do so. I never had anything bad or bad experiences with pin locks, but (and the only reason I changed) most equipment out there is geared towards ball lock. I simply got tired of having both and struggling to find pin lock parts to convert other pieces of equipment I had. So the easiest for me was going all ball. Carb caps, fermenters, keg cleaning gear and all sorts off other stuff is all ball lock. To me going to ball just made more sense.

Another tricky part is knowing what all your kegs are. Unfortunately, they aren't all the same. This site helped me.
https://www.cornykeg.com/

 

[Dogwood]

Thanks for the good info, ball lock it is!

 

[thunderwagn]

Thanks for the good info, ball lock it is!

If you're in the states, that link I posted above is the cheapest and easiest conversions I could find and they all worked great. Just make sure you know what type of pin lock kegs you have.
If you have multiple kegs to do the price does get rather pricey, but the piece of mind of everything being the same was worth it to me.

 

[Hawkbox]

This is also handy for getting a handle on thread size. Remember quick disconnects are much cheaper than posts so you could always get away running both for a while if dollars are tight.

http://dresselbrew.com/Keg_Info.htm

 

[Dogwood]

This is also handy for getting a handle on thread size. Remember quick disconnects are much cheaper than posts so you could always get away running both for a while if dollars are tight.

http://dresselbrew.com/Keg_Info.htm

Thanks for the link, never knew there were so many differences! Think its time do some maintenance work on the kegs!

 

[Hawkbox]

Yeah I ended up with 20 kegs from god knows where, some are Italian so I had to be really thorough going through them for parts.

 

[GFHomebrew]

This is also handy for getting a handle on thread size. Remember quick disconnects are much cheaper than posts so you could always get away running both for a while if dollars are tight.

http://dresselbrew.com/Keg_Info.htm

I found out recently about the different keg post thread sizes awesome link hawk I wished I viewed this before ordering my recent keg posts .

 

[Hawkbox]

I had a keg early on that just spun on it's post so I ended up needing that. I think Ozarks gave me the link a while ago.