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Okay, I've got an odd ball question. I made a fairly big mistake with my Vallejo paint set. Essentially I bought a bunch of Daisy BB to use as agitators in the paint and dropped in two or three per bottle. This was several months ago. Today I noticed small round rust holes in the paint bottles. So I've just spent the last 2 hours fishing all the little BBs back out of the paint to prevent the rust from getting worse.

Moral of the story:
Do not put anything in your paint bottles that will rust.

Does anybody have any idea what rust will do to paints? They seem okay for the moment.

It will just change the color.

Holes? It was rusting through the bottle??

Holy o_o your paint bottle is metal?

Suspended in the paint, iron oxide will change the color slightly.

In the future, use cut pewter sprue bits from minis as agitators. No rust!

Coming back to the hobby after 5 years of doing nothing I reanimated my paint last week.

I used either ball bearing balls which are around 5-6mm in diameter or metric M6 stainless steel nuts which I picked up at work.

Both of these work really well and beause they are both made of stainless steel I don't need to worry about rust forming.

Kagar wrote:Coming back to the hobby after 5 years of doing nothing I reanimated my paint last week.

I used either ball bearing balls which are around 5-6mm in diameter or metric M6 stainless steel nuts which I picked up at work.

Both of these work really well and beause they are both made of stainless steel I don't need to worry about rust forming.

Welcome back!

Anyway, I second Teek's pewter advice. Works for me.

Uh oh.

Yeah, thankfully I heard about not using BBs in your paint pots to help with stirring, or I probably would've done the same thing.

Hopefully it's all salvageable.

Teek wrote:Suspended in the paint, iron oxide will change the color slightly.

In the future, use cut pewter sprue bits from minis as agitators. No rust!

Okay, thanks, that's a good idea. I was sort of thinking the same thing, minor shift in the color, the extent of which will probably depend on the color involved.

Chrysaor686 wrote:Uh oh.

Yeah, thankfully I heard about not using BBs in your paint pots to help with stirring, or I probably would've done the same thing.

Hopefully it's all salvageable.

Oddly enough I think I heard about this approach on this site, in this forum. I can't remember the thread unfortunately. FWIW, I was using Zinc Plated BBs, which I erronously assumed would be enough to prevent rusting..... :(

I use small round glass beads. Picked up a bag at Michael's for like $2 or $3. Sometimes need to use the flat\ end of a brush to push them in the opening, but they work good for me.

You need to use marine grade steel for BBs in fluid if you are going for metal ones. I have hundreds of BBs that are not appropriate, but I tested them by leaving a couple of them in a bowl of salt water before putting them in my paints luckily. They rusted really badly and now I am looking for glass ones instead. Based on the amount of rust that they caused in my test, they might make a slight shift in the colour of the paints, but on the whole provided you fish them all out they shouldnt be too bad.

I use 8mm hematite beads that I bought at Michaels for agitating my Vallejo paints.

Reaper have small skulls they use as agitators you can get them from them.

i just use lumps of white metal (mostly tags from multi-part kits). once they've gone matt (as opposed to shiny) then it will have a protective oxidized surface. either that or bits of resin or plastic should be pretty inert.
if you're going to push the boat out - gold or platinum - they pretty much won't react to anything!

Chrysaor686 wrote:Yeah, thankfully I heard about not using BBs in your paint pots to help with stirring, or I probably would've done the same thing.

Stainless steal or aluminum ball barings will work, you just can't use mild steel ones. When in doubt, see if they are magnetic. In general, anything that sticks to a magnet will rust.

Broken glass works well too so long as you have solid paint pots that are not going to be damaged by the abrasion.

bubber wrote:if you're going to push the boat out - gold or platinum - they pretty much won't react to anything!

Actually, platinum is a wonderful catalyst and while it doesn't react itself, it can cause all kinds of other things to react that wouldn't normally. You can't go wrong with gold though.

Hematite beads are good if you can find them small enough.

I so wasn't expecting this sort of post.

Has anyone here thought of just using regular airsoft pellets? They're pretty easy to get a hold of, and cheap too. Walmart probably has a large stock of them if you don't know anybody that plays or owns airsoft.

I do play a fair bit of airsoft and would not recommend airsoft BB:s. Most BBs are made to compost so as to not damage the environment.
This would of course be especially true if you happen to have Bio-degradable BB:s but even the regular BB:s tends to deform when put in water and will probably ruin your paints.

Lot of excellent suggestions in this thread. I think I'm going to use some pieces of old sprue I've got from the FoW stuff. I'm going to put it into some salt water first though, just in case.