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I'm primarily a Vallejo paint user and am generally very happy with them apart from their tendency to settle very quickly, with a few colors being especially bad (ex: Beasty Brown, Blood Red). I was thinking that dropping a small bead or slug into the bottle might help make shaking more efficient, and was wondering if anyone had tried this. It should be easy enough to find appropriately sized glass beads at the craft shop, but I'm guessing lead shot (either from fishing or shotguns) would be more effective due to its density. But I'm not 100% sure that lead (or some other metal) won't react with whatever chemicals are in the paint. Any advice?

Use a glass bead. Shotgun shot (which is not actually lead) will contaminate your paint.

Lead might oxidise and have an effect on the paint (the red oxide form will tint paint as this is one of the things it was used for - same with the yellow and orange ones).

Stainless steel ball bearings would work (but you would have to ensure they are stainless and not just chrome/nickel plated steel - which will rust and contaminate the paint).

Glass beads are at least chemically neutral and shouldn't react with the paint.

Glass beads are cheap and easy.

Shot can work - but you want to know what it is. Lead shot is perfect - and you can get lead shot readily for fishing weights and reloading for shotguns. Some shotgun shot though is a cheap steel alloy which will corrode in paint and cause rust to get into your mix. A gun store that sells reloading supplies should be able to sell you a tube of lead shot for extremely cheap (BB or BBB birdshot should be about right). You just need to make sure it is regular lead and not a coated or plated lead or one of the steel varieties.

http://www.midwayusa.com/product/358687/bpi-steel-shot-bbb-10-lb-bag

Reaper uses pewter skulls in their RMS paints too - and if you have scraps of metal from figures, that works well enough too.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Regarding lead and oxidation - it can happen...but metallic lead does not normally like to oxidize and the conditions in a paint bottle are fairly benign to lead.

With raw lead figures, they tend to interact with environmental conditions (in particular tannins from wood products) that cause the bloom. You also see the lead oxides form readily on things like battery connectors - due to both the electrical current traveling through them and the various gases being emitted from the battery...quite often developing lead sulfides or lead nitrates as opposed to an actual lead oxide.

I've got a lot of lead for reloading that looks like it had just been removed from the die even though it is 10 years old. Granted, I also have a couple of old lead figures that are nearly unrecognizable because they were stored in cardboard boxes in humid locations.

This thread has a lot of discussion on the topic.

hasslefree miniatures sell steel balls just for this purpose

Thanks all. Sounds like using metal balls is possible if you get exactly the right ones, but it doesn't seem worth the trouble. I'll just look for some heavy glass/lava/stone beads on my next craft store trip.

tppytel wrote:
I'll just look for some heavy glass/lava/stone beads on my next craft store trip.

Learn from my mistake. I got the heavy lava/stone beads at my craft store. They were weighty, and non-reactive. However, they are so big that they don't do a good job of rattling around in the dropper bottle, so the paint still doesn't get mixed up very well.

You need both a good weight, and a relatively small, round size. Reaper skulls are great for this, but you can also use little bits of GW pewter. Just make sure they are able to rattle around in there and mix it up. Don't go with a longer piece which won't roll around freely.