Paint Mixers

Experts say that shaking a jar of paint is not the best way to disperse the pigment. Not only does it disperse the pigment very unevenly when you shake it, but you also get a lot of paint on the lid of the jar. And of course, that can harden and make the jar very difficult to open later on. Actually, the best way to disperse the pigment in paint is by using a paint mixer, I happen to have one here, it's a battery operated model made by Badger. You flip the switch and you have a little mixing head here that will turn very rapidly and disperse that pigment very nicely. It runs on two AA batteries, it costs between 10 and 15 dollars at most hobby stores or mail order. I'll show you how wonderful this works, and especially works well on paint that has settled and hasn't been mixed for a long while. And as you can see here, I've got a jar of paint, of zinc chromate paint that has pretty much settled out, it has not been shaken for quite a while. Let's just open this up and I'll show you how wonderfully this paint mixer works and here's a tip for you, one of the downsides of a paint mixer like this is that, when you're withdrawing the paint mixer, if you happen to leave it on just a little bit too long, you're gonna wind up by spreading paint all over the place because that'll just fly off the end here. What I've done was I found a little juice bottle, this is a plastic juice bottle. I've cut the bottom off of it, taken the top off of it, and what we can do with this is, just set it down right over the neck of the paint bottle. And this way, if you happen to leave your paint mixer on just a little bit too long, it's this plastic sleeve, it's this plastic bottle that'll catch a lot of the over spray, over shoot if you will. So let's take a look and watch how quickly this paint mixer will disperse this paint that has pretty much settled out. You can see, that it is really getting down there into that pigment, and in fact, just 10, 15 seconds, even 30 seconds with this thing, and you've got paint that is really thoroughly mixed. And again, you want to turn it off before you pull the paint mixer out, but if some of it does happen to spatter, it will spatter on the plastic sleeve. Getting a really good paint job on your models is very important because it makes them look good and if you've got paint that has pigment dispersed in it very evenly, you'll get a good paint job. And a paint mixer, something like this, is the ideal way to do it.