Plastic Pipettes For Model Railroading
I’ve recently been trying out new brands of paints for airbrush use but unfortunately my local hobby stores don’t stock a wide variety so it’s been online ordering for me. An average price for a small bottle isn’t too bad at all, ranging from $3 – $4 each. Add a few bucks for shipping and the prices are still reasonable; give how far paint goes in an airbrush.
The thing that gets me, as it probably does all of us who order online, is the time it can take for a package to arrive. I recently ordered a selection of paint and it ended up taking over a week to get to me. Not all that bad really except that while pouring some of the paint directly from the bottle in to the Paasche H airbrush cup, the bottle slipped and a lovely shade of red went all over my airbrush, hand, bench and floor. Not a financial catastrophe as the paint is relatively inexpensive but now I’d have to wait another week on a new order of the paint.
I could have used an eyedropper the first time around for the paint instead of pouring directly from the bottle to the airbrush, but I’m lazy and I dislike cleaning glass eyedroppers once the paint dries a bit. Ok, think plastic disposable pipettes. I’ve always put these in to the silly gadget category but like my recent paint mixer change of mind, I now am a pipette devotee!
Pipettes in bulk at just 3 cents each.
I checked some of the online hobby stores but these pipettes went for around 50 cents each, we can do better that that. I found a medical supply house on Amazon that sells packs of 500 pipettes for around $15.00, which works out to 3 cents each. That’s better!
The little pipettes are made of Polyethylene and are just less than 6 inches long. The have a stem capacity of 1ml, which is fine for adding paint to the color cup of my airbrush. Even if I use a couple of different colors in a painting session, the cost of the pipettes is about a dime for that job. More than the price though, having separate pipettes for different paint colors keeps the work area a little cleaner, and the paint measurement and delivery more precise.
Finally, and to be honest I just like saying pipettes, don’t know why really, I just do.
Category: Useful Tools
