Timodel – Paint Shaker

Taking a bit of a break from our usual offering of minis and books, we’re looking at the Timodel paint shaker. Is it, as the box claims, “Easier, faster, smarter?” Let’s find out.

The text below is a transcript of the video – for those who prefer to read rather than watch.

Inside the compact box are all the bits that you need. A plug, which has a pretty short cable – so you may need to use an extender – or you can run it on four AA batteries. There are three stretchy straps that can be clipped to the shaker and around whatever your preferred brand of paint is. That stretch should accommodate the size and shape of various brands’ bottles, at least within reason, going up to 50g or 35mm diameter.

Finally, there’s the shaker itself – quite small, a somewhat weighted base on it. The Timodel brand is from Isle of Wight-based model shop Upstairs Downstairs. The Paint Shaker is set to retail for just under £30, a similar price to the nail polish shakers that this undeniably bears very strong similarities to, which is not really a bad thing!

We want to give the shaker a good test, so we’ve dragged out Digital Designer Mark’s project box of shame and blown off the thick layer of dust. The paints here have sat around unused for years. A Flames of War Stone Grey and a team Yankee Hind Blue currently look pretty awful! Hopefully the shaker can fix that. There’s also a Foundry paint with a still good consistency, but we will check that its shape fits into the straps.

As you can see from applying the unmixed paints to paper, the Stone Grey and Hind Blue are in a rather dreadful state. The Hind Blue, in particular, is more like a watery ink of completely the wrong colour.

We strapped the Stone Grey in first, gave it a 30 second shake and tested the result. We repeated and put more down on the paper. Pretty good! Yes, we could have given that paint a shake by hand, but we’ve saved some effort and got a good mix.

The Hind Blue is a sterner test. As you can see, it has separated in the pot. The first 30 seconds of shake improve things, bringing it much closer to the correct colour, but it still needs some work. Separation is happening on the paper. The second shake gets things to a much better consistency and the colour’s better too. So, that’s a paint in a really bad state that has been sorted out in a minute.

We should point out that you can’t see just how quick the shaker is actually shaking things here – it’s something to do with the frames per second frequency of the video synchronising with the frequency of the shaker itself. But we can confirm this is a rapid vibration as opposed to the somewhat leisurely “shake it like a Polaroid picture” pace that it seems on the video.

It handles the larger Foundry paint just fine and there’s strap room to spare. So, this does what it should. We’re not sure it’s exactly “smarter” but “easier” for sure, and “faster” too. If you think that’s worth about £30 then you should consider adding the Timodel Paint Shaker to your hobby desk.