Hobby Tip - Water Filter Balls for Rivets, Boils, Lenses and more

Hi everyone, just a quick hobby tip post. I had taken some pictures while answering a query on a Facebook post and thought I might as well post it up here to live alongside my other short hobby tips.

Water filter balls are one of my favourite hobby materials to have a supply on hand, really handy for conversions and scratch-building. They're great for studs and rivets, servo skull eye lenses, Nurgle spores and boils...

There is slight size variance in the water filter balls but it's pretty easy to find similar sized ones as you work. I like this variance because I can find balls that are just the right size for whatever I'm working on.

On the image below you can see I used various different sizes of water filter ball for the eye-lenses of the bionic eye and servo skulls, the studs on one skulls' forehead and the skull pauldron and smaller ones for the buttons on the dress-coat collar and pistol holster.

The guardsman was probably my first ever use of them for the studded pad and rivets on the backpack. You can just use a pin vice/drill to drill a small divot, use a cocktail stick to apply a small amount of glue, use another cocktail stick, lick the end to pick up a ball and place it to the glue in the divot.

For textures like the spores/boils on my Nurgle figures you don't have to even sort them out, the slight difference in size just adds to the organic look.

You can pick up water filter cartridges from most supermarkets in the household and kitchen department anywhere around near the kettles. Ideally you should find cheaper off-brand versions, no point going for expensive ones for this purpose.

Some brands are pretty easy to pop open with a little work, some are held together with clips, others glued/melted around a seam. If you find yourself with one that's too difficult to open you can just bore a hole into the container to get inside. 

The balls are mixed with activated carbon flakes. The contents may be dry or like the one here, damp from factory testing. You can lay them on some kitchen paper and/or near a heat source to dry them out. 

When dry it's a pretty simple procedure to separate the balls and flakes putting small amounts on a fresh piece of kithcen paper, hold it at a slight angle over a new container and by rolling back and forth and tipping it more, the flakes tend to stick to the paper, the balls roll off into the container.

Repeat many times as appropriate and store in your new container for your hobby needs. Should last you for many years,  unless like me you practically run out using them over an entire Nurgle army.

Well that's all for now, until next time

Take care