Bean bag fill the expensive way

Figured I'd poke a little fun at myself while, hopefully, being slightly helpful to others who might search for "bean bag fill." To make a short story long, I finally broke down and replaced my pillow with The Vest Guy Large Bean Bag to shoot out of the car window this migration season. The pillow just ain't the way to do it after using a proper bean bag. Things are much more stable now!

Anyway, after searching these forums I found a lot about bean bags and a ton of talk about filling them with rice, sunflower seeds, pistachios and "cheap" things like that. But, in my opinion, when you really want to smack your wallet the right way.... 50,000 airsoft pellets will do the job well! At $22.99 per 10,000 it sure beats the hell out of spending less than $10 on the some food-stuffs (pun intended). On my first guesstimate in the Dick's hunting aisles, I figured 3 packs of 10,000 each would do the job....ha....no! You need 5 to get to 50,000 and you could probably do around 52,000 pellets to get that bag good and filled.

So, $56 for the bag + $114.95 + tax and you too can do the Vest Guy's Large Bean Bag the expensive way!

P.S. less than $200 for any piece of camera gear is getting off easy.

What does the silly thing weigh?

Somewhere around 2-5lbs I guess. No idea, but not that much.

Your option is good if you assume to use your bag only at your local location. If you travel around "food stuffs" is a more practical option to buy on location and give it away to birds after you are done.

Mostly it is for driving around New England, but when Africa calls I will just dump the pellets into another container

Did you try lava rock or hydroton?

Inexpensive and light.

Nope. Was already at Dick's purchasing some other items and, on a whim, threw the airsoft pellets in the cart. But good suggestions!

Try ball bearings.

Too cheap

Poindexter wrote in post #17463452
Too cheap

Try silver, gold, or platinum casting grains? Pure gold would actually work fairly well if you got a decent sized grain, as they would be soft enough to deform slightly into a rather solid and conforming pad.

lol Luckless... As "they" say... I don't care what you say.... that was funny right there.

I needed some ballast for my Rugged Gear cart and I ended up with lead shot. Way too heavy for a bean bag, but perfect for my application. I put 15#s in a ziplock bag... and put that in an RRS BH-55 bag. It looks like it grew there.

On a more serious note, I've used heavy leather bags filled with a mix of lead softened lead shot and hardened aluminium pellets to steady some sensor equipment. We had initially just used lead shot, and while it worked great it took three or four guys to haul the bag off the back of the truck. Someone got their hands on the aluminum pellets, which were far lighter, but seemed to have issues with the fill slipping and was just less stable than the lead bags. Mixture seemed to work well. However, that was way overkill for something as small as a camera.

depleted uranium pellets can probably be pretty cheap...they are always trying to find a place to put that stuff!

This is the best idea so far.

Definitely the best idea yet! Although it might shorten your life expectancy, I wonder how therapeutic throwing said uranium pellets is for dispelling some road rage? Since we're obviously the 1% elite of the bean bag fillers posting here, it sure would be nice to scare some peasants out of the way with a little depleted uranium.