Figure Holders for Painting

I've tried all sorts of methods of holding figures for painting, from the simplest (bottle caps and blutak) to the fancy (3d-printed handle and adjustable gripping socket), and they all work well enough. However, at each end of the scale they have their issues: the bottle caps are small, don't offer much gripping surface, and are easily knocked over, while the fancy 3d-printed handle is quite bulky, and takes a very, very long time to print, which is fine if you just want one or two, but I'd want at least a dozen.

I've finally settled on this system: short lengths of 25mm beech dowel (bits of a broomstick, in fact) with a nail driven into an end, and a steel washer epoxied around the nail head. I can whip these up very quickly.

The individual stands are reasonably stable, and if need be, more weight can be added by gluing lead or steel slugs to the bottom. The 16mm washers on top are broad enough to support a decent blob of blutak, for attaching figures with non-ferrous bases, but more often I mount my figures on steel washers, so I just put a 10x1mm magnet on the holder and attach the figure to that.

When I'm painting a group of figures, the individual stands tend to just cluster about on my painting table, but the wooden tray for them is useful to keep everything organised if need be.