256th Imperial Battle Group: Storage

Showing posts with label Storage. Show all posts

Tuesday, 8 October 2024

Cabinet

So, a couple of weeks ago, (maybe more, I can't find the post!) I wrote about my new purchase of a display cabinet. Well, it has found a home in the corner of the front room (living room\family room, whatever you want to call it), despite not matching the rest of the wooden front room furniture. It has also gained some models.

The cabinet

Lights!

The cabinet had some built in lights but the wiring was missing from behind, so I had to find a new power unit and wire it all in. It was relatively easy to do and with some new LED bulbs, as the standard ones didn't work, despite the power pack saying they would, we have some illumination. However, it's top down and so the top level is very well lit but the lower ones less so. It's more obvious on the pictures lower in the post.

Top shelf

Top shelf is a bit of a mish mash of Sisters, Deathwatch, Grey Knights, Imperial knights, AdMech, Imperial agents and some Chaos at the back.

Upper Middle shelf

This shelf is mostly guard, with a couple of vehicles, some rough riders and various troops, with a small contingent of Eagle Knights on the right.

Middle middle shelf

This is my son's shelf, which contains some of his Tau models, although I keep suggesting he puts some of his orks on here too.

I've skipped the lower middle shelf as it currently contains my paint tray, and that's not very exciting.

Bottom shelf

The bottom shelf, if you can call it a shelf, contains all my rule books and codicies, plus my copy of Conquest Card game. I plan on adding to this collection at some point with some of the older codicies for ages I have, but for now that's everything.

Night time lights

As you can see, the light dies off pretty quickly, meaning the lower shelves are in complete darkness. I think in time.i will replace the over-head lights with LED strip lights that run down the sides, maybe a couple of strips each side to ensure all the models are well lit.

I am really liking my little display cabinet and while it only shows a small portion of my total models it's still nice to have some out on display. I will try and rotate through the models over time but I doubt it will happen very often, probably only when I paint up new stuff I want to display.

Friday, 14 April 2023

Battle foam boxes£

We hobbits are forever on a quest to find the most cost effective and easiest storage solutions for storing our precious models and up until now I have tried a few different options. I have magnetic storage trays, KR multicast, GW cases, shoe boxes with foam bits, ice cream tubs and plastic bags full of models and I’ve always come back to KR as my first choice in storage. However these are not cheap and have their limitations. However, while surfing the internet or rather eBay, I can across some options for storage boxes and while comparing prices to see if they were worth a punt I can across some Battle Foam boxes and on checking the website I found that their empty D-Boxes are on discount, down from £8.40 to £3.36. With the cost of postage I managed to get 6 boxes for less than £30. With some foam purchased from the local haberdashery, I managed to put together all the stuff i needed to build storage for all my remaining models for less than £35 or £30 for just the material (not including postage).

D-Boxes

I brought 6 boxes, two of black, green and white. They were a little bit smaller that i though they were going to be, but that’s not a problem. The boxes are are about half the size of the KR standard boxes but are a little bit deeper. For me this works well as they are to be used to store my smaller armies, like my AdMech and my Deathwatch. One thing that i was surprised at was that despite the fact that the boxes are empty, they came ready assembled and in a huge box.

The factory

So after getting all the stuff together I started to build my new storage boxes. Yes, this takes a bit more time than just buying ready made but this way i get fully customised trays. It quite simple to build, just takes a bit of time waiting for the glue to dry properly.

Rhino storage

It can take a bit of working out to get the best use of space and also to make sure that you get a full box and are no it over or under the box capacity. I didn’t find this to much of a problem, just have to take your time with it, the hardest thing I found was making sure that you cut the pieces to the right size and I cut several to big and to small but managed to get things to go together alright.

AdMech box

This is an example of the custom trays that i managed to build. The Dominus models are significantly bigger that the standard Skitarii, but i only have a couple of them and I am not planning of getting any more. Therefore I build a tray that was uneven to hold the Dominus models and also fir a number of Skitarii.

The vehicle tray at the bottom was also custom built to hold the two armigers and the AdMech tank. I probably could have built this try slightly differently however it works very well.

So that was one box with around 1000 points of AdMech and i have built a second box with 1000 points of Deatchwatch, with a couple of Rhinos and a Dread (the rhino tray above) plus a number of troops. I have 4 boxes left and I’m not quite sure what I’ll be putting in these. One will most likely get my Dark Guardians first born marines army and i would look to put the Eagle Knights First born in another although it will most likely need two boxes for them. Depending upon the Rutledge for 10th, i may well look at building a full Inquisition army (about 1000 points) and put that in a box. Alternatively I may look to put all my kill team stuff in one box, with all the teams, counters and other bits.

The big box

This is the big box that that all the smaller boxes came in, with a ton of small bits of foam, mostly the cut outs from other trays. They are a bit useless and I feel bad about just chucking them out but I have no need for them. The kids have been having great fun with all the bit though.

Tuesday, 15 September 2020

New storage, KR multicase.

After having started talking about my new primaris armies, I thought I should take a bit of a step backwards and talk about the storage that I bought for them. This storage was brought not only for the new primaris units but also to hold the last few units of guard that didn't have a home yet. I already have two of the cardboard KR multicase's and also one of the big old GW cases, a bit like this one;

Now, my issue was that I had the two cases plus the GW case but only enough storage foam to fill half the space. I had brought some of my own foam, with the intention of building my own foam tray and I even started building them, cutting out the foam bases and some walls. However, I just didn't have the time to get them finished properly, so the half build sheets were used to store my old school marines in the loft. So, I was back to square one, lots of space but no foam. When I received a voucher for Amazon at my birthday, I decided that it was time to just take the plunge and get some proper foam. After looking around for quite a while at the options, KR still seemed like the best. It took a while longer to figure out what I wanted though, as I had about 50 guard and 4 vehicles that needed a home and also wanted space for my new Marines.

After lots of um-ing and ar-ing I finally settled on these two sets;

KR tray set: Space Wolves set G

KR tray set: Tyranids set I

These weren't perfect but in reality without doing the KR custom build option, these were the best I was going to get. I have taken one half of the wolves set, the 25 slot storage trays and one half of the Tyranids set, the pick and pluck trays, to form storage for the guards and 4 vehicles and then taken the other halves of the sets, the four 18 slot trays and the 2\3 tray, to form storage for the primaris Marines. This means that I will have storage for the bikes and possibly Inceptors in the pick and pluck section plus space for the rest of the troops in the 18 slot trays.

All tolled, this means that all the units that I want to use have a permanent home now. This does leave some units, such as my Hellhammer without a dedicated tray, one of the bits I was um-ing and ar-ing about, but I have a plenty of foam bits and a square foam thing, a bit like someone has taken a pick and pluck sheet and picked all the bits out of the middle and taken the bottom off as well. It works to line the section I'm putting bigger items, like the Hellhammer, in to before packing the area with foam block, from pick and pluck sections strangely enough!

So, this mean that I can now just grab a storage box and have all the bits I need to play an army with, without having to keep swapping models around all the time, which is very handy when I don't actually remember the last time I played a game!

Next up, more marine stuff.

Friday, 6 December 2019

Storage project

Recently I have been trying to sort out my storage issues. While I still have lots of other storage issues, as I still don't have proper storage for my blood angels or my dark angels armies. However, my main concern at the moment is my kill teams and getting them out of their butter tub storage boxes. After looking around various websites and looking at lots of different options and possibilities, at all sorts of prices, I finally settled on something more home made. I would have liked to get something like the tabletop tyrants skirmish case or the KR half case but there were several issues with this approach. The main one is pretty obvious, that of price. While the various foam storage cases are great, my KR cases have been around the block a few times and are still in good condition, they are still quite a few pennies. The second, and possibly just as big a factor, is model size. To get a foam case that is interchangeable between different armies would have meant that either I got a tray with a few big slots and things like my guard would rattle around or trays with small compartments and the likes of the Deathwatch would have to squeeze in and not fit properly. I could just get lots of different size trays and solve this issue but again that's lots of money I don't have. The other issues are not as big a deal, things like token storage and the roster cards. Also I wanted a system where I could switch around teams quickly and easily, without having to spend ages switching models from one storage to another.

After searching for a while I settled on the idea of a magnetic storage box but there were a whole multitude of options and ideas out there. In the end I decided to go for a magnetic sheet in the plastic storage trays and also magnets on the bases of the models. This was due to a convention of factors, such as weight, availably and ease of construction. So I ended up with this;

The box is a 5 layer craft storage box, with 10 sections to a layer. I took out most of the dividers on each layer, to create just a couple of sections. The top layer was dedicated to tokens, dice, tactic cards and specialist cards plus a tape measure, everything I need to play, except a board obviously.

The next 4 trays were all magnetised, more or less to the same area, only the guard box has a slightly bigger area of magnetic sheet on the right hand side, to accommodate the extra models in the guard roster. All the trays also include space for the teams data cards and faction tactic cards plus a few other print outs, such as orders, canticles and specialist ammo charts. I also have a couple of peice of paper with other details on, such as the AdMech Rad Saturation rule or the marines transhuman physiology rules on, just in case I forget.

The set up is fairly simple and easy to construct and all the necessary items were purchased of amazon, including the craft box, magnetic sheets, magnets for bases and (as yet to be applied) sticky dots for marking the models positions.

There is one slight problem with the system at the moment however. In the picture above, you can see some foam in the bottom right, this is surrounding and protecting the metal models, as they are to heavy and the magnets don't have enough power in them to hold them in place. I tried with the small rare Earth magnets I have, about 3x1mm ones but this didn't help, even with two of them. I have purchased some bigger magnets, 8x1mm, but these have yet to arrive. When they do I will try them out and see if that solves the problem. It's not much of a problem really, the guard only have 2 models that are metal and the scion\inquisition only have 6 but none of the other teams, as yet, have any at all (the scout Marine team will have quite a few!).

The other problem I ran in to was down to my miscalculated measurements. I thought I had the right depth of magnetic to go under the bases but apparently I didn't and they were a little to short to make a nice contact with the sheets in the trays. This was fixed very easily by sticking a thin sheet of card in between the magnet and the base and super glueing it all together.

It was a very quick and easy fix, that doesn't seem to have caused any issues to the overall construction.

Most of the models sit nicely on the magnetic sheets in the trays and nicely on the actual ground. A bonus to all this is that there is now a little extra weight in the bases and so the models are a little more stable on uneven ground.

The final test! I took the metal models out for this, as they would have just fallen strain out and bounced on the ground! The rest stayed firm, even with a little shake. Now I don't think that they will stay put if the box takes a proper hard bash, but I don't 0lan on taking it anywhere where it might receive such a bash. I know that the idea is to protect the models and those hard bashes are never planned but so far I'm really impressed with the box and how it works.

I plan on getting another box, with 5 more layers to house the remaining teams I have (scout Marines, elites Marines and chaos) and the teams I plan on having (grey knights and sisters of battle), giving me a system where I can chop and change which trays I take and which I leave behind, as all of them will be interchangeable with each other. Right now this does all seem a little overkill as I haven't actually played a game of kill team in months, but I'm hoping that after Christmas I will get back in to things as live settles down again with the wife going back to work but we shall see.

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