Thursday 26 January 2017

Fun with magnets

No painting progress to show you today. instead I've been having a play around making magnetic movement trays.

I've been wanting to make these for a while, mostly to make transporting my armies to and from my local gaming clubs a little bit easier. I rather like the idea of having some custom cut foam to fit each unit, transporting them on their trays,  then being able to simply plonk the entire unit down on the board without having to unpack each individual model and ranking them up.

The obvious starting point was the Corsairs I'm working on at the moment. The process is quite simple really. Using the 2mm N35 disc magnets I ordered in bulk from China (£5 for 300 - bargain!), I just glued one beneath the base of each model in a regiment.


For the actual trays themselves, I bought a load of magnetic whiteboards from my local Poundworld, cut away the plastic borders, removed the cardboard backing and I had all the magnetic sheets I needed. I just had to cut them to fit a movement tray and glue them in place. Five minutes with superglue and basing sand and I had something like this:






It's very rough looking atm, but the next stage will be spraying and vanishing it. However, I  couldn't resist having a play with one of the smaller trays and the corsairs I've magnetised so far:



That should do nicely! I've yet to be able to pull the same trick with the metal models on the 50-man tray, but it doesn't matter too much. I'm not trying to play Warhammer on the ceiling, I just want to stop the models from moving around, which is what I've achieved. Plastic models on the other hand, I could probably throw around the room and they won't come off!

Anyway, this experiment has worked like a dream. I'm really happy with it and looking forward to doing the same for the rest of the units in this project.

More soon!

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