This is a quick post on storing your beautifully painted vehicles. It came up after I posted this picture of my almost completed WW2 Germans, online. I like to get to a point where the army is almost finished before I assign them to a box, so the Germans and British, are currently stored haphazardly!
The main storage boxes I use are thin plastic A4 sized boxes (used for papers), and these work really well, are cheap and don’t take up much space.
More tidy. Plastic box with magnetised sheets and plastic bases with steel paper
To base or not to base?
Over the years I have alternated between storing my vehicles and figures in boxes with magnetised bases, or using foam to protect them (or both).
With most of my vehicles I base them on steel bases and line my boxes with with magnetic sheets. This is a good system and them only time I have had problems is when the box has a violent bang or is tipped upside down. However in the last few years I have gone away from basing vehicles because of the aesthetics. It bugs me when I see a nicely based vehicle (perhaps based sticking out of a cornfield), driving down a city street.
Yes there are lots of good reasons to base vehicles (protect barrels and the models themselves), but that debate is for another post.
Latest storage plan
My newest and hopefully last solution is to use a plastic box and line it with anti slip rubber, (used in cutlery drawers), and then cut out individual holes for each vehicle. This is time consuming and takes a bit of planning (especially if space gets tight in the box).
I use a thin 6mm foam camping mat and a sharp blade on a knife. I plan where each group of vehicles will go and measure a space for each vehicle. I also use think pieces of wood to mark the space between each vehicle instead of measuring and marking.
I can complete a sheet for a box each night , while watching TV. The foam is soft enough not to damage the paint and the vehicles cannot move around.
Next up I will cover 6mm figure basing and storage. Another hot topic….
