Thought your warhammer army was expensive? Try buying storage for them! I often go to one of the local stores to paint, and I usually don't interfere when the staff are trying to sell someone new to the hobby something they don't need. But nothing makes tempts me to butt-in more than when I see a staff-member circling some poor newb taking minis out of his shoebox like a vulture..."for only 99 dollars plus tax you can store 120 of your minis" (but not tanks that costs another hundred bucks)...
Think about that, retail price for a rank and file GW miniature is 2.48 + tax..., now you have to add another 90 cents (about a third of the models prices) just to store them? No waaaaay!
The online retailers are no better...Battle-Foam is even more expensive than GW, and Army-Transport isn't much cheaper. Besides, miniature cases have a lot of problems too
The trays either custom conform to your models...but then you can only use them for those models
or
They have those small slots...like gw cases and are the death of standard bearers and assault marines and devastators alike.
Also there is the problem of storing the foam trays, as they don't really stack well and you have to buy cases for all your foam trays...but if you have multiple armies this makes buying for each army kind of inefficient. and even if you do create say a shelf to store all the foam trays you have to pack and unpack your carrying case every time you want to swap out armies.
The other thing is (at least for my Army-Transport bag) is that adding and removing modular trays from a bag tends to cause you to squish them and that can break models in and of itself
So what is my solution then?:
Ladies and gentlemen...I submit to you the humble GWCheapskate army transport system. This article will cover the 40k version... and a future one will cover Fantasy (which is a little different because you want to keep your models ranked up).
Materials:
1 28 Quart plastic box (something like this...note the price there is for a box of ten...but you can pick them up individually locally).
2 or 3 Large Bath Towels depending on how many layers you want (note you can also use eggshell foam)
1 Scissors to cut the bath towels
Obviously you can pick the container that suits you best, I just find that 28 stores 1500-2500 pretty well and is just high enough to store my high elf dragon standing up. One important thing to note is make sure the box you pick is high enough to store your tallest model.
One other important thing is make sure the towels are thin but not too fluffy as pointy things get caught in really fluffy towels.
I recommend going to your local Target or Walmart for this stuff...(Hardware stores won't have the towels). Dollar stores may also work, but I have only recently discovered the Dollar General near my house so I will update.
Once you have the materials...cut one bath towel to the size of the bottom of your storage tray (with about a 1 inch overlap) and line the bottom.
Cut the other towels with the idea of putting miniatures in layers (and vehicles taking up one section at the bottom in single a layer).
Then simply lay your miniatures out heaviest/sturdiest on the bottom
Lightest/most fragile on top.
Finally, cut a towel to cover to the size of the top of the box (usually the top has more surface area than the bottom in these types of boxes), and cover your minis with it this prevents them from bouncing up and down in your trunk!
There you go... your 15-20 dollar miniature carrying case. Feel free to mail me a check for the difference :-)
In the next article I'll have some pictures of my cases and how I store them
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