I realised after I assembled my Vespid Stingwings that my existing method of miniature transport (foam trays) wasn't going to work because they're QUITE large in overall dimensions and wouldn't fit into any of the trays I have, and their wings make them fairly delicate too.
A friend of my has an extremely DIY case he made out of a plastic lunchbox with a piece of metal drilled into the bottom and neodymium magnets glued onto the bottom of the miniatures and it works really well. I figured I could skip the metal-drilling bit by ordering a stainless steel lunchbox and then I'd only need to deal with attaching magnets underneath my miniatures' bases. Well, it arrived earlier in the week and somehow despite being supposedly stainless steel, it's not even slightly magnetic. 😑 I had bought a bunch of 5x2mm magnets so I figured I'd just superglue them into a grid pattern on the bottom and sides of the lunchbox, making sure I attached the magnets in pairs to ensure I wasn't going to be putting them around the wrong way and having the miniature repel itself from the lunchbox mount (I needed magnets up the sides because a couple of the tallest Stingwings won't actually fit sitting vertically in the lunchbox and so will need to be horizontal).
After a bunch of measuring and glueing, it's come out a treat! Unfortunately, while my plan to ensure I didn't put the magnets on in a such a way that they'd repel was in theory a good idea, I neglected to realise that the PAIRS of magnets I'd used to attach to the sides and the miniatures weren't ever going to be always in the same place, and I hadn't made sure that the pairs of magnets themselves were ALL in the same direction as each other, so it's a bit of a crapshoot as to which miniatures properly attach to which magnets in the lunchbox. Thankfully I seem to have fucked it up at about a 50/50 ratio so if one miniature doesn't attach to the magnet I put it on, I can just move it one or two and over and it'll be fine.
So now I can just throw my miniatures onto their magnetic mounts, put the lid on, and drop it into my backpack without worrying about breaking anything, and I also don't need to worry about the more delicate features like spikes or staves being ripped off as I'm trying to pull them out of a foam tray!
Posted on 21 February 2025, 21:17