Ok for a quick update about my last entry, the Coffee Press works like a dream, fits with just the right amount of snugness and I use it every night to prep my coffee for the morning, I am a zombie and a mean tempered one in the morning, my wife can confirm this.
Drafting the Army Transport...Trays! Part 1 - Best Laid Plans
So what have I been up to in the last 2 weeks? Well I been getting back into one of my hobbies. I play a World War 2 miniature game that has me assembling and painting two armies to face each other on the tabletop Till the Death...or until the end of Round 5...but I like Til the Death more. ;P I have 2 armies because where I previously lived there where no other players of this game so if I wanted to play a game I would need to provide the armies for my opponent.
One issue that a player of any miniature game with large armies is how to transport them without them getting jumbled up, and even worse, damaged during travel. And honestly there are many different ways out there but I don't want to spend 200 dollars to have a case that can only hold 80% of all my minis and because I want to get more...well I want more tanks, halftracks and artillery pieces (oh I love those big guns). So knowing I am going to grow at least one of the forces I want something that I can expand easily and cover a wide array of styles and designs. But before anything else I need a carry case that fits my needs.
Armed with this desire I go shopping, ok been doing that for other reasons but I make it a point to go to places to check out their smaller storage options and there is a lot out there, but I also have a concern about how long those options will be around, because lets face it styles change every year and when it comes to miss matched storage totes they make the back of my brain itch. However when walking around Menards the week before I noticed a multilevel stackable storage that was about the size and dimensions that would fit my need and would be expandable later if needed, so grabbed it and I had a reference for where to start.
With this box to build as my template, I modeled a replica of it and began to create the beginnings of my modular transport system. First the plan is to make 3 stackable trays that run the narrow length of the tray in three trays that I can stack two high. I came up with a central stud on a flat plate as the base idea with enough clearance that I only had to worry about 1 type of miniature-weapon combo being to tall for it. Next, I needed to make the inserts for the tray in which I needed to model the 25mm base size to model around, I copied, expanded and elevated the 25mm base to give me a nice 3mm lip to keep it from sliding. This was going to be fun and I would also need a hole in the bottom to save material and time when printing, so I copied the initial 25mm base again and shrunk it to 22mm and stretched it through the bottom of the work-plane and what would be the tray later. I than copied the 25mm with one set aside for reference if needed, I took the 25mm and the stretched 22mm and merged them together and than make them a "hole" (Hole is the TinkerCAD name for a function that carves out that shape when it is merged with another solid shape.
Now I had the first 25mm insert ring the serious work began, the optimal layout design. Here I knew it was going to be interesting as my size layout was 270mm by 125mm so if I packed it right I could get at most 4 inserts if I kept the spacing tight enough, but as some of my soldiers have bayonets sticking straight out...I did not want to risk it. So I kept the spacing quite open and left 3 - 25mm ring inserts per row and used the extra space to offset the following rows by half to try and squeeze in an extra when it was all said and done. After a fair amount of time fiddling with the layout I got 12 - 25mm ring inserts on half where I like it, so the other half of the tray would a lot faster as after I selected all the ring inserts, which was actually 24 objects because I had not merged the 28mm lip and the merged 25mm/stretched 22mm Hole which I would need to remove material from the tray itself and deselected the tray itself, just copied the selection and flipped them along the long axis to keep them symmetrical. After they were all in I was looking at the spacing I had left and decided I had enough space to squeeze two more ring inserts onto the tray on both sides of the handle.
While finishing that up I than looked over my armies again and my eyes landed on the support weapons, a machine gun and mortar for each army, and knew I would have to replicate the process for the 60mm base as I did for the 25mm. And after making the first one it was nice and quick to recreate in a larger size and start placing them upon the tray with 2 - 25mm ring inserts as well for the extra figures that those have and I assembled as separate bases, I had done this as a way to show casualties without setting a numbered dice or other token to indicate this. I got excited about this tray as I could fit my entire support section for both armies on a single tray and I can neither confirm nor deny that I did a little happy dance.
The trays almost finished, I had to create one last element to the tray itself the outer supports. Now I had made the central support with just an inverted cone on top of a cylinder and merged them together for a basic hand, with a 20mm circular flat headed handle, now this seemed kind of large to me by it was still a test model so I figured I would discover something else better at a later date. But was I knew I needed but was unsure about was the outer support studs. I wanted something stronger than a cylinder but wasn't sure at first so put it off till later besides it was a critical but non-fun thing to work on. I was just looking through TickerCAD's basic shapes files and notice a wedge shape, I than thought of the Strength of the Triangle as the most basic and strongest shape that can be made and decided that would be the support I wanted to use, so after some tweaking I had a small acute triangle that was as high as my central stud and saved the file ready to send to the printer and see how my designed turned out.
And as it happens...it was 30mm longer than the build area.
To be Continued.