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Thirty One bags
Most miniature gamers know that storing and transporting your minis can be a challenge. The ubiquitous Battle Foam trays are nice but spendy. They can also be bulky, and you still need to carry your books, dice and extras in a separate container. I'd rather spend that money on more miniatures!
So, I built my own custom miniature transport container that is affordable and functional.
Back when I started this hobby, my wife's friend was selling Thirty-One bags. You might have heard of them. The wife bought me a bunch of the open top bags in the very manly color of slate grey. They have a box shape with a square metal frame at the top and some long handles to carry over my shoulder. I got a few in different sizes. They work great for transporting most of my gaming equipment. Their big drawback is that they don't have rigid sides which is a problem when you're hauling around your fragile little soldiers. Another drawback is the typical cheap plastic "shoebox" just aren't the right size for the bag.
Luckily, I found a good tutorial on YouTube by Doctor Faust. He gives a short instructional video on how to build little wooden shelves that can be customized to fit into any container. The video is here.
I customized his design so it would fit nicely into one of the smaller Thirty-One bags and ended up with a great storage system for hauling around the figs. The materials are very inexpensive and can be found at most hardware stores. The one I built is large enough to hold 8 platoons of 15mm Americans for Flames of War with plenty of room for more figs. Rulebooks and accessories fit in there too. Another nice thing about it, is I can make more shelves and permanently store figs from a different game system. That way I can switch out the shelves whenever needed and reuse the same bag.
I bought a large sheet of 1/8" plywood and cut them down to size
glued on some poplar wood strips
Added a rubber non-slip cabinet liner (cheap!) and loaded the units
put them in the bag with books and gear. Ready to go!
Anyone else come up with some inexpensive transport solutions?
Ok, I haven't had any comments on this blog on an post for many, many months. The only post that seems to get any traffic is my 2015 post about Star Fleet Battles. I don't fully understand why that post has generated so much interest, while the rest of my content has been mostly ignored. Clearly, this has not been an successful blog. I get much more traffic with my Facebook content and the YouTube channel is showing promise. Perhaps the subjects of my posts have been too random. I may need to focus on a specific game or subject. Maybe I didn't generate enough posts to keep the audience connected. Whatever the case, I am ending this blog with this final post. I'm calling it a 'permanent vacation' because the blog and posts will still be here, though I will not be adding any new content. I might continue to comment on the SFB post since that is still generating traffic 3 years after it was published. To anyone who might still be reading, I say 'Thank
Hey all! This year, I made the trip to ReaperCon in Denton, Texas. This is new for me because I have never been to this convention and I am more focused on the gaming rather than the painting segment of the hobby. But I do want to improve my painting skills and learning from better painters is a way to improve. Another new challenge was that I decided to do a video blog of my experience at ReaperCon. aka a 'VLOG'. This is a new way to share content with friends and hobbyists and it was exciting to try. And I was able to take the trip with my brother who lives out of state, that made it fun as well. We took classes, painted figs, took the factory tour, and entered the painting competition all in just three days! Below is the link to the VLOG playlist. Most the videos are less than 10 minutes long. All the videos together comes out to 56 minutes if you play them all in order. Enjoy!
Our local Team Yankee community has a regular game night called 'Cold War Thursdays'. I was able to make it out to the store about a month ago. Chris had enough USMC figs to make a 75 point list for me to use. He took an equivalent West German force. We played out a NATO-v-NATO version of the Hasty Attack scenario. I am currently building a list that is heavy on Cobras and Hueys. Chris had plenty of air units to choose from. So, I grabbed all the Hueys and deployed them with a platoon of Marines loaded inside. The Leopards were absolutely deadly! The majority of my force was wiped out by three of them. My Humvees were the only unit that could even put a scratch on them. The Hueys were useful at moving troops forward quickly. I was able to drop the Marines nearby an objective. There was a squad of grenadiers inside a house close enough to still hold the objective. Except for the Leopards, most of the Germans were wiped out quickly. The Marines cleared the hou
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