Over the past few weeks I made the wife a file storage cabinet to use for work - the design dimensions seemed to be very similar to what would work for minis so I built two! The dual used for minis was purely coincidental, trust me.
There are 14 10 inch x 16.5 inch drawers which will allow me to store and transport all the mini's i'd ever need to put on a convention game. The file cabinet will lift off the rolling cart part to make it easier to pack into my car for transport
Each drawer is supported on simple shop built wooden runners which are more than solid to hold the drawers in place but allow the trays to slide out to be taken to the table. I wanted to be able to organize each players troops in one or two trays before going to a con and that will help me keep track of things.
Some of you may be wondering why there is such a large gap between the top drawer and the case top. It's 2.5 inches and was deliberate to allow for storage / transport of taller models - vehicles, troops with pikes. Of course my use of the term "deliberate" is the similar to how Gimili the Dwarfs used the term when falling off his horse during the Two Towers movie. I just screwed up and them created a convenient excuse.
Each drawer can hold a lot (interior dimensions are 9.5 x 15.5 inches - this drawer has 123 stands of 15mm British infantry plus 21 stands of calvary. Most of my Nap and ACW 28's are based on 40x40mm stands and each drawer will hold 54 stands or 216 figures.
I do plan on making some sabot bases holders for my 28mm skirmish figures which tend to be mounted on 25mm round bases. That will involve cutting some 1/4 inch plywood and then drilling out 25+mm holes. I'll use a 1 inch hole cutting drill bit and then sand out to cut to make it just a tad bigger than 26 mm. It will be really tedious and I'll wait for a day when the weather is really bad and there nothing else to do.
I really like the drawer pulls as they have space for paper labels and were really cheap - I got 60 of them on amazon for a little under $0.40 each, I'll need to figure out what to do with the left overs.
The are plenty of plywood scraps from this project to make more drawers and am thinking about making one a dice tower and some other game related accessories. Any suggestions on what to build will be greatly appreciated.
I put the cart on some very robust caster wheels (5 inch diameters). It wasn't for the weight of the miniatures but more to make sure the contraption can navigate some of the parking lots where convention games are held. Some of them (like maybe the Host in Lancaster) more closely resemble artillery test ranges than parking surfaces.
This cart will likely see it's first convention use at Cold Wars in 2019 and for sure at Historicon later that year.
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April 19, 2024, 10:33:29 PM
