Matt’s “Really Useful” Storage Solution

Why did I decide to do this?

That’s a good question!

I have a lot of foam trays and foam storage bags/boxes from several companies ranging from mid price to fairly expensive. Whilst these work well I feel that they have a couple of issues.

• It’s a pain to get miniatures in and out of the tray.
• The storage space isn’t very efficient.

A few people at our club have miniatures stored magnetically in biscuit tins, but I’m not a biscuit tin kind of a guy so I wanted something a little more aesthetically pleasing!

I’ve had a 4 litre ‘Really Useful’ box knocking around for while and I always thought that it would make a great miniatures box so my first step was to pick up some more!

Our local Staples, which is now an Office Depot, currently has an offer on ‘Really Useful’ Boxes.

I picked up 2 x 4 Litre boxes and 2 x 9 Litre boxes for under £18.

I’ve attempted making a magnetic storage box in the past but it didn’t work very well. The magnetic sheets that I picked up weren’t strong enough and the miniatures moved around. Not ideal!

It took me a while to find the right magnetic material for this project but I eventually came across magneticdisplays.co.uk and they had exactly what I needed!

For £18 I picked up 5 adhesive backed Ferro sheets.

These sheets are much stronger than some of the magnetic sheets that you can buy in craft shops.

Magnetic Displays do these in a few sizes but amazingly they do these to fit the 9L and 4L ‘Really Useful’ Boxes. Perfect!

If you don’t want to fix the sheets in yourself, they also sell ‘Really Useful’ boxes with these sheets fitted!

This was an easy one. Most FLGS should sell magnets but I got mine from Amazon.

The depth of the underside of the GW bases is around 3mm so I got 5mm x 2mm Neodymium Magnets.

I also decided that the best way to fix the magnets to the bases of the miniatures would be to use Milliput.

Milliput would give me a strong bond between the magnet and the miniature base, plus it would fill the 1mm gap between them.

As I said earlier, the magnetic sheets are adhesive backed and cut exactly to fit the 4L and 9L ‘Really Useful’ boxes.

The adhesive side is very sticky once the backing is removed so getting them in the right place was a little tricky, however they fitted perfectly and the bond between the adhesive and the box bottom is very strong!

The next step was to magnetise the miniature bases.

Using Milliput as an adhesive and a filler, I attached magnets to the underside of my miniatures.

The Milliput takes a couple of hours to cure but once it does it’s rock hard and creates a solid bond between the magnet and the base.

This has worked really well for me and I’m really pleased with the result.

The magnets are really strong and the miniatures don’t move at all. I’d be happy to store metal miniatures this way.

Getting miniatures in and out of the box is easy. No snagging on foam and no trying to find the right hole for the right miniature!

The space is also much more efficient. The miniatures in this box used to take up at least 3 times the amount of space in foam trays, plus I had to store the foam tray somewhere safe too!

Overall, I think this is how I’m going to store most of my miniatures in the future!

I hope this has helped someone!