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Some of you know I took up painting Warhammer 40k models earlier this year as a side hobby for stress relief. Well months of listening to podcasts and browsing forums got me into the mind of actually assembling and playing an army. I am in the midst of finishing my Ultramarines Army and will be starting a Blood Angels army if this experiment works out.

The issue is traveling with this army. Does anyone have recommendations on how to stow these things away for safe journey? I've looked at the Battlefoam stuff but it is seriously expensive to be purchasing on a whim. I was thinking of some small tupperware containers for the troops and larger ones for the vehicles but that may be too ghetto. Is there a happy medium?

Let me know if you have any suggestions to help a future gamer out. And yes, I can hear some of you bastards laughing at me.

Gun cases
Seriously, anytime you need to transport things that can break looking into the big double sided foam lined gun cases that are designed to hold objects in place with gentle pressure and survive falls without damaging their contents.



The other option is cheap is of course bubble wrap and liqueur boxes you can get behind any package store or other booze selling business. Reason being most are already subdivided into areas and an old friend of my transported his Warhammer army that way by wrapping each unit in bubble wrap and stacking them atop each other inside the box.

For my Necrons I stick em in an old lunchbox lined with bubble wrap and with the empty space packed with tissue paper. I take the smaller boxes, and stick em all in an old, big, armoured toolbox my dad ad lying around, which I also lined with bubblewrap. Vehicles also go in this box, wrapped in more bubble wrap and cushioned with tissue paper. The toolbox has the added advantage of having useful compartments in the lid for all my paints, brushes, glue, scalpel, clippers and so on. It's my all-purpose Warhammer Box

That's what workd for me, but that is for an infantry-oriented army, if I had more vehicles it wouldn't work so well

But your idea of tupperware containers should work fine, especially if lined with bubble wrap as I said

Bwahaha. "I just want to paint a couple guys..." Then before you know it you're building a legal army. Once you step down the dark path forever will it dominate your destiny.

To answer your question:

Generally, some kind of foam solution in either a hard or soft case (soft case generally being cheaper) is the "pro" solution for any serious collector. However, even I have to relegate much of my armies to simple piles of dudes stashed in the cardboard boxes that vehicle kits come packaged in. Plenty of new army collectors start out with "shoebox armies", their barebones barely-legal army transported in a shoebox or similar cardboard container. If you're careful, it usually isn't a problem. I just try to avoid throwing pewters in with plastics in case of a jolt in the car, and sometimes I had a little spare foam padding like the kind you get in blister packs.

Most of it boils to smart pack-ratting. For example, I have a "vehicle armory" I cart around in a big, wide cardboard box about the size of a large board game's box. It's got 3 Basilisks and 5 Leman Russes packed in like sardines (...or perhaps more like tanks on a transport ship), and they sit in there naturally enough that there's not much room to jostle around and get smashed, as long as I'm not careless with the box. When I'm carting my Imperial Guard around, I usually even go so far as to fasten seatbelts around the loose boxes.

One simple and cheap solution are craft boxes or cheap tackle boxes with lots of little compartments that can fit a stand or two in them. I keep the foam blister pack inserts and use these to pad these spaces and they can then all be firmly stashed for transport.

Hell, for my Flames of War armies I even break up the boxes into unit groupings with the little unit descriptor cards from teh blister packs mounted on the wall of the dividers so I know exactly where each stand goes.

These are some higher end examples, but any bargain store should be able to hook you up.

Thanks Ando. Those cases actually look really nice.

I work in a kitchen, I have acess to more bubble wrap than I could ever use.

You might consider packing peanuts or, if you have a lot of it lying around, shredded newspaper and/or cardboard stuff as a filler medium to fill in the gaps in your transport case(s).

My uncle's a hoarder of sorts and there's tons and tons of old cardboard boxes and newspapers piled up. When I needed to ship cereal to England to a friend, I filled the larger box with all kinds of random paper trash and labels, etcetera, that were lying around in the floor of the kitchen.

I personally swear by the crystal caste battle hives, they're damn reasonable for what you get. They cost about the same as GW own cases for an aluminium hardcase with twice the volume and pluck-foam insert trays. I have one of the suitcase sized ones (which holds an entire mechanized infantry guard army with room to gobble up a marine company too...) and the kids here have one each of the smaller ones which are more than enough for a 1500 point army. Making extra trays with card and foam is pretty easy too.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:You might consider packing peanuts or, if you have a lot of it lying around, shredded newspaper and/or cardboard stuff as a filler medium to fill in the gaps in your transport case(s).

My uncle's a hoarder of sorts and there's tons and tons of old cardboard boxes and newspapers piled up. When I needed to ship cereal to England to a friend, I filled the larger box with all kinds of random paper trash and labels, etcetera, that were lying around in the floor of the kitchen.

I recommend against polystyrene or wadded newspaper for a packing material when it comes to GW minatures, they're both really hard on the paintjobs. They're okay for filler around storage trays, but if they're rubbing against the models it will end badly for the hard work you've put in to painting them.

It really depends on how much you want to pack and how far you're going.

One solution I used for my warmachine stuff (which is all metal) was magnets. A decent rare earth magnet on the bottom of the base and those things could be inverted, shaken and not move. Never used in on a plastic model but presumably it works even better due to lower weight. RE magnets are rather cheap- you could get a pack of 100 suitables for about AU$15. On plastics one model per peice should suffice.


You should be able to pick something like this up for about AU$30 or so.

Warmachine small bases are 30mm to GWs 25mm so you'd get a few more in there. You can fit roughly 45 small WM bases to a tier with a height off up to 58mm. These can hold 3x15 WM models but GW should let you do 4x18. The bottom tray is 10.5cm deep and a touch over 20cm wide- enough to house even a GW baneblade should you obtain one. All in all it's only slightly bulkier than a GW case which will hold about 108 models without vehicles (compared to 288 on just the tiers). Also when you open up, everything is there, available. No digging through layers to get stuff out or put stuff back in.

Magnet demonstration. RE magnets would have no trouble at all keeping plastics attached. Some people go as far as to attach models to the roof as well for extra space but I generally avoid that.

You can of course go with smaller boxes- even lunch tins or DVD double pack tins for small numbers or just smaller tool boxes. Another small magnet benefit is undercoating and painting. Stick the models to be undercoated on a metal tray/tool box/chain and you can undercoat them from all sorts of angles and get very good coverage. You can also mount them on something for painting so you never have to touch the model.

Keevan_Colton wrote:

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:You might consider packing peanuts or, if you have a lot of it lying around, shredded newspaper and/or cardboard stuff as a filler medium to fill in the gaps in your transport case(s).

My uncle's a hoarder of sorts and there's tons and tons of old cardboard boxes and newspapers piled up. When I needed to ship cereal to England to a friend, I filled the larger box with all kinds of random paper trash and labels, etcetera, that were lying around in the floor of the kitchen.

I recommend against polystyrene or wadded newspaper for a packing material when it comes to GW minatures, they're both really hard on the paintjobs. They're okay for filler around storage trays, but if they're rubbing against the models it will end badly for the hard work you've put in to painting them.

Yeah, I wouldn't put them directly against anything you give a damn about, but they'll keep stuff from knocking around inside once your precious little mans are all safely stowed in whatever you stow them in.

I wouldn't have put them directly against the cereal, either. Fortunately, a General Mills cardboard box is considerably less paintjob-intense than little mans.

Bit late to the ball here, I use a Stanly plastic tool box, cheap and easy to get. I then picked up egg crate foam from the local Joan Ann, cut it to size, all set. Over all it cost my maybe a third of the cost of a GW case.

I use a Games Workshop army case, as seen herehttp://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catal ... 095468http I got the limited edition green one, with tank capacity, for Christmas. It transports about 2000 points of my guard, but I'm starting to run out of space for my Guardsmen. Each row of figure compartments holds 9 models, with 4 rows each layer therefore holding 36 models. There are three layers, and two "compartments", so the standard figure case carries 216 Space Marine sized models. Even with my guard Troopers doubling up, I'm running out of space, admittedly because 50% of the case is taken up by tanks.
A real annoying feature for me is that as each row has 9 models, you can't have a nice neat row of the 10 men in a squad.

I also have one of the older GW cases - it's filled with soft foam pyramids, and has two compartments. It's better for transporting unusual shaped models, but it's not terribly well designed, and it's rather small.

I see a lot adverts for Battle Foam - who can be found at http://www.battlefoam.com/ppresspage.html, but I think they're a bit more high-end of the market, with spaces cut to fit specific models. They're also USA based which means I'm not sure how to get hold of them.