Portable Miniatures Painting Station

Am I alone in being bombarded with Facebook adverts for wonderful, hand-crafted portable hobby painting stations? 

The one I seem to receive the most is for The Paint Case 2.0 by Frontier Wargaming (https://frontierwargaming.com/product/paint-case/).

 This wonderful item is fully customisable and is 46 × 12 × 31 cm and weighs 3.7kg empty. As standard it comes with, 4x Paint Drawers holding up to 128 Vallejo or 72 Citadel paints, 2x Large Toolboxes for brushes and tools (with optional dividers), 2x Miniature Holders, hosting five miniatures each, Protective Cutting Mat and Adjustable Shoulder Strap.

 All this for €102.50, which I guess isn’t to bad for what you get!

Having just bought ourselves a campervan, my wife and I don’t have €102.50 to spare! However, I can see the use for such an item to allow me to keep up to date with my hobby while we are away from home. How, then, could I create something similar, but at a fraction of the cost?

 The answer to my prayers is the Ikea Moppe mini chest of drawers made from birch plywood (42x18x32 cm)! 

Taking this as my starting point (it comes ready assembled which is nice!), I realised that the outer casing was quite thin and fairly flexible. Once the drawers were filled up with paint pots, tools, miniatures etc. I feared that the top might come off if I attached a handle. 

I decided that the best thing to do was to “beef” things up by adding an overall covering of 6mm plywood. 

I managed to get all the pieces I needed from one 600x1200mm sheet and a friend cut them out accurately on a table saw. 

These were glued in place and tacked at the edges for strength and put to one side to dry. 

Once dry and sanded, the entire cabinet received two coats of water-based Oak coloured satin varnish. 

A suitcase style handle from eBay was added to the top face and some felt feet to the bottom to stop scratches.

 I don’t think I need a shoulder strap, but one could easily be added later on. 

Rather than fit a hinged painting area, I opted to make mine removeable. When fitted this holds the drawers in place so I rivetted two spring-loaded toggle latches (again from eBay), one each side to make it secure, but easily removed.

 Again, I added felt pads to the corners so when placed on a table it won’t scratch it. 

I added an A4 cutting mat, from The Works, to the inner face (using double sided tape) to protect it when using a knife etc. and really that was about it! 

I may configure the drawers with inserts but haven’t rushed into this just yet. For example, the bottom (largest) drawer easily holds two rattle cans with room to spare for a clip-on LED USB light I bought to add to the case.

So, how much did it cost me so far?

 ·       Ikea Moppe - £17
·       6mm Plywood - £10
·       Wood Glue & Tacks - £2.50
·       Varnish - £4
·       Handle - £2.50
·       Toggle catches - £2
·       Cutting Mat - £3
·       LED Light - £4.00

In total £45 so a little under half the original item. Not too bad….and I enjoyed building it!

Airfix 1/72 Spitfire Mk1a - Framed Sprue

 I actually created this a few month ago, but forgot to do a write up (there's a few others I've found on my phone, too) at the time.

I bought this model at the IPMS Gloucester show in 2024 and it was waiting on my pile of shame to be tackled. It only cost me £5 and I'd always intended to frame the unassembled sprues as a complementary display to my Airfix Sherman.

This time I took a simpler approach and left out the paints, brush etc and reduced the amount of box art I included so the entire display would fit within the IKEA frame's mounting card.

To best suit the display I had to make a couple of modifications to the sprues.

1. The small clear sprue with the moulding of the canopy was discarded and the canopy carefully cut down the centre into two halves. Each half was then attached the to appropriate fuselage half with PVA after painting.

2. The pilot figure would have been facing to the rear, so I removed him from the sprue and reattached him facing forwards so his painted details would be seen on the display.

3. Similarly, the control panel/dashboard (was reversed so the nicely detailed decal could be applied and seen.

Firstly, I primed the entire sprue with a grey car primer rattle can. Then, to speed up painting, I masked most of the grey sprue and sprayed the underside light stone and the upper side in earth brown. These paints were modulated using pre-shading (dark grey) and highlighting using the base colour + off-white.

I then used my newly acquired AK Masking Putty to create the camouflage pattern on the upper surface spraying olive green.

The smaller details were brush painted, before I sprayed gloss varnish in the areas where the decals were to go. These were applied with the help of a setting agent to get them to conform to the panel lines. I then touched up the sprue in light grey and the model was complete. Lastly I added some weathering (Smoke marks mainly) and gave everything a coat of ultra matt varnish.

The back board of the frame wash painted sky blue with a Dulux match pot and the sprues attached with fuse wire.

Framed up, it looks good on my office wall and is  great conversation piece. Easy to achieve and very satisfying when it's done!

Team Yankee 3D Printed Mi-24 Hind Gunship - Part Two

I chose to finish the Hind to represent the Battlefront Team Yankee model as I liked the colour scheme.

To start with I gave the model an overall coat of PSC Dark Yellow from a Plastic Soldier Company rattle can. This primed it and gave me the base coat all in one go.

While I was at it, the main rotor was given a spray coat of black paint from a Pound shop rattle can.

The next step was to pick out the glazed areas in a GW turquoise blue with a shadow area around the outside edges using Army Painter Blue Wash.

The camouflage pattern was added using Battlefront’s own NATO Green and the underside of the fuselage and the wings were painted using a Revel Duck-Egg Blue.

Finally, details were picked out, such as the rotor tips in Yellow, the weapons in gunmetal etc.

I found some old Warlord Decals for the serial number and hand painted the Red Stars on the fuselage sides.

50 4x2mm rare earth magnets all the way from China in under 3 weeks for just £3!

Afterwards, the model was sprayed with Army Painter Satin Varnish followed by Testors Dullcote when dry.

For an aerial base I needed the imagination of my dear wife! She suggested the clear plastic barrel of a cheap Biro pen! Genius!!

I took the pen apart and printed up a circular base with a hole to accommodate the threaded end. I then sawed off the tip to open up the barrel so I could superglue a cut down steel flat headed nail to match the 4mm dia. Magnet I had mounted in the underside of the fuselage.

Another (smaller) cut down nail was super-glued into the rotor shaft on the upper fuselage to match the 4mm dia. Magnet I’d glued into the underside of the rotor.

This leaves me with a robust model for the tabletop that is easily broken down into three parts for storage.

Pride of place in the Team Yankee IKEA cabinet!

Now I need to find a Westland Lynx…..

Revell 1/144th Type XXI U-Boat with Interior detail - Part Three

I thought I'd post some final pictures of this project.

It's now placed on high (on top of my IKEA cabinet) hopefully safe until such time as I can get a wooden plinth made to hold it, and a new shelf to display it from.

Just to add a sense of scale, I've added a handful of 1/144th scale figures ('n' gauge) left over from a Dragon "Leopold" Railway Gun kit I made years ago.

Hope you enjoy......

Something Different - Airfix 1/72nd Sherman Vc Firefly

 Idly scrolling through Facebook I came across an image of this excellent plastic kit painted, but still on its sprue, displayed in a box picture frame, and I thought to myself that looks really good!

This got me thinking that maybe I could have a go at this too, just to try something completely different. That's when a visit to Lidl's came in to the picture. Their Summer Madness promotion on Airfix starter kits was just coming to an end and all they had left was the 1/72nd Sherman Vc Firefly - could the same idea work with a tank?

Until I opened the box I hadn't realised that this is a completely new tooling kit, made in the "Quick-build style" with complete track/running gear mouldings. All the parts are on two identical sized sprues - perfect for my purposes - and would easily fit into a frame of roughly 30 x 30cm.

The first job was to prime everything. As the kit was moulded in a light green coloured plastic I chose to spray it grey to ensure there was sufficient contrast once the tank parts were painted in their olive drab.

To achieve this, I carefully masked the sprue sections before airbrushing Vallejo Olive Drab over all the tank parts.

The next step was to dry-brush all the model surfaces with a lighter mix of white & olive green to break-up the larger areas. 

Then the details were picked out - pioneer tools, tracks etc.

The decals were added before Army Painter Strong Tone was used to pick out the areas of shade. Finally the entire model was lightly dry-brushed with Vallejo Iraqi Sand. I also used Strong Tone to shade the sprue names & numbers before dry-brushing light grey just to make them stand out a bit. That was the painting finished.

I found a suitable frame in Ikea. Called SANNAHED it was actually 35 x 35cm and had about 30mm depth between the glass and the rear board. These were on special offer at £10 so I bought two ready to try another project with an aircraft kit. It had a nicely cut mounting card, but this was too wide to use so I dicarded it. I painted the rear board with a Dulux match pot of a neutral stone colour before attaching parts of the original kit box and the kit itself. The card box art was attached using double sided tape and the kit sprues etc. were secured with thin fuse wire.

And there you have it - finished.

On a separate note the kit itself looks to be very good. The levels of detail are good and cleanly moulded. I read on-line that if you buy the kit on its own (rather than as part of a starter set) it includes an additional sprue of running gear and separate track links together with storage items to populate the glacis plate, which would probably make a good kit even better. One glaring boo-boo is the inclusion of a bow machine gun! As we all know the Firefly had this gun deleted to increase ammunition stowage!

3D Printed -Team Yankee

A quick post to show my slowly increasing 15mm (1/100th) Moderns collection. All the AFV models have been 3D printed, the figures are Battlefront Team Yankee miniatures.

Two Scimitar CVR-T Light Tanks and a Platoon of BTR60s

The whole collection in my IKEA cabinet. Note the centre two Chieftains are the most recently printed

IPMS Avon

I've been to this primarily modelling show the last two years. Each year there was a small wargaming representation but nothing to really write home about.

This year I swore I wouldn't bother, but as Colette and I were at a loose end and looking for a day out we decided to head down to Bristol and I'd take a look around whilst she raided IKEA.

This year I was pleasantly surprised. There were a good few demo/participation games, a bring and buy and a good mix of wargame traders amongst the kit vendors.

Another Waterloo re fight amongst others.

On Rob Broom's Scarab Miniatures stall I found these little beauties and couldnt resist them.

Black Adder Goes Forth in 28mm; Edmund himself, George, Baldrick, Darling, Melchett, Lord Flash and "Bob"! There's even Melchy's drinks cabinet for good measure. What fun!

What did I say about getting diverted?