Building a paint rack Tutorial by:Nesbet

Monday, November 8th, 2010  Nesbet miniatures

Let me show you the device that will hold all my paints (hopefully, soon) wich I had begin building last week:

To build this one (that's unfinished, BTW) I used a single 1x2" wood stick, a box of 1 1/2" screws and a silly amount of plastic tube clamps. If you click in the image, you'll see that the grey things that hold the pots are just those clamps used to attach tubes on the roofs/walls. =D

How did I get to these idea? Quite curious.
Wasting my time on the internet, I found the amazing Miniature Scenery racks. Yeah, they are freaking AMAZING. You have just to glue them and voilà! The thing is I don't have 250+ USD to buy such a amazing combo of racks, neither the space to field it. After realizing that, one day walking on the street, I passed near an Rexel Electra shop. I saw the glass cabinet trhough the window and discovered those things. No idea how to call them in english. I bought one (yeah, one! think in the face of the seller) to measure and run some tests. Short story: size A was to small for the citadel pots and size B was much too big and it would be a waste of space.

So, I thought about changing all those awkward pots for dropper bottles. I use to dilute a bit my paints, and I like mixing them. And I hate wasting things. Don't get me wrong, it is not about being Scrooge, it is about control, and not wasting insane amounts of paint, letting it dry in those pots! I found cheap empty dropper bottles here in Chile (in another city, BTW) and buy some to try them.

They fitted pretty OK in the clamps, but I didn't liked how it turned out with the paint. As you can see, the paint tend to stay in the inner walls of the bottles, just like in the citadel pots, promoting the paint to dry faster. And I also didn't like the size of the drops; it was just too much paint for one drop.

Well, I always hated the screw tops paint pots and loved the old old OLD citadel paint pots, back from the years of the 2nd or 3rd editions of WHFB. After some research, I confirmed that nowadays, Coat d'Amrs, Privateer Press and Wargammes Foundry still use those amazing paint pots.

So, I decided to discard the idea of the dropper bottles and try to get the pots I always loved xD

I started searching for anyone selling the pots, empty with a price more affordable than CdA (5 pounds for 10 pots with 30% for shipping O.o!). A very nice user from Warseer, Verm1s, told me (in a thread I started in WS) about an oline shop that sell the pots for only 0,21 pounds each (if buying more than 100, that is my case).

The thing is, that *@#€&! store don't want to sell the 120 pots I want, because they only send to Europe and the US. ¬¬U
I'm now thinking what to do in order to be able to buy these freaking pots!! I don't have any relatives over there and after begging the chick from the store to let me buy the pots, all I got was:

I'm afraid we only post these pots to Europe.

Sorry,

Linda

Well, in the meantime, while figuring it out, I'll be able to complete the rack and build its sister!
I intend to add 2 or 3 more ranks, to make the rack hold 51 or 60 pots. I haven't decided yet, but I think I will make two 60-pots racks, in order to have all my paints there and enough room for the next 20 colours I would like to buy in the near future.

What do you think about it? Have you ever built a rack for your paints? What do you think about mine?
Any idea on what should I do to buy the pots? 51, 60 or 68 pots per rack?

See ya next time!!