I’ve been doing some cleanup of old stuff and came across the collection of Warhammer models from when I was a teenager. They were kept in old shoe boxes and time had not been kind to them. There were some breakages of arms and plenty of bits of paint knocked off. I didn’t really want to put them back into the boxes if I was going to keep them for much longer. Luckily the Internet (in this case Reddit I think) had plenty of solutions on how store figures. My favourite was to glue little earth magnets onto the bottom of the figures and stick them to some metal. It did take a few tries to get it right.

The first thing I tried was a set of Magnetic Sheets. These are A4 slightly magnetic self-adhesive sheets and the fit very nicely into the 4L Really Useful Boxes I brought. Unfortunately, the models did not stick very well at all. The lightweight plastic ones started sliding if the box was tipped over 30 degrees or so; and the metal ones hardly gripped at all. Not quite what I was looking for.

Another idea I had seen online was to use the magnets but place the figures in something that would stop them sliding, such as guide holes in a piece of MDF. Since I happened to have some lying around I thought that was worth a go. If it worked I would need multiple guides so I thought I would mark out a template for where the holes should be drilled.

With the template and a handy permanent marker I transferred the hole pattern to another piece of MDF and drilled out 1” holes. Drilling out the holes was a bit tedious. But sometime later I had a lovely guide glued onto one of the magnetic sheets.

This looks pretty spiffy. With some test models in I tried the tip test. The box went to about 45 degrees before the models started falling out. To be fair, this was an improvement over just the magnetic sheet, but still not what was desired. Also, the guide was very limiting, in that only models on the smaller 1” could be stored. Time to abandon this one and try again.

At this point I was getting a bit tired of searching amazon for magnetic sheets and thought it was time to do what I should have done in the beginning. Taking a plastic and metal figure that had the magnets in the base I went to my local Home Depot looking for any metal the figures would stick to. This was really interesting as it was a good reminder to me that not all metals are magnetic :) I found some steel hobby sheets with good ‘sticking power’ but they were relatively expensive to buy. But after surreptitiously tapping every shiny surface in the store I found that some thin sheets sold for duct lining was perfect. It was cheap, plentiful, and could be cut by a pair of tin snips.

As an added bonus, the thin sheets could be put on top of the magnetic sheets, so no glue was required. As you can see, both plastic and metal figures stuck wonderfully to this. The boxes can tip to 90 degrees without the models moving at all, and most of them still stick upside down. (There are a few bigger ones that fall of, but that’s not really a problem).

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with this solution. I have 4 boxes done so far, and it really is nice to know the models will keep safe from damage now.