I’m still assembling and painting Orcs, and have enough of them now that I’m sick of shuffling them around a game table manually. Instead of buying a set of GW movement trays and cutting them to size for the larger bases that Orcs use, I dusted off some old Evergreen plasticard sheet I’ve had laying around in the garage. I originally bought it for basing DBA units, which doesn’t take a heck of a lot of plasticard since they’re 15mm troops.
The base of the tray is 2mm white plasticard cut to hold a 6 x 5 ranking of Orcs. The tray edging is 1mm plasticard cut into a 1mm long strip and super-glued in place. Thin styrene cut into narrow strips like this tends to curl a reasonable amount so be prepared to carefully bend it back into a straight line. Look at the larger photo and you may notice some slight wavering along the edges because frankly I wasn’t that careful. A single sheet of styrene built two 6 x 5 Orc sized movement trays, with enough left over to make a small cavalry movement tray for 6 x Goblin Dire Wolf riders.
I’ll wash the trays in dish-washing detergent to clean them, then prime them with a cheap black spray can and matt varnish them lightly to get a nice flat black that will blend into the Orc bases. After all on the game table, nobody will be paying any attention to your movement trays.
The photo also shows I’m about 40% of the way through assembling the second unit of Orc spear + shield warriors. Multi-part regiment boxes take a lot longer to assemble than two part Battalion boxes – that’s for sure.
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Looking nice , i just have had no time of late , to do any modeling :(
When you run out of styrene you have lying around and go to get more, look at styrene strip stock for your rails; it will stay rigid better. Also use styrene solvent glue (plastic model cement etc) which spreads along the styrene by capillary action and softens it briefly it so the two pieces fuse together.
I was cutting up the old style Citadel movement trays and extending them so I needed to match the stock. Their thickness is 1/16″ with 3/16″ high rails (so the rails rise 1/8″ above the surface). The rails are 1/8″ thick at the base but beveled on the outside (so the cross section is a right triangle).
The 1/16″ thick styrene sheet is sold here as as .060″. I guess that’s 1.5mm; the 2mm you’re using is probably a good substitute.
For the rails, I couldn’t find a right triangle cross section. I used L-shaped strip with the open side of the L facing out and filled the interior with putty or wood filler, then sanding to a bevel with a sanding block. This worked fine.
What worked even better though was quarter-round strip. I think the size I used was 0.10″. Glue that down along the edges with the rounded side facing out, and you can use it as is, but I used the sanding block to get a flat bevel.
Have you considered vacuum-forming movement trays? It’s not difficult to do, though the set-up involved would probably only be worth while if you had five or more trays to do.
I have considered building a vacuum forming table in the past, for other reasons but haven’t got around to it yet.
The bigger problem locally would probably be sourcing a reasonably priced supply of heat set plastic sheet…