Bases Galore

These just arrived for me today — a box full of laser-cut MDF sabot bases, from a guy I know only as Catweazle, in Australia. I sent him some vector files for cutting the bases, and he sent me this lot in return. Score!

I haven't sorted them yet, but I imagine that this should be as many bases as I'm likely to need any time in the foreseeable future, unless I really go berserk and start playing gigantic mega-games.

Laser-cut Sabot Bases - a Followup

Click here for Part 1: First look

Here are some of those laser-cut MDF sabot bases from Ponoko in use, after painting and flocking with the same static grass I used on the figure bases.

I've glued light black cardboard beneath; it's sturdy enough to take a bit of wear and tear, but thin enough that it doesn't appreciably add to the overall height of the bases. Plastic card would be usable, but the benefit of cardboard is that it can be glued permanently to the MDF with PVA.

It's thin enough too, that the magnetic sheet I use for storage can still grab the steel of the washers the individual figures are based on.

It's not a strong attraction, but it's enough to keep everything in place against a normal degree of jostling.

For a more rock-solid connection, I can glue a very thin steel shim in the bottom of each cavity, and use a 1mm thick rare-earth magnet to hold the figure in place. That's a strong enough attraction that the whole base can be shaken quite vigorously, and the figures will remain in place. It's a lot of trouble though, and I'd only do it if it was really warranted.

Here's one I've prepared with some steel shim and magnets.

I don't know the exact thickness of the shim, but it's thin enough that I can cut it with a regular pair of scissors. It's just glued in the cavity with a drop of liquid superglue.

The magnet is 10x1mm; I got a batch of them very cheap from China a while ago. I use them mainly for holding figures to the bolts I use as painting holders, which is why this particular one is so grubby. I have some 3x1mm magnets as well, and they're quite strong enough for this purpose, but the wider surface area of the 10mm magnets makes everything a bit more stable.

With the magnets holding everything together, I can pick up the whole base by one figure (if I wanted to be that cavalier with my paint-job) without any risk of everything falling apart.

Note that there's no real reason, except aesthetics, to cut the shims in a circle. A square will do exactly the same job, and is a lot less trouble.

Of course, I could glue the magnets directly to the base of the sabots, but I like to have the option of using them unmagnetized if that takes my fancy. I'm a fan of flexibility in use wherever possible.

Laser-cut MDF Sabot Bases

 I'm a fan of basing my 15mm WWII infantry individually or in small teams on steel washers — I use magnetic sheet in a box for storage and transport, so the figures don't jostle against each other and knock all their paint off.

Individual basing gives you a lot of flexibility about figure placement on the wargames table, but especially in larger games it can be a real pain in the Gentleman's Personal Area to move them all around. That's where sabot basing comes to the fore, allowing me to move entire squads as one until it actually becomes important precisely where the individuals are placed.

 These sabot bases are designed specifically for German sections in the Battlegroup rules, consisting of two teams each: one seven-man element of riflemen, and one three-man element manning the section LMG. I mount the LMG teams as one single figure and another group of two on a larger washer; hence the difference in hole sizes in the LMG team sabot.

I designed the bases layout in CorelDraw, exported the file to SVG, and had the bases cut by Ponoko. They have a making workshop here in New Zealand, and it took about four or five days from submitting the design to receiving the sheet of MDF.

File submission was pretty straightforward, though I did have to make a change and re-submit it, because I initially forgot to set the SVG export file to convert all text to curves — I've used no text, but apparently it's important nonetheless.

This sheet is quite small, only 181x181mm, and it was not inexpensive. I thought it was pretty dear to start with, but it got worse. I had not noticed that even though I was ordering from a New Zealand address to a New Zealand-based workshop, all the pricing was in US dollars, nor that GST wasn't included, nor postage. This little sheet ended up costing me about $NZ50.00, which is far too much.

The image above shows one side of the cutting, the photo to the left shows the other — I don't know which is the entry or exit side for the laser beam.

This side, the dirtiest, is protected by a sheet of adhesive paper.

The paper peels away quite easily, and the protected surface is perfectly clean.

The edges, of course, are burned dark. For this particular purpose, that's advantageous, but that might not be true of other multi-piece construction projects.

I'll glue the MDF to thin card so that the figures don't just fall through, and add some paint and flock. I've used magnetic sheet underneath before, and though it does give the group a little more stability as I move them around, I don't think it's really worth the extra trouble; the figures don't tend to fall out all that often even without the slight magnetic attraction of the sheet.


I'm more than happy with the quality of Ponoko's work, and their service was pretty prompt and relatively trouble-free. However, the pricing is far beyond what I'm happy with, and I doubt that I'll do it again. Or at least, not until the costs get a lot more reasonable.

Click here for Part 2: The finished items

Tin-Plate Tank

Not really tin-plate, but laser-cut aluminium shim.

Annette found this amongst a bunch of novelty items in a stationery shop a few weeks ago, and naturally thought of me. It comes as a couple of small flat sheets plus a turned barrel, and uses tab-and-slot construction.

It's not exactly a fine scale model, but it was quite fun to bend and build. The trickiest thing about it was that reflections from the shininess of the metal often made it difficult to distinguish where anything was when trying to match up the tiny tabs with the equally tiny slots.

She bought me another at the same time, a P-51 Mustang. That'll be next.

Laser-cut Casualty Markers

Continuing in my forays into the wild world of laser-cutting, I've designed these casualty markers designed for use with games like Hail Caesar, Pike & Shotte, Black Powder and so forth.

The idea is that they're used with standard 12mm six-sided dice to indicate the number of casualties a unit has taken thus far.

I've created them in two parts, as you can see at bottom-right: the base, pierced with a hole for the die, and a little collar. The bottom of the base would have some thin card glued to it, so that the die wouldn't just fall through if the base is picked up and moved.

What I haven't quite decided on just yet is precisely how I'm going to assemble them. I have two options in mind:

1. As you can see in the example to the left of this unit of Peasant Rabble, the collar is used to deepen the recess for the die. This has the advantage that it makes it less likely that the die will fall out when the marker is being pushed around the table. Also, it means that there's room to create a little casualty mini-diorama on the other half of the base, which can look quite good on the table and makes the marker feel more like part of the battle scene.
2. In the example to the right, the collar is mounted to one side of the hole pierced through the base, creating two shallow sockets instead of just one deep one. This has the advantage that two dice of different colours can be used, which can be useful for the morale mechanic used in the games I referred to earlier — in which the number of "casualties" can vary within a turn, with only casualties in excess of a unit's "shaken" morale value counting against them in a break test, after which those excess casualties go away. There's an added advantage that the marker can accommodate units with a higher morale value than 6 (though I could also do that with a d8 or d10, or even a d12).

I have a bunch of them cut already, so perhaps I'll just do some of each and see how they go.

Laser Cutting

I've just recently been given access to a laser cutter, and the opportunity to try my hand at designing some stuff for production on it.

I did this little MDF cabin, with a lift-off roof, and some sabot bases for converting my skirmish-based 15mm infantry to use in Flames of War (should that ever be necessary). I just glue some magnetic sheet underneath and trim it flush with the MDF sabots, and Bob's your uncle — the washer-based infantry stay in there quite securely. I'm tempted to do the same for my medieval figures as well, so that I can easily transpose between Hail Caesar and DBA/DBM/HOTT/FoG.

At the moment it's all very simple stuff — proof of concept really, rather than a serious attempt. However, I'm learning already how to achieve what I'm aiming at, and now I'm ready to try my hand at something a bit more ambitious.

I'd like to have a laser cutter of my very own, but even though the price has come down drastically for small desktop models, they're still well out of my reach. Maybe one day.