After realizing last week that throwing all my Warmachine miniatures of a faction into a plastic bag and see them slowly disintegrate isn't the best of ideas, I got into looking at affordable and modular ways to store my miniatures.
The foam bags are all nice, but are often much costlier than I want, especially if I want to expand. Also, I hate the process of finding spots for everything in a foam tray and putting things in and out of their exact positions, along with the wasted space on trays.
So I've come to the decision that I'm going to use some form of magnetic basing. I can pack a lot of miniatures standing in a magnetized tray, and they're secure enough for my uses.
I have three main ideas:
First, there's some nice small plastic cases (example) with flat bottoms at my local hardware shop. I'll buy some of those, line the bottoms with strong magnetic sheets, then base my miniatures with thin steel sheets, something like Litko's flexible steel sheets, which they can cut to the sizes I need. Then just store the miniatures in the trays stuck to the magnet sheets. This is the most modular and cheapest solution, as I simply buy more small cases, and magnetic sheets as needed.
Alternatively, I can buy a small steel toolbox, or a larger toolbox with drawers that's still portable (like this or this). Then put the same magnets I'm using to make an omni-jack out of my cygnar heavy kit on the bottom of my miniatures to secure them.
However, I prefer not to have magnets on my miniatures themselves since I use a steel tape measure and have seen and had accidents with that setup before.
The third idea is a mix. I can steel base my miniatures, as in option one. Buy a metal toolbox as in option 2, then buy a bunch of thin and wide neodymium magnets for the best magnet strength I can get, gluing them to the bottom of the tray/box, then placing the steel based models on that.
And the wildcard is buying a bunch of tiny loose steel balls (for ball bearings, like these) and using a combination of greenstuff and glue to pack as many of them as I can into the bottom of a base, and use that to both weigh down the miniature (increasing stability on the table), and providing something for a magnetic sheet to stick to in the case. Alternatively, I can save myself some time and money by buying thin steel washers, cutting them up with a heavy duty clipper, and gluing them in the empty space under the base.
Also, the drawers on those metal toolboxes are all usually around 2" deep, is that enough for most infantry models?
I have 4 full Warmachine armies that I need to store away, Trollbloods, Legion, Cygnar, and Retribution, and those will only be growing with all the new MKII stuff. More importantly, I've started painting up my miniatures, so I want to keep them safe, but also easily accessible at the same time.
Whew, it's a long post, but I could use any comments or suggestions this community could provide.