Basing Experiment

A number of miniatures enthusiasts advocate keeping one's eyes open for everyday items that can be incorporated in miniatures building. One reason is to exercise creative muscle. A second reason might be to instill uniqueness into a piece. The third reason, less fancy and artistic-sounding in nature, is to save money.

As I have recently been customizing Hreoclix for other games, I have been removing them from their dials. Some have an adequate little plastic base already for standing, others do not. But I'd like something better looking. This summer, before I really had things like my Epic Duels project in mind, I came across a number of discarded solar LED garden lights. Obviously thrown out because they didn't work any more and I just started collecting them for different ideas I started having. I'll probably get to some of those in the future, but I'll talk about one I'm in the midst of trying out right now.

One of those discarded lights contained an acrylic rod with bubbles trapped in the middle of it, like this one:

Image from buyeparts.com

The rod, 1-1/8" (29 mm) in diameter, seemed just right for basing miniatures in the Heroclix scale.

I was thinking about how to cut the thing such that I would come out with reasonably straight and level faces on the discs. By had was maybe out of the question. My father-in-law suggested his lathe and I jumped at it. I just eyeballed a thickness I liked, which turned out to be around 3/8" (4 mm). At the thickness I chose, we got 22 discs, and one that was thicker (the piece that was in the lathe chuck).

The cutting did generate heat, enough of it that the discs ended up with rough faces. But, hey, I'm just going to be covering that with paint and maybe some green stuff, so no big deal there. I filed off the roughest parts, but the surface will just look like ground, I think. The only hitch is that I think the best way to attach the minis to the bases I made will be to keep them on the small, almost adequate bases they are on. 

So my first experiment is to dig the smaller base shape into the top surface using my Dremel and a couple of different wood bits. After fitting them in, I have realized that I will want to fill in gaps and such using green stuff (or some other filler) then painting them. But I'm thinking I'd rather do this in batches, so it will happen after I have a few more figures ready to finish in this way. 

Here's the four Star Wars characters mounted and ready for ground work:

Not too bad even as they are, but adding ground effects will look better.

A belated Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all!