As you may have noticed, I dabble in the three-color style every once in a while. For this purpose I got a bunch of Foundry paints, which come in triplets. In practice that means that instead of needing to find a single pot, you have to find all three to do anything useful.
Normally, I store my paints in a variety of boxes with larger or
smaller compartments. This is not very ideal for the Foundry paints,
because the compartments are too large and the paint pots get mixed up
and finding the right one becomes a tedious chore.
Luckily, Feldherr recently introduced a new foam tray with round cutouts. This is actually meant for Vallejo -style dropper bottles (which I also use), and I decided to order one to see how it'd work out. Once I got it, I found out that the holes were just big enough to be used with the Foundry pots. The fit is a bit tight, but it works. Very old GW paints (which I still have and they work splendidly even after 30 years -- try that with the new ones) and Coat d'Arms paints use the same size bottle. Miniature Paints glass pots are really slightly too big, but you can fit one or two in if you really have to.
The only problem with the tray is that as foam it's a bit floppy, especially loaded to the gills with paint pots... So instead of attaching it to a normal foam bottom, I decided to stick it on a piece of hardboard. And to better facilitate fishing the tray from a deep box or drawer, I decided to put on a wooden handle as well.
Here's how that worked out.
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Here's the new Feldherr paint tray ready to be stiffened up a bit. |
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Measure twice, cut once. |
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Adding the handle. |
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Maybe I should invest in a power saw... but where would I store that? |
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Ok, the parts look fine. Now put everything together. |
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Drill some holes. |
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Add glue and screws. |
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And finally stick the actual tray on there. |
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Ta-daa, we're done. |
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And the finished product loaded with Foundry paints. |
I'm pretty happy with the tray. I could actually fit almost all my Foundry paints on it. In retrospect, 4mm MDF or plywood would have been better than hardboard, but that's what I had at hand. Grabbing by the handle it feels a bit wobbly, let's see how it holds out in use.
Note that with the handle it won't really fit into Feldherr bags anymore, but I don't travel with paints anyway so this is not an issue for me.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Copyright 2003-2021 Mikko Kurki-Suonio
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