Monday 31 August 2015

Bandua Paint Rack and Paint Table review

Feeling all fired up from shifting house, I decided to improve my painting space, adding a paint rack and painting tray. Here's the new set up.

This was my old way of storing paints, and heaps of other stuff. Not very tidy and hard to find things!!

Having seen a few paint racks on other people's blogs, like this one on Kerry's blog (another New Zealand Napoleonic gamer), I decided to look around for something suitable. Given I have a variety of paints, in different shaped bottles, pots etc, I needed something flexible in what it could hold. I eventually settled on this Artai paint rack from Bandua, who make a range of pieces.

I also got this painting tray/table, as it's nice to be able to lift everything out of the way easily.

These pieces come in wooden parts which you clip together. All went together easily enough.

Here's the paint rack, which also comes with a neat brush holder. I didn't bother using any glue on this and it seems ok.

The paint brush holder hooks into the back of the paint rack, but can also detach and stand separately if you want (see packaging photo above).

And here's the paint tray. I needed to glue the side pieces of this with wood glue, and held the corners with a couple of pieces of tape while it dried.

I'm very happy with these items and should have got them years ago! Good price and it will save a lot of wasted time by having the most frequently used paints and brushes close at hand and easily accessible. The paint table will also be convenient if I'm taking my painting tasks to someone's house for painting sessions.

Tuesday 18 August 2015

New house and new cavalry

I'm back again at last! The house shift is finally complete, and we are gradually getting things in order again. Here's the new refreshments area where strategy can be plotted.

And what do you see in the below picture? It's very strange but most people see a double garage.

However what I see is a L-shaped wargaming table measuring 14 feet by 12 feet :)  So that this...

...becomes something like this. Each square is a square foot, or 30cm. It's good to have some long term plans! Somewhat smaller tables fit in another room for more regular gaming of course! I've also found some excellent folding trestle tables, 60cm by 180cm. The setup below will take 10 of them...

New figures on the workbench too. More Austrian cavalry from Perry in the back, and in front are Polish cavalry from Murawski enterprises. Murawaski Poles have an amazingly small amount of flash compared to Perry, very nice indeed. Looking forward to getting these into action, but likely I'll finish off the Austrians first.