This week we have a break from painting less because I didn't paint anything and more because like I mentioned last week, I have larger things going on in the background. Also, as I've saidtyped at least a few times here that I like making tools so here we go.
I generally paint my minis and other bits stuck to the top of spice jars. These might seem big but I like them a lot. I also go through a lot of spices. Unfortunately, when I have to paint something near the base of the mini, the large tops get in the way. Sharp-eyed readers may have spotted a dowel among these recently. While dowels allow more angles of attack, I find them much harder to manipulate with my comically big hands. I also hate that I cut them so terribly unevenly with my razor saw because I don't have a more proper tool. Sanding them flat might work but these are oak which is difficult to sand and even then a big metal fig on the top is still pretty likely to tip over. This tool keeps the figs upright and means I can be lazy and not sand them. Win-win!
These are pretty much what you might expect. A couple layers of chipboard with holes cut in them are glued to the top and bottom of a couple pieces of cardboard. I also took some chunks of square-ish XPS foam to the inside corners to give a little more strength. So far this guy has been working pretty well.
Way back in the heady days of January of this year, full of hope and optimism before 2020 went to shit, I built a new paint rack to replace the older jankier one I'd built a year and a half previously before I started binge buying paints. It's served me fairly well since then though I ended up doing a serious revision after my Pro Acryl expansions arrived in slightly larger bottles. I ripped the glued-in racks out on the left side and remade them in pseudo-configurable format with a long horizontal piece and a shorter piece at the height of the paint bottles vertically.
The idea was that the paint bottles end up holding most of the weight and that the dividers are really there for organizational purposes. This worked less well in practice partially because there's no guarantee that there are lots of bottles in the correct sizes in a given row but mostly because I re-used the chipboard dividers which are nowhere near rigid enough. It also got extra annoying when all of the larger bottles were in play and I had to put them back. This situation was passable, if just, for the last few months.
I kept the idea that the dividers should be configurable, sort of future-proofing them from variably-sized paint bottles for the future paints that I'll inevitably buy. I swapped the chipboard for Readi-Board which is a) cheap, b) relatively easy to work with, and c) something I have a lot of on hand since I use it enough. It isn't ideal for this usage, sadly, since it is not super rigid and has more thickness than I'd like--3/16" if you're wondering. The middle support shares the load with the two ends which has so far prevented a lot of sagging. A section of craft stick glued to the bottom of each support keeps everything reasonably flat.
Construction is basically a double thickness cardboard backing with taller 1 1/2" walls which makes taller bottles a little more secure. The previous two versions had a glued footprint but his time around I left those off and it leans back on something sturdy. A coupla piles of blue tack keep it upright which I'm sure will fail hilariously some day and I'll regret everything. This has the added benefit of freeing up desk space which I always seem to be short of.
This frame should be configurable enough to not need to be rebuilt for a while. The only thing that'll prevent long-term use, the most likely thing as it were, is if I buy way too much paint to fit. Someday if I can get my hands on the gear and materials, I'd like to replace the dividers with something more appropriate.
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