Fun with cardboard - a low tech storage boost for 2mm figures

As you will have gathered I'm a fan of the Really Useful Box as a storage solution. My go to boxes are the four and nine litre capacity ones as they take two or four hobby trays respectively. The hobby trays each have fifteen spaces measuring just over 60mm by 60 mm and 30mm deep. For two millimetre figures it's that last dimension which is problematic. Well not really problematic, more overly generous. I simply don't use the entire depth of the tray to maximum benefit. For the 2mm Altar of Freedom project two nine litre boxes don't quite give me enough storage space and a lot of the space available is wasted. This vexed me as I needed more storage while at the same time I had unusable storage capacity staring me in the face!  The question was what to do about it.  As always I turned to a do it yourself solution.  I considered a few options, I dismissed cutting trays down to allow extra trays per box as too costly and probably impossible to do neatly and turned to my old stand by ...cardboard.

The thing about my homemade 2mm figures is that even with a 2mm MDF base and standards mounted on top of the matchsticks the average height of an infantry base is well under 1cm, nearer to 6mm in fact.  So there is space to double up in each compartment in a tray.  What I didn't want to do was damage the flags of the lower layer by standing a second base directly on them so I came up with a cunning plan.

The aforementioned cunning plan in the flesh

A quick bit of basic mathematics told me how many more compartments I would need to free up.  This was assuming that I could only stack infantry, artillery and cavalry bases two deep (Generals and HQ's have oversized flag poles and won't stack).  Then it was out with the scissors and Stanley knife and straight edge.  Trebian at Wargaming for Grown Ups will be proud of me I'm doing proper grown up craft stuff with sharp tools and still have all my own fingers!  The idea was to create a 60 x 60mm surface supported all round on 15mm 'legs'  (these would sit around the MDF bases of the first layer of troops)  a small hole in the centre of the 60 x 60 surface allows the mezzanine floor I'd created to be easily removed to get at the lower tier of troops.  The first one was carefully measured and test fitted before being used as a template for the rest (that's high tech talk for 'you draw around it and then cut more of the same shape out').  Four score lines later and a bit of gentle bending and hey presto.

The master copy for use as a template

The final rough shape

These work exactly as wanted and have given me a low tech, low cost storage extension solution, which pleases me immensely, especially the low cost part.  

The final item in use ...Simples!

In other news I am still testing positive for the 'Rona but the viral load must be dropping off as the line is much thinner on today's test.  Hopefully I will be clear tomorrow and can rejoin polite society (if they will have me).