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Afternoon guys,

looking to start pinning components to cork to allow ease of airbrushing before the final construction of the mini. Have sourced a decent pin-vice and pinning materials, now just need something to pin to! I'd though about wine bottle corks but they seem a little small for this purpose. Where else could I source larger pieces guys? Preferably in bulk.

Thanks

Find your local home brew shop.They should sell large demijohn corks by the bag full. If you want something even bigger you could try floristry oasis.

I use plastic bottlecaps from coke bottles. The cap is filled with hotglue for some weight and when I drill holes through to insert the pins the rubbery consistency of the glue grabs the pins and lock the into place.

You can always bind like 3-9 of them together into a cork cube, glue em with wood glue or whatever so that they dont topple over when you are using it.

I personally use bigger cork tops from the hobby shop.

Cork floor and wall tiles are readily available, although a bit expensive these days and can easily be cut and glued into any size/shape you want.

Also these things are great, I found them in Poundland once in packs of a dozen for £1.00. I bought them all.
They made good enough drystone walls for 15mm scale games with a bit of work..
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/18-x-Stikatak-Cork-Expansion-Flooring-Gap-Insert-Strips-/121265005047?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item1c3bf521f7

Cork sanding blocks from B&Q, about the size of a hefty bar of soap. You could chop one in half of its a bit too cumbersome.
£1.98 or some such, bought one yesterday.

 Desubot wrote:
You can always bind like 3-9 of them together into a cork cube, glue em with wood glue or whatever so that they dont topple over when you are using it.

I personally use bigger cork tops from the hobby shop.

This is also what I do.

Just look for "cork stoppers" and you'll see they come in all sorts of sizes. I tend to prefer the larger ones because it allows me to hold multiple things at a time making batch painting a little less cumbersome.

forgeplanet.com is run by the dude from buypainted - he sells his cork stoppers for a surprisingly reasonable amount. I had bought some from fleabay as well, but they were overpriced (and rather crap (air bubbles)). greenstuffworld.com is another good one, his cork cones are larger than forgeplanets

I don't particularly like pinning into corks. I've used champagne corks (flared bottom is more stable, when setting down) and both natural and artificial wine corks, but nothing really did it for me. Biggest issue I had was grip - especially with metal models or larger plastic bits with offset pins. Spraying was a pain, as the parts tended to rotate during manipulation. They weren't flying out all over the place, but they always ended up spinning around on me - the friction simply wasn't enough to fight gravity.

Instead, I keep a cheap, crappy pin vice or two around specifically to serve as a painting handle. When I'm done with a part, I can simply pop the pin into a chunk of foam (even corrugated cardboard works) to let the part dry and chuck up the next bit. Much more stable, even easier to manipulate, cheaper (one time expenditure, a simple pin vice costs no more than a bag of a dozen wine corks from the craft store), and takes up less of my precious storage space (incidentally, I have a collection of wine corks I really should toss out...).

Another thing that works really well are these guys:



They are really cheap (I bought a pack of 50 for less than $10) and work great for things you might not be able to pin; I stick a bunch in a block of styrofoam. If I can't use the clip to hold a part, I'll roll a tiny ball of poster tack to put in the clip and then stick the part to that (it works really well with things like space marine torsos).