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I have roughly 40 tau drones and there all on clear bases. Anyone have a tutorial , a trick, or anything to do for them? I was thinking smoke effects but that might be too... clunky for that many drones.

Leave them clear, I use straws, cut them to length, tape the top end while pruning and varnishing at the end. Other clear stands like for fliers, I use masking tape.

Edit: look at my Tau gallery, I base the clear stands like the regular ones; some people leaving them clear, but I think that look unfinished and toy like.

yeah that's the feel I get, toyish, unfinished...
maybe ill copy yyah

Yeah, I base mine too, though I tend to avoid armies with flight stands.

One thing with basing them is the clear plastic doesn't like basic glue very much. Giving it some texture (I take sandpaper to them) makes gluing sand to them much easier (I base before I spray). I just hide wrap paper around the pole and tape it closed though, when spraying.

Though I misunderstood Big Mac's comment above and it suddenly strikes me that just putting masking tape on them, trimming it up and applying the glue to the top of the tape would be much, much easier.

Voss wrote:
Yeah, I base mine too, though I tend to avoid armies with flight stands.

One thing with basing them is the clear plastic doesn't like basic glue very much. Giving it some texture (I take sandpaper to them) makes gluing sand to them much easier (I base before I spray). I just hide wrap paper around the pole and tape it closed though, when spraying.

Though I misunderstood Big Mac's comment above and it suddenly strikes me that just putting masking tape on them, trimming it up and applying the glue to the top of the tape would be much, much easier.

my comment above meant= I was using masking tape to cover off the stems, but with the drone stems I found a regular plastic straw from fast food cut down to length fits perfectly and more efficient at the job intended, though you need to cover off the top with a piece of tape when priming/varnishing.

Painter's tape works great for those pegs. And it's got a ton of other uses.

I've used painter's tape to mask assembled bases to preserve the acrylic flight stand and it works great. I've also replaced the whole thing with a conventional base detailed to match the army and piece of 3mm acrylic rod cut to fit. The acrylic rod is cheapish and easy to find on Amazon. I was working with metal Seraphim, so I had to redrill the models. With drones you could probably just glue them right on, and the numbers you're talking about might be worth the mass production of new ones. You could see both on my P&M blog, the tape recent and the acrylic rod a few pages back.

Edit: grabbed some photos from the Gallery:

I put the small round ones on standard bases of a similar size (eg below). Haven't tackled the large cruciform GW one yet (in terms of masking). The others I just masking tape or sellotape.

As others have suggested, drill a hole in a regular base and glue the clear upright piece in, then paint to match your army.

Also, the top peg usually snaps off so clip it off & make the hole in the model bigger. As a plus, because the main part of the stand is cone-shaped, you can push the model on & it'll stay in place with friction meaning you can take it off the base for easier transport.