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Made in se
Mutilatin' Mad Dok






Good day Dakkadakka, long time no see. I have a quite niche question that someone here might have the answer to.

My brother wanted to print his own bases and ran into a problem when he found discrepancies in the actual sizes to the numbers given to describe them. Does anyone have or know where I can find the actual sizes of the old warhammer fantasy bases, to a tenth of a millimeter?

Many of you probably know the stated measurements by heart:

20x20 mm infantry
25x25 mm large infantry
25x50 mm cavalry
40x40 mm monster

(I think there was a 50x50 mm as well?)

I have noticed before that the actual dimensions don't fit exactly though, and have a few pictures to demonstrate (I really hope these will display here):

(Note, the spider riders are on the cavalry bases that came on a sprue specific to the battle for skull pass box set, that's why they are slightly different from other cavalry bases)

First picture: 6 "20x20" should amount to 120 mm obviously, but they are a tiny bit thinner than that. 5 "25x25" infantry bases should be as wide as 5 cavalry bases, but they are slightly leaner than that, and the spider riders' even thinner than that. Second picture: both of these bases should be 25 mm wide. Third: 5 spider rider cavalry bases are as wide as 6 small infantry bases.

Obviously, I have a ruler and eyes myself, and I will try to get as accurate an answer as I can. But if this is a question that someone else already found the answer to I would very much like to hear it.
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Made in gb
Decrepit Dakkanaut




UK

Honestly for a rank and file game that moves in whole inches, the difference in base size of 1mm or so isn't going to break things at all. You'll have more inaccuracy just moving parts by hand over the board.

It's the same as how GW's 60mm base is something like 61mm in reality and I believe can vary depending on when you bought it.


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Made in se
Mutilatin' Mad Dok






Honestly, you are right, and I said as much to my brother when he first raised the issue. And the "issue" isn't one of rule compliance to the movement rules but one of avoiding visible gaps in formations, which can happen when the difference between description and actual size is closer to a whole mm, as with the cavalry base width.

But another compounding issue is one I already demonstrated in my example pictures, with two different sizes of the cavalry base: if the exact dimensions changed over time, there is even less point to trying to emulate the exact make of the base. And this may have happened with the other bases as well, so I think just going for the given measurements is for the best.

Raising this question elsewhere, I did however find someone who actually had this exact problem, and I can share what he found, if anyone else wants to know:

measuring the 20x20 mm square base:

height 3.3mm
footprint 19.9mm x 19.9mm
then there's a slight bevelled edge on the top platform...
top platform before bevel ~18mm x 18mm
top platform after bevel ~17.5mm x 17.5mm

If you want to print your bases as close to the originals as possible, you could do a lot worse than those numbers!


 
   
Made in au
Anti-Armour Swiss Guard






Newcastle, OZ

The cavalry bases are closer to 24mmx50mm.

You can fit 5 of them across in a 120mm wide tray, which you couldn't do if they were actually 25mm.

(My old cavalry trays from my WHFB days were (internal measurements) 120mmx50 and 120x100 (5x2 and 5x4). The 5x2 trays also doubled for small archer unit trays (12 archers on 20mm bases)

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Made in us
Brigadier General






Chicago

Yep, the cav bases were noticably smaller, but it does make them easier to rank up.

Anyone playing games with square/rectangle bases and movement trays should check for fit before they paint their base edge. Sometimes with aftermarket bases they're actually a smidge big or they fit so tight that painting would make them to big so you might need to sand the base edges a bit.

Unrelated, but interesting, the top of a standard 25mm round GW slotta base and the inside of a Privateer Press style 30mm round lip base are the same area having a 23mm diameter The 30mm is of course more forgiving of figures hanging over and less tippy, but you don't actually gain any basing space.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/11/23 13:22:20


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Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut





 Eilif wrote:
Yep, the cav bases were noticably smaller, but it does make them easier to rank up.

Anyone playing games with square/rectangle bases and movement trays should check for fit before they paint their base edge. Sometimes with aftermarket bases they're actually a smidge big or they fit so tight that painting would make them to big so you might need to sand the base edges a bit.

Unrelated, but interesting, the top of a standard 25mm round GW slotta base and the inside of a Privateer Press style 30mm round lip base are the same area having a 23mm diameter The 30mm is of course more forgiving of figures hanging over and less tippy, but you don't actually gain any basing space.


I should think them being incrementally smaller than advertised is less of an issue than them being larger - which of course could be fixed with a few strokes of a file.

I don't generally have unit-specific movement trays, and all of them have a bit of "give" not just for variation in base manufacturers, but also because some of the more dynamic poses don't allow a perfectly seemless fit.

Slightly O/T: many years ago a friend of mine (who is an excellent painter) was so impressed by my LotR High Elf spears that he offered to paint them for free (these were the metal ones). I immediately took him up on the offer, but as part of his painting project, without asking my permission he changed their orientation on their bases to be more "artistic." They looked great, but there was no way they would fit on a movement tray.

Re-re-basing them was a fraught procedure, I tell you.

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Made in fi
Dakka Veteran





I would print any custom rectangular bases at "official" size instead of actual size because the latter weren't always accurate and often varied a little between batches. I remember making movement trays for my Empire army back in the day and being surprised that a tray I made for halberdiers was too tight for spearmen despite both having the same base size

Cavalry bases were actually 24x50mm or 23x50mm depending on year but I would print them at 25x50mm so that I could use the same movement trays as I would for 25x25mm (although as mentioned above 10 cavalry used to fit on 120x100mm tray which was useful for Empire). The extra millimetre for making bases official size also helps with ranking cavalry models.

If you are designing a full set of rectangular bases, you need

20x20
25x25
40x40
50x50

20x40
25x50
40x60
50x75
50x100
60x100
100x150

(20x40 and 40x60 were extremely rare base sizes and used by roughly 2 models each so you can probably live without them)

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/11/24 16:21:45


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Made in au
Grizzled Space Wolves Great Wolf





The battery in my callipers is dead so I can’t measure them... but if I were making them I’d probably take the nominal size (20mm, 25mm, 50mm, etc) and minus off 1% or maybe 0.5%. That will be enough that they shouldn’t have a problem fitting in to-size movement trays, but not so much smaller it’s going to make a difference to gameplay.
   
 
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