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This year I put together a Disciples of Tzeentch army for AoS, and after unhappily trying foam for transportation I experimented with magnets which have worked great! Now that I'm starting my Eldar army I want to do the same thing, but I'm running into issues with the clear flyer bases. Since they are flat on the bottom, I can't easily put some green stuff and a magnet beneath them for transport. I want to keep my army legal, but something will need to be done with these bases!

Right now I am working on a Warlock Skyrunner and a Wave Serpent, which have 30mm and 60mm bases, respectively. My initial thought was to glue the clear stem into the clear base like normal, but then glue the bottom of the clear base onto the top of a regular base (a 40mm Games Workshop base for the Warlock Skyrunner and a 3" Reaper Miniatures base for the Wave Serpent are the closest sizes I could find). This seems like the most stable solution, and the base sizes are only slightly bigger than normal. The backup solution would be to cut the bottoms off the clear stems and glue them directly to the correctly sized regular bases, but I'm not sure how sturdy this might be.

So that's the situation. I would love to know if anyone has tried either of these approaches before, and how it turned out!

I put magnets in the body of my bikes, and at the top of the flight stems. Works for bikes/vypers.

For tanks I’ve not found a solution I like. Right now they are just dry fit on the pegs, so I can take them off the stands for transport. While moving them around the table I just need to be careful not the let the stand fall out when I pick them up.

For a magnet tray solution I’d worry that everything would be too top heavy. If you want to be precise about base size, you could just drill holes in the base plastic of the flight stands. Then instead of leaving them clear (where you would see the magnet/work) just cover them with whatever you use to base your infantry.

I use the regular black plastic GW bases for my jetbikes and grav tanks - the 32mm for the jetbikes and 60mm for the grav tanks, since they're about the same size as the clear flat ones. When I fit the clear stems to them, I drill a hole in the base and push the peg on the bottom of the stem through the hole with glue, which I think gives a sturdier fit than cutting the peg off and gluing it down. Though I only use the clear stems for the jetbikes. I wanted a more secure mount for the grav tanks, so I mount nuts into the grav tank body and a machine screw sticking up through the base, and screw the tank onto it.

 Bellerophon wrote:
I use the regular black plastic GW bases for my jetbikes and grav tanks - the 32mm for the jetbikes and 60mm for the grav tanks, since they're about the same size as the clear flat ones. When I fit the clear stems to them, I drill a hole in the base and push the peg on the bottom of the stem through the hole with glue, which I think gives a sturdier fit than cutting the peg off and gluing it down. Though I only use the clear stems for the jetbikes. I wanted a more secure mount for the grav tanks, so I mount nuts into the grav tank body and a machine screw sticking up through the base, and screw the tank onto it.

I was thinking about switching my tanks to a nut/bolt system. Seems like it would not be hard to set up, just require a few bucks worth of parts, and make everything far more secure.

Thanks for the ideas! The nut and bolt idea is really interesting to me, seems sturdy and relatively straightforward. I'm going to try to place a sturdier clear stem onto a black base and magnetize that to the hull, but if that doesn't work, it's nice to have a fallback that isn't the flimsy original stem.

My Eldar tanks still use their original stands.

I only made a small change to the model and stand to make them more stable.
I enlarged the mount hole in the hull bottom to 3mm from the 1mm it was. This enables it to sit 5mm or so further down the shaft, and be a lot more stable.
With the old hybrid Fire prism, I also had to move that mounting hole back an inch or so to get the centre of balance for the heavy-as-gak turret.

My jetbikes use more or less the same system. Larger mount hole (these were pre-ball socket stands). The shining spears, though, since they were converted from DE Jetbikes (newer style) still use their ball-top mounts. The stands are popped out for transport.

Has anyone used using spherical magnets+Bearing?


Im considering getting some for when I do my bikes.

My theory is to have a ball bearing drilled into the bottom of bike/vehicle and have a spherical magnet at the and of the stand so the model can be made in cool poses. But does it work/look cool?

One issue is going to be lack of friction and torque. So you either need crazy strong magnets, or things are going to droop.

For my ball/socket modern bikes I just filled the socket with green stuff and a disk magnet, and use the same basic stem with a magnet on top as my old bikes.

 Nevelon wrote:
One issue is going to be lack of friction and torque. So you either need crazy strong magnets, or things are going to droop.

For my ball/socket modern bikes I just filled the socket with green stuff and a disk magnet, and use the same basic stem with a magnet on top as my old bikes.

I was thinking of investing in some high grade N52 magnets for this job.
Seen GSW selling some so im curious.

http://www.greenstuffworld.com/en/125-rotation-magnets-n52

These look interesting.
From what I can see its standard disk magnet with a 3.5mm+ diamiter and then a spherical magnet.
The eldar tanks are quite heavy so will probably need the bggest one. I dont play x-wing so dont know how those compare to 40k scale wise.

this place does similar for X-wing - I was thinking maybe they might work well for jetbikes also but have not pulled the trigger yet to try them out

https://themagnetbaron.com/collections/x-wing-flight-stands-hobby-repair-kits/products/starwarsmedium

You can easily put self-adhesive magnetic foil on the bottom of the flight bases and glue the flight base stems into the bikes.
That looks better if you give the flight-bases the same treatment as regular bases in your army of course.

For the hover tanks I use 60mm bases with - seen from the front - an H shape out of plasticard on them, which connects to the base of the hovertank mechanically and is held in place snugly with a pair of magnets.

When clear flightbases fail - and they do tend to break at times - I just use regular bases with brass rod as a replacement.