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Update: I think I've stumbled on something (and got it to market) before anyone else!

So, having a bucket load of fairly heavy metal models to shift around, I didn't much like the looks of the MDF trays you can get, and wanted something that gripped the base just a little more and was a bit deeper so easier to pick up.

I also didn't want to texture or paint the movement trays. This often gets rubbed off through use, and I didn't much fancy having to sand or glue anything.

So I broke out some high end filament and made a thing... There's no prep work whatsoever on this - it's literally pried straight off the print bed and used straight away. Super convenient.




These will go on sale, with a variety of formations and size options, but I'm not sure about how popular they might be. I'd very much welcome feedback.

Price will be around £5+P&P for a 10-slot 25mm hole frame.

Awesome.

I was eventually planning to get some of the MDF trays you mentioned, but I'm very interested in yours. They look pretty damn good.
Though the price is pretty steep with 5 GBP, around the double of MDF trays.

Yeah, the price is unfortunately a factor of the print time, which is quite long on the quality settings I have.

It's the zero-effort that's the selling point here. It looks nice right off the printer.

Few pics of the production design (slightly flatter):



Stress test (All metal):



Light duty (All plastic):

More trays (price is lower than I thought - about £4 for a 10 man...:

Offset ranks.


Single rank:

3-2 offset 5 model tray:

And here's the clever bit, now it's on sale (couldn't discuss it until then due to design protection shenannigans):

The (to my knowledge) World's FIRST FLEXIBLE MOVEMENT FRAME:





And a kit for linking frames together, flexibly:

32mm version:

I really like it. Do you have a way to order or look at pricing/shipping options?

These look great! Let me know if you want help bringing them to market!

I have never been a fan of movement trays and as a 40K player never saw the need for them.

However for some reason I really liked these the first time I saw them and now I've seen the cool flexible function I think they are awesome.

I think it's the fact they are a really simple design but that they complement the bases and aren't an actual "tray",

Really cool and am tempted to get some for my Astra Militarum.

 doomdreamer wrote:
I really like it. Do you have a way to order or look at pricing/shipping options?

http://www.winterdyne.com/3d-printed-products/

If I still played Id be all over these.

I think with some more tinkering, you could allow them to 'spread' out in addition to piling in.

Although now that blasts are a thing of the past, perhaps its not as needed.

Look great and love the flexible aspect. Will be picking up some in the nest short while for sure.

40 mm frames now up.

This is such a good idea! I've never, personally, used a movement tray but if I ever did these make so much sense!

3-slot 40mm flex frame got done a while back, and finally filling in some of the gaps in the 32mm range with a 3-4-3 offset.

Pics:

Wow these look, awesome man, your paintjobs really make them pop really good idea and so smoothly executed as well.

Uh, dunno if I wanted them to pop! Whole point of a tray is that it shouldn't really distract from the models, but I think that's what you meant? Thanks for the kind words anyway!

35x60 Cavalry frames:




Need to get my lad's Black Knights painted up so I can get some nicer pictures. On their own they're a bit boring.

Neat product idea!

There's now a whole lot of these, thought I'd post up with one of the more interesting pieces (most are exactly what you'd expect) - this one a mixed size frame made by customer request for Imperial Guard / Astra Militarum:

Don't get me wrong lovely bit of kit, but should this product be in this thread section ? Its for finished models not for advertising products.

Forum mod please move it, thx.

May as well use this to respond to the above; I designed and made these, ergo, showing off.

Great stuff!

Any plans to make square ones (not necessarily flexible ones though!) for those of us who still play old-style WHFB?

I have a bunch of WHFB that I plan to play with eventually but getting movement trays for them all is a real pain.

kick start this thing and out it up on every miniforum and subreddit in the land.

The issue with trays for square bases is that you really want a solid bottom with no internal framework. That's slow and thus expensive to print. I may well do exterior frame pieces (much like the old modular trays GW did) for supergluing to a plasticard or MDF bottom, but not likely to do single-piece trays like these.

As for kickstarter, this started off with one machine I won in a Facebook giveaway... I'm now well into double figures on machines, and more are likely sooner rather than later.

The only reason to kickstart would be if production cost was high or I needed significant investment to get a new product out. I do the design work myself (thankyou video games industry), and once you've got a few machines getting a new product produced is easy. So a kickstarter'd just be a glorified preorder with the risk of growing too big too fast and not being able to fulfil. I prefer my current method of doing what folks ask for and just adding each new thing to the lineup. Slow and steady. :-)

Damn, this is fantastic. Gotta agree, kickstart this thing, offer it in a couple different neutral color options (green, brown, grey, black) and/or market it for sale to a company and reap the royalties. This is a sick idea!

Kickstarter's out, for the reasons I mentioned above, but I'll go into more detail below.

Having a choice of colour - again, not something I'd consider effective for printing the time it takes to remove, purge and replace filament and ensure nothing's come loose in the process is an additional cost that would have to go on somewhere- it's far simpler to just let the customer spraypaint the things if that's what they want.

Cost to bring to production of a new item with printing as a manufacturing method is minimal. It's literally just a case of allocating time on a machine. Kickstarter doesn't do anything positive for me at all here - as I said, it'd literally just be a massive order influx which I wouldn't be able to cope with in good time. Mass production (injection moulds) aren't a great solution here - I have 33 currently active individual frame designs (avoiding the ones that use common parts, and not including the other bits and bobs I make) - getting moulds cut for each of those would be hellishly expensive, meaning the kickstarter would have to go huge to cover itself.

It's very, very important to realise that a plastic products kickstarter for a niche market is very likely to make a loss, rather than a profit as you'll be covering large setup costs with a discounted pricing rate. Your calculations need to take that loss into account and your forecasts need to determine when you're likely to break even on it. You could theoretically, if your baseline margin (pre discount) is high enough, break even on the KS, but those margins don't normally take into account tooling costs, or if they do, it's factored by the lifetime of the tool.

Given that MDF frames amd some other printed versions are already cheaper than mine (mine look nice, but that means time, and time means cost), the definite initial loss and time to gain market share are major factors against the idea, especially since I'm already trading, owe nothing and growth is pretty steady without artificially boosting it.

I blather, here, on Facebook, and on Instagram and that's about it. I prefer to keep the personal touch going about stuff where I can answer questions or bounce ideas about (hence a showcase thread rather than a banner ad).