Introduction to My Method of Making Movement Trays for Warhammer

Well here we have it, a long awaited and promised tutorial on how I make my movement trays. The materials that I use have not really changed that much over the years since I began playing Warhammer, but the way I build them has evolved over the years. This is just one way to make these. There are many other methods, and it is not the cheapest method. If you are looking for cheap, then you probably want to look elsewhere at say GW's modular tray kit or Rendra. This method is my favored method for building trays that can display a very high end detailed army.

 I like using making my own because it allows me to do a number of things in addition to personalizing my army. 

I like my movement trays to serve two purposes:

1.   Accentuate the basing scheme and/or theme of the army.  For example, my Chicago GT, Khorne Demon army was about blood and an over the top demonic like pits of hell thing.  The basing needed to emphasize that  for the bloodletters and other models.  So I even extended that further to the movement trays.  Painting internals of the tray to match the bloody pattern.

Another example, the VC Bashin' Orcs, the theme is beating up skeletons and zombies.  I try to add to the detail of the army by doing this.

2.   Have width to protect the miniatures (It seems there is always a game in a tourney, whether intentionally or unintentionally where your opponent slams his all metal unit into yours. When you spend lots of time on conversion and paint work, you do not want this to happen, especially to your crazy front rank conversions.)

In this particular tutorial, I'm building the movement trays for my Warriors of Chaos army. This is an army that I started several years ago. So now that I'm expanding this army, I am going to build the trays very similar to what I did in the past, ie. the one pictured below.

The main materials:

1.5 mm or 2 mm plasti-card or sheet styrene (Evergreen and Plastruct are just two popular hobby suppliers of this material)

3.2 x 4.8 mm plastic styrene strips.

your favorite glue for plastic

Aves Apoxiesculp

The tools:

Ruler/triangles, steel ruler / Straight-edge, carpenter's square

Marker

Cutting tools

Here you see a picture of one of my existing Warriors of Chaos movement trays. This was built for my Chaos Hounds or a 5-wide Cavalry unit.

The next picture is the underside of the tray. Here you can see the randomness with the Apoxie sculp exposed in areas adjacent to the plastic. When I built this tray, I actually first built the tray and then drilled some wire into the plastic styrene strips on the edges of the tray. The wires are what hold the apoxie sculp in place, similar to the reinforcing steel in concrete. That's a very time consuming and somewhat tedious way to construct the tray.

In the next post, I will begin walking through my new way of constructing the trays, but keeping a similar look as we build movement trays for my two Chaos Knights units.