Friday, May 1, 2020

The Final Form Of My Home Made Magnetic Army Transport

I wanted to put out an update to my last post on building a magnetic model transport system for my Convergence.

Just before Captain Con my wife was kind enough to finish making the bag to carry all of the magnetic bins I built. It's frankly huge, but it carries absolutely everything without any issue.




It's huge! Total size is 16" deep, 24" wide, and about 15" tall. In the above picture it's carrying my dice tray, dice, all of my Convergence and a Blacksmiths Guild Ball team, and my sheet pan/tournament tray (sprayed silver).

The bag is semi-rigid, using some foam internally between the fabric to give some stability and padding. My wife did an outstanding job on it.

I got some flak from my Guild Ball friends for how much room I was taking up in the trunk on the drive up, but its awesome.  It fits neatly in my own car's trunk and will be used for all my local travel from now on. This is significantly easier than when I had to use an old PC carrying strap to bind all my cases together to carry the CoC around locally.

In case you didn't see the last post, here are what the cases look like populated with my stuff:







Conclusions

If you compare this to an actual product of equivalent size, it's about what you'd get in a Magna Rack 1520 from Battle Foam.  The racks plus bag for that is $365 plus shipping.  If you add up total materials for my system, I'm likely looking at about $100 max. Of course, I didn't have to pay for any labor in this creation.

On the flip side, I mentioned to my wife that she could probably pull $100 to $150 for a bag like that for other gamers if she tried to make one and she said in no uncertain terms that it flat out isn't worth it for her labor to charge that little.  Apparently the bag was a bit of a pain in the ass for her to make. She was happy to make it for me, but no one else has my charm to convince her it's worth making another.

If I wasn't married to an extremely talented quilter (and all around amazing woman) I'd probably would have to had been more careful when picking out my bins to make sure I could arrange them to fit in a piece of luggage I could buy rather than having the bag being fabricated to meet the specs of what bins I purchased.

I'm very happy to have done this, and I intend on magnetizing my other armies to use this system going forward, though I already have a bunch of foam so I'm not as motivated to go ahead with that. Plus I plan on just using Convergence for a while anyway.

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