Miniature Transport

Everybody’s doing it, even St Duncanhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKg8oPF4xfk; magnets on the underside of your minis and a sheet of something for them to stick to in the bottom of a suitable box,  Really Useful Boxes (henceforth RUB) being one of the more popular box choices because they’re rigid, transparent, and stackable. My one and only beef with this setup is transporting them. OK they stack, so you can carry them loose but What if you’re chucking them in the boot of your car with some other stuff and your stack falls over? What if you work out of your vehicle and don’t want to explain to your boss why the back seat of your car is covered with toy soldiers? What if you’re on the bus/train and you don’t want the local yout mocking your choice to drybrush rather than edge-highlight? How are you packing books and dice?

The obvious answer to this is a bag to chuck your boxes in and I think I’ve found a suitable one, or at least a suitable one for me. The Tabletop Tyrant figure case, it’s also quite convenient because I already own one. I picked it up with some foam back near the dawn of eighth edition to hold my then darling Death Guard. As an army they’re relatively resistant to foam snags, however more recent projects (Eldar you spiky sluts) are killing me.

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My Tyrant Case. That front pocket was the size of a codex, I’ve not tried to fit one of the slightly larger new ones in yet. It’s stuffed with foam here for reference

Box Size	External/mm	Internal/mm	Weight
4 litre Really Useful Box	395 x 255 x 088	348 x 220 x 068	700
9 litre Really Useful Box	395 x 255 x 155	335 x 210 x 140	900
9 litre XL Really Useful Box (7″ small)	395 x 255 x 205	335 x 210 x 180	1000
19 litre Really Useful Box	395 x 255 x 290	315 x 205 x 270	1200
19 litre XL Really Useful Box (LP small)	395 x 255 x 330	315 x 205 x 310	1300

key RUB sizes grabbed from their website. These are variants on their A4 box size

I lifted this table straight from RUBs website and trimmed it down. These are the box sizes I’m into as suggested by Big D in the video linked above. The key bit is they share the same 395mm x 255mm footprint, which is around the internal footprint of the Tyrant bag. The bag itself is fabric with rigid panels so affords a little play when fitting boxes and maybe a bit more protection. A pic will illustrate this nicely:

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That’s a 19L RUB in a tyrant case, which fits almost perfectly. It doesn’t move inside the bag and the zips do up completely. That also gave me a clue to the workable max internal height of the Tyrant case (290mm) with respect to the RUB footprint. I’d tried to measure that internal height manually, but because of the flex in the bags corners I measured anything between 270mm and 310mm. That 19L box will accomodate the tallest of knights, the Cerastus, and I’d guess four knight bases (I only have two knights to sit in it). I don’t have just one massive RUB though, I’ve got two medium ones:

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This was less of a success, two 9L boxes stacked would sit inside the bag but I couldn’t comfortably do it up. Of the five straight edges of the zip track I could do four-and-a-bit which would secure the boxes but leave a little  flap. There’s a couple work arounds to get the bag zipped up entirely, the first is to remove latches and let the lids ‘float’ ontop of the boxes, this is still a tight fit though. The second is to simply remove the lid of the top box. The case has rigid, padded panels so zipping it up fully should protect the contents of the top box in the stack. I’m not sure how useful this config will be as the 9L box has a max internal height of 140mm. Maybe it’s needed for nidzilla or some sort of tank car-park? I hope most infantry will fit in the 4L box at internal height of 68mm.

Unfortunately that’s the three RUB I own at the moment and as is clear, two of them are already in use holding woodstained Eldar and an excessive amount of cotton wool, so I’ll probably order up some new ones. The question is what sizes to fit the most into my bag?  I’ve simplified the table from before:

Box Size	External Height/mm	Stacking Height/mm	example mini
4 litre Really Useful Box	88	80	infantry/beasts/bikes
9 litre Really Useful Box	155	147	big bugs/ dreadnoughts/vehicles
9 litre XL Really Useful Box (7″ small)	205	197	Knight Questoris
19 litre Really Useful Box	290	282	Knight Dominus/Cerastus

External height is the absolute height of a box in isolation, this is not so useful when we’re stacking them though as a box will nest inside the lid of the one below, effectively reducing subsequent box heights by 8mm. Skipping to the end, any combination of boxes should work if we treat the maximum fill height as 282mm and only use the stacking height of each box.

This gives the following permissible combos with the bag completely zipped closed and no mods like lids left off or handles removed:

• 3 x 4L at 240mm of 282mm used
• 1 x 4L and 1 x 9L at 227mm of 282mm used
• 1 x 4L and 1 x 9L XL at 277 of 282mm used
• 1 x 19L at 282 of 282mm used

To me the combination of a 4L with a 9L XL looks most interesting. It looks like the 9L XL has a regular 9L box with a taller lid, which if swapped over would allow 108mm tall minis in one box and 140mm tall minis in the latter granting a further option. Irksome it’s the two I don’t already have.

I reckon that’ll do for this one; it’s a bit of an aside while my work schedule has prevented hands on hobby time. I don’t plan to document making one of these boxes since there’s a whole bunch of impecable guides already out there. I might chuck up a few pics of the bag stuffed with boxes full of minis. Hopefully I did the sum correctly and they’ll fit my case, otherwise I guess I’ll just use one of those bags-for-life stuffed in the store cupboard. On that note does anyone already use a bag to cart magnetic tupperware around? If so I’d be grateful for any insight on bag/box combos that work.