Home Made Flight Stands How to..?

I thought I'd show how to go about making the cheap flight stands that I've designed for air warfare games. They only take a few minutes to put together, are made from easily obtainable bits and are very inexpensive. Including the glue, bases, wire stand and dice frame, I think they are only about 10p per base, so pretty good value. They are also adaptable to whatever rules you are using, so I can do hex bases with one dice frame for Bag the Hun or square bases with a double dice frame for Wings at War, for example. Anyway, here's what you will need:

• 30mm x 3mm Hex Base - available from Warbases or similar
• A 7mm mdf dice frame - optional (as above)
• A 40mm wire stand - I use 40mm wire spears with the tip clipped off.
• A pin vice and drill.
• A pen and ruler.
• Superglue - I use the gel version.
• A 1/600th scale aircraft - e.g. Tumbling Dice Starfighter

Step 1

Assemble the aircraft, cleaning off any flash and adding any components.

Step 2

Mark up the hex base with the ruler and pencil for drilling.

Step 3

Drill at the centre point right through the base, taking care to make the drill angle perpendicular.

Step 4

Glue in the wire stand but be careful to make it flush with the underside of the base to avoid 'wobble'

Step 5

Glue on the dice frame (optional) taking care to line it up with the stand and hex base edge.

Step 6

Drill a matching hole in the underside of the aircraft model about 2mm-3mm deep.

Step 7

Glue the model to the stand, taking care to line it up in the vertical and horizontal.

Step 8

Undercoat with primer ready for painting, otherwise the mdf will soak up the paint.

There's no reason why this wouldn't work with larger scale models in 1/300th or even 1/144th scale and you could make the bases or flight stands any size that you want, for example, 100mm hex bases and 100mm wire stands. In fact, I might just have a go at this, as I have some 100mm tall steel pikes that would be ideal as heavy duty stands for 1/144th scale planes. You could even texture the bases if you wanted to, to represent the in-theatre terrain, or just paint them to match a sky blue hex mat.

Very simple.