Vehicle storage

It's been really wet and windy today, so I've had a day of sorting stuff out, which included getting around to gathering together various cardboard boxes that I have been storing my collection of 1/56th scale WWII vehicles in and putting them into a more permanent storage solution.

I purchased a couple of hard plastic storage boxes from the Really Useful Box company. The ones I bought were the 7 litre boxes which measure:

• External Dimensions: L 400 x W 350 x D 85mm
• Internal Dimensions: L 340 x W 307 x D 70mm

They're great because they are the perfect height for storing vehicles in, come with locking lids and are intended to neatly stack upon one another. Here is a case of German vehicles for North Africa (or possibly Italy).

I put some paper in the base, so that I could mark which vehicle went into which slot. Each slot was created using the foam that comes out of the spaces cut into a figure tray and trimmed to size. It's the pieces of the figure tray that you would normally throw away so that you have slots to store your figures, but I knew it would come in useful one day.

Once the edges of the box were lined, I then started playing Tetris with the vehicles to maximise the number that I could fit in and once happy with the places, started trimming more of the foam pieces (which have an adhesive bottom) and sticking them to the paper around where each vehicle would fit. Here is the start of my British vehicles for the Mediterranean.

I ended up filling six boxes with vehicles and storing them away neatly, which means I now have a bit of space on my shelves, so that I can start the next phase of cleaning and tidying! The missus will be so chuffed!