Using Shelf Liner for transport boxes

    In a very useful comment (and some private follow up) to my post in July about using Really Useful Boxes for transporting my troops, Bob Chicka mentioned the use of non-skid shelf liner to prevent slippage of the figures. Actually, he meant using metal unit bases with magnetic stands (or vice versa), and then placing those in the boxes resting on the shelf liner for organization and prevention of slipage. Now,  Czar Barry has been using something like this with his boxes, but it just didn't click with me (I used strips of anti-skid outdoor tape in my old hard plastic boxes, which worked fairly well, but was rather expensive as well as being a nuisance to cut. I've contemplated going to magnetic bases with steels sheets in the bottoms of the boxes, but I have well over 10,000 troops at this point, so the amount of time and money to do that would be very substantial indeed. So, the shelf liner alone would probably provide a much faster and economical anti-skid solution for my purposes.

A trip to my local Walmart led to the discovery of 5 colors of non adhesive anti-slip shelf liner. Pictured are Sage, Black, Summer Blue, Red Sedona, and Taupe. Now, I'm all about color, plus I like to color code my armies for storage and transport (such as Blue for French, Green for Russians, Black for Prussians, Red for British, Taupe for Austrians), so I bought a roll of each (plus an extra roll of the blue and green, not shown). Get it before the hoarders, I always say!  :-)

This particular product is "Select Easy Liner" by Duck Brand. Their website lists 3 additional colors: Chocolate, Warm Yellow, and White. It sells for about $5 per 10 foot roll at Walmart.

It turned out that my 8.1L Really Useful Boxes are exactly 12" long, same as the width of the rolls of shelf liner. Viola! The boxes are 9.5" wide, so I decided to see if my trusty paper cutter would work to cut very precise sheets very quickly for the bottom of my boxes. Keep your fingers well clear of this baby! As you can see, the thickness of the easy liner just fits the paper cutter...

  

and the surface friction of the liner makes it really easy to cut it into perfect 12" x 9.5" sheets! I got 12 sheets per roll, with a piece about 5" wide left over from each roll.

Even better, the cut sheets actually do fit the boxes perfectly!

In about an hour, I chopped up five rolls into 60 sheets! Look kind of like place mats, eh? Cost of the liner is less than 50 cents per box.

The Infantry of the Young and Middle Guard have volunteered to demonstrate the high coefficient of friction of the shelf liner.

The dimensions of the Really Useful Box also suit my mounting scheme very well, as you can see. Laying another sheet loosely on top of the figures would probably keep them in place even better for transport; I may try that, too.

Well, I hope some of you find this post useful. Say, it just occurred to me this stuff would be ideal for lining the boxes I use to store my Starships as well!

Peter