Miniature Painting Station

I got quite a big board game collection and a ton of miniatures in it that are just gray plastic. To relax I like to paint them and improve my boardgaming experience. However the setup that I had wasn't up to snuff. I used whatever table surface I could find, an old desk lamp and my paints were sorted in the trays that they came in. I wasn't happy with either the lighting nor the storage solution so I decided to make a better setup.

My parents still had a 90cm diameter table lying around that they were about to throw away, and since it's mobile and enough space for what I wanted to do I decided use that as a base.

Step 1: LED Archway

For the lighting I decided to make a double light arch. I used two flat aluminium profiles with following dimensions: 2m long, 30mm width and 2mm thickness. I made two 90° bends in every plate to mount the plates under of the table. The bend are seperated about 165mm from eacht other and I left a little bit over 10 cm at either end, and cut of the rest. I drilled a small hole in the centre of both profiles to connect to each other with a small bolt, and two holes at all the ends. Then I mounted these on the table with an angle of about 55° between the two profiles. with 8 screws total (and one bolt/nut at the top). For the lighting I used 2 LED-strips of 1.5m, connected to a dimmer, connected to a AC/DC (12V) adapter. I mounted these on the underside of the table and connected a long wire so I never need a distributing-plug.

Step 2: Paint Holder

For the holder I decided to place it at the far side of the table from where i'm working in between the LED strips. Since I the maximum working/material area I had available was a 600x300 mm surface I decided to make two identical platforms with a depth of 15cm and an angle of 60° each (for the 90cm diameter table I'm using). In inkscape I designed a platform able to hold 38 small paint vials each with two different diameters (depending on the make of the paint). The vials are sorted in 4 levels and I tried to make it so that the names of the colors remained visible while still holding the paints in place. The result can be seen in the pictures as well as the inkscape svg files. The first one needs to be printed twice, the second one only once.
I cut these on an Trotec SPEEDY 100R in about an hour at the Fablab in Leuven.

Step 3: Result

Here a picture of the final result.
Things I would still like to add eventually:

• a way to fix the paint holder to to table
• a way to store my brushes
• a working surface that fits the table nicely