As I wrote in an earlier post, like many others, I generally prefer to mount, pin, or otherwise affix my minis to a cork when painting. My first small improvement to this was to glue a washer to the bottom for added stability. With my newest round of miniatures (my new Tengu warband for Bushido... soon to be blogged about) I found I needed to do a bit more...
With the Tengu, I decided to try out some pre-made resin bases by Secret Weapon Miniatures. Since I wanted to get on the gaming table quickly with these, and also because some of the Tengu are pretty big and heavy, I decided to try gluing and pinning the minis to their new bases immediately to see how painting them on their bases would work. For transport, I also wanted to try magnetizing their bases and heading to and from my local game store using a metal baking tray (given their size and winged shape, they don't easily fit in my Infinity Battlefoam bag).
Of course, pinned and glued to their bases meant that I couldn't easily then affix them to my painting corks. While stewing on this problem, the solution came from my lovely wife: glue an additional washer on the other side!
As I'd already inset the rare earth magnets (2 for a 30mm base, 3 for a 40mm as shown above) this was a perfect solution! The rare earth magnets are ridiculously strong so there's no chance of the mini slipping off the cork. With the extra stability already provided by the washer on the other end of the cork I was back in business!
As for painting minis pre-attached to their bases, I'm not quite a convert, but fortunately these particular resin bases raise the mini up just enough that I can still get my brush into most of the hard-to-reach places even with the base in the way.