My Base Instincts

One of my blog followers - followers sounds kind of like a religious thing, doesn't it? And its not subscriber because you don't have to pay. Anyway, someone who looks at my blog expressed their empathy over my earthquake experience and all the cleanup afterwards. They live in California, where they have more than their share of earthquakes so they really can empathize with me. At any rate I thought I'd comment on my setup a little, which might prove useful to some of you. When I originally started collecting I determined that all the figures needed to go on bases. Initially my approach was to cut one inch wide strips of balsa wood, which was cheap, and glue the figures to those (see Batman figure on left). If the figure was really big I would cut two inch thick strips of balsa for those. Over time I learned that some figures which were rather heavy would sometimes bend at the joints and fall over, taking part of the shelf with them. I also found that over time the balsa wood would distort slightly, probably due to moisture, and would sometimes just fall over, usually taking other figures with them. So over time I started getting away from the strips of balsa wood and have gone over to shaped pieces of wood that I procure at the craft store (see Superman figure on right). The larger the figure generally the larger the base. A lot of figures got new bases after the earthquake as I was cleaning up the mess. There are still many that have not been changed but slowly but surely I'll probably work through the collection as time passes. Actually I'm glad I got them back on the shelves as quickly as I did because after the earthquake on Tuesday I lost power in hurricane Irene on Saturday and didn't get it back on until Tuesday evening so the basement was really wet and the figures wouldn't have fared very well, especially the ones with cloth capes. Oh well, that was the strongest earthquake we have had in this area in over a hundred years so I'm hoping it doesn't happen like that again in my lifetime.