live StackaRack - customisable plastic paint rack Kickstarter from Spiral Arm Studios

[insaniak]

StackaRack is a customisable plastic rack for miniature paints, designed to hold pots or bottles from any of the major manufacturers.

 

 

Paint collections have a way of growing organically, and most of the current paint rack solutions out there are fixed to specific configurations, and made for a specific type of paint pot. If you're like me, and collect multiple brands of paint, that can make organising them a little frustrating, and so we thought we would try to fix that.

 

StackaRack was designed to hold any of the major miniature paint ranges - from the dropper bottles used by Vallejo and Army Painter, to the tall pots from the likes of Privateer and Reaper (and GW's old range), and the current stubby Citadel pots. The injection moulded plastic parts will fit together with plastic clips, allowing you to build it how you like, and disassemble and reconfigure it as needed.

 

Check out the project live on Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spiralarmstudios/stackarack?ref=acpi8t

[Chaoswolf]

Ah, but will it hold all my old Polly-S paints? 

 

Still, seems like it could be interesting.

[insaniak]

13 minutes ago, Chaoswolf said:

Ah, but will it hold all my old Polly-S paints? 

I'm not sure of the bottle size on those, as I never used them, but the StackaRack cavity will hold pots up to about 32mm in diameter.

[Chaoswolf]

That should work.

[Talae]

Interesting. I wonder if the STL files will actually take a year to deliver. Seems they could be available much sooner.

[Inarah]

It looks unnecessarily complicated with individual squares for each pot of paint and a clip system to hold it together.  You know you want a rack that is going to hold 20 or 30 or 50 bottles of paint.  Do you want to assemble all of that?   Right now you can get paint holder stl files for free on various sites,  and wooden racks that hold 65-75 bottles for less than the cost of their "basic" set of only 10.  

 

 

[insaniak]

47 minutes ago, Talae said:

Interesting. I wonder if the STL files will actually take a year to deliver. Seems they could be available much sooner.

 

They will be made available earlier, but as they need to match the final production version so everything stays compatible, it's impossible to put a date on that until tooling and test shots are done.

 

 

6 minutes ago, Inarah said:

It looks unnecessarily complicated with individual squares for each pot of paint and a clip system to hold it together.  You know you want a rack that is going to hold 20 or 30 or 50 bottles of paint.  Do you want to assemble all of that?   Right now you can get paint holder stl files for free on various sites,  and wooden racks that hold 65-75 bottles for less than the cost of their "basic" set of only 10. 

 

The unit-by-unit customisability is the entire point. If you buy an MDF rack that holds 60 bottles of paint, when you find yourself with 65 bottles you have to add an entire new rack. And you're stuck with the configuration of that rack. StackaRack lets you just add as many units as you actually need, and configure the rack to the shape and size that best fits your space. 

[tpugmire]

Cool idea, but a little too expensive to do my whole paint collection. 

[WhiteWulfe]

Ooof, no compatibility with 1 Oz and 2 Oz bottles it seems... 

 

Any chance at slightly larger hole options for things like Tamiya acrylics, AK Interactive/Ammo/Vallejo 35mL bottles, Mission Models 1 Oz, and various 2 Oz bottles? 

 

$106 CAD plus shipping for forty paints feels like a steep asking price, especially given the competition that's out there.  I can get 144 bottle solutions in MDF or acrylic for less including shipping, or if I go relatively fancy I can get 42 paint pots (3x Rank 14) into Wizard Racks from Game Envy for less including shipping.  The Game Envy ones also have the benefit of being able to fit a tablet, rulebook, or instructions on them too. 

 

I kind of like the expandability option, but then there come the clips, and I'm curious as to just how many I'd have to deal with to build even a reasonable sized "quick access" Paint rack for the project(s) I have going on the desk.

 

Any plans for four, nine, or sixteen units that are already pre-assembled as one cast block?  Larger racks would also want to use such for greater stability. 

Edited April 22, 2021 by WhiteWulfe

[insaniak]

1 hour ago, WhiteWulfe said:

Ooof, no compatibility with 1 Oz and 2 Oz bottles it seems... 

 

Any chance at slightly larger hole options for things like Tamiya acrylics, AK Interactive/Ammo/Vallejo 35mL bottles, Mission Models 1 Oz, and various 2 Oz bottles? 

Unfortunately, there was no practical way to make the one unit fit everything that's out there, so we chose to focus in on the more commonly used miniatures ranges. There is certainly the potentially to make separate units to hold different sizes, but this would be a whole additional sprue. So unless we burn through the existing stretch goals, it would be an option for development in the future.

 

2 hours ago, WhiteWulfe said:

I kind of like the expandability option, but then there come the clips, and I'm curious as to just how many I'd have to deal with to build even a reasonable sized "quick access" Paint rack for the project(s) I have going on the desk.

The current design has a clip on the top, bottom and back to hold units together securely horizontally, with an additional vertical clip top and bottom on each side to secure vertically - you wouldn't generally use the vertical ones on every unit, just either end of the row. Although I'm also looking at adding some slide rails on the top and bottom to do away with the vertical clips entirely.

 

2 hours ago, WhiteWulfe said:

Any plans for four, nine, or sixteen units that are already pre-assembled as one cast block?  Larger racks would also want to use such for greater stability. 

This was absolutely something that we considered, but again it comes down to the number of sprues that we can realistically produce out of the starting gate. So multiple units are something that I would love to add in later, but are just not practical for the initial launch. 

[Staffan]

On 4/21/2021 at 5:38 AM, insaniak said:

The unit-by-unit customisability is the entire point. If you buy an MDF rack that holds 60 bottles of paint, when you find yourself with 65 bottles you have to add an entire new rack. And you're stuck with the configuration of that rack. StackaRack lets you just add as many units as you actually need, and configure the rack to the shape and size that best fits your space. 

 

Sure, but I think the premium for configurability is a bit too high. For example, a 100-unit Stackarack kit costs £125, which is about $173. If I instead were to get, for example, Monument Hobbies' MDF rack holding 64 Reaper-size bottles, that costs $26. So for the cost of a Stackarack set that holds 100 paints, I can get 6 Monument racks that each hold 64 (or 36 if using the GW-size one). Customizability is certainly worth something, but I'm not sure it's worth 2-4 times the price.

 

And Monument is on the higher end (likely because they're really solidly built and well-balanced, and you can stack them on top of one another). Looking at the lower end, TTCombat has a 100-unit paint stand for Reaper-size bottles for £10—less than 1/10 of what you're selling yours for.