[The Workshop] Bitz Organisation

As now days almost all sprues come with extras, lots of extras, it comes important to have somewhere to keep it all.  Now, you could just bung it all into a box, or you could separate it all out for ease.  

In this post I am going to look at the methods that I personally use to help organise my own bitz collection.


Why separate the bitz you ask?  Well, the main reason is for ease.  No one wants to be hunting through a huge box for that one axe or head, so instead the better idea is to separate them out into sections.  For this purpose I have three main methods of storage.  Some are better than others, and I will cover the problems I have encountered with them while others suffer from size or capacity. 

So, to start off, I'm going to show you the simplest method I use.  Bags.  You can use various different types of bag, I favour these clip-to-close style food bags.  The good part about bags is they can hold a lot of stuff, depending upon the size you can hold almost an entire box full in a single bag.  I tend to separate mine out a little bit more, into categories.  As you can see from the picture to the right there is writing on them, this is usually things like; "human heads", "dwarf hand weapon arms", "dwarf command" etc.  It just makes it easier to find specific bitz if you know where they come from.  The downside to bags is that you really need a separate container to keep them all in, and you have to sort through lots of bags.  This is really the case if like myself you have bags for dwarfs, orcs, goblins and 40K orks all in one box, it can get confusing to find the right one.

The next one I use to use a lot, but recently been veering away from this option.  The main reason being it is small.  This sort of box is useful to keep track of the really small items that might otherwise get lost or hard to find in larger boxes/bags such as beer steins, badges, pipes etc.  However, for the larger items this sort of box is not so good, as the size is limited making it unideal for items such as monster or cavalry parts.

That is not to say that this type of box is useless, it is handy for keeping track of those small fiddly items that you won't always need, but are useful.

This is perhaps the best method I have found to keep it all tidy.  It's usefulness comes from having several draws each with individual divided sections.  This eliminates the need for more spacious options, as you should be able to keep everything pretty much all together in one box.  The fact that it is multi-layered helps, allowing you to put similar bitz in one draw making it easier and simpler.  What's more these things are stackable, allowing you to have quite a few stacked on top of one another for little space taken.  Of course the down size is that they are quite bulky (depending on the size you go for) and you will need more surface space to store these boxes.

So, hopefully I have shown how you can store a number of your bitz for your army.  Having storage like this helps with keeping your workspace semi tidy, and allows easy access/knowledge of where certain bitz are located.  I personally plan to gain more of the latter box, and as you can see they are not hard to get a hold of (this one being from B&Q, a UK based DIY store) and have it separated out a little better and easier.