"Factory-applied adhesives and flock" Topic

Last week I bought some Litko flexible steel bases (10x20 and 20x20) for my 6mm minis, and they arrived on Monday. Excellent service as usual. I did not realize this at the time but their flexible steel bases have adhesive on one side. How effective is this adhesive? Will fine-grit flock stick to a pre-glued base?

I believe it is made to stick to their wood bases to magnetize them. No idea on how well grit will stick to it.

I tested them with magnetic sheets and steel bases that I have, and the Litko bases stick to the magnetic sheets but they do not stick to the steel bases, so I do not believe they are for magnetizing. Or at least not for magnetizing bases as I would understand, since they are the "Flexible Steel Base Bottoms", and not the "Magnetic Base Bottoms" or the "Heavy Duty Magnetic Base Bottoms". And if I had looked more closely at Litko's website I would have noticed that they sell sheets of all three, and all three are adhesive-backed.

The flexible steel base bottoms do stick very well to the plywood bases. I know because I use them all the time and store my based figures in boxes with magnetic sheeting (from a sign store) in the bottom of the box.. It can be pulled off but after sticking for a while it will also pull off splinters of the top ply of the plywood.

I've never tried them for actually basing figures since I use 28mm size almost exclusively. The bases are flexible but with 6mm size that shouldn't be too much of a problem. As far as the fine grit sticking to the adhesived side, best bet is just to test a couple.

Good luck with your experiments.

Jim

As a followup, I finally painted some of those 6mm minis, and they do stick well to the adhesive. The flock sticks well too, with a little bit of shedding. The problem I am facing is that the layer of flock is very thin, so there is a significant difference in height between the bottom of a strand of miniatures and the top of the flock level, so that just won't work. I'll have to apply some sort of filler (probably wood filler) to create a level edge and then apply adhesive to the entire thing. It was a nice thought.