worries about not losing his rules stuff.
I'm a big proponent of mounting almost all of my minis onto bases. It reduces the chance of things being damaged.
I used to primarily use steel bases, but I've been moving away from that as I find the 3mm wooden bases to be easier to pick up and move. (The steel bases have sharp corners unless the corners are rounded.)
Steel bases work well with magnetic-lined storage boxes, and wooden bases don't. However, if I put FlexSteel (self-adhesive rubber sheet that sticks to magnets) on the base bottom, it's good.
If you play a lot of different rulesets or genres, you quickly find yourself using a lot of different sizes of bases. I finally got organized a few years ago, and sort them out by material (wood, plastic or metal), shape (rectangular, square, round, hexgaon), and size, with an index sheet for quick reference.
But even so, from time to time a need will crop up for a base size that I don't have. It used to be that you could find some useful wood shapes in the craft stores, but that's not as dependable lately. So I buy a lot of bases from LITKO, and they have a great selection.
So here's a problem. A big Civil War ironclad, and I need an unusual size of base. I don't have anything suitable in my supplies. LITKO has nothing suitable off-the-shelf.
The good news is that LITKO has something on their website called BaseMaker, where you can custom-order bases in any size and many possible shapes. Materials available are plywood and acrylic, as well as base bottoms. However, make sure that what you want isn't already in their catalog, because you'll pay more for a custom order.
So I go ahead and order a 3mm-thick wooden base and a matching FlexSteel base for the bottom. And I might need more of these in the future, so I order a few of each.
After a short while, a package arrives.
Everything is well packed.
That's the FlexSteel on the left, showing the paper side that peels off; and the wood bases on the right. And you can see I went for the 'rounded corners' option.
You can see the based ironclad here.