Flight stands and bases

So while walking through my local Dollarama I found two items of interest. Well actually I found any number of interesting items, but we shall focus on two for today.

First up something to be used as a flight stand.

It is, of course, an extendable device for picking up dropped metal items, as you can tell by the grip that is still attached. I have glued it onto some MDF and used washers to try and add some weight to the base. I will, ultimately, remove the surplus rubber grip to produce a smoother look.  

Its minimum height is around 7".

It can extend up to 31"

It has a built in magnet, but that can be removed and a more powerful magnet could be installed. It also has a built in light at the end for atmospheric shots. Maybe add some cotton to the end, turn on the light so as to create an image of ypur craft going down in flames. Now I do not have any gimbals to allow for attitude adjustment, but I am thinking of using these for my VSF stuff and any tilting would see troops plummeting to the Martian surface. At any rate, at $3.00 each I figure they are a good deal.

Next up are some square wood sheets. They appear to be made out of the same hardboard that is used for clipboards. I have been using cheap clipboards for a lot of scenery needs, both legal and letersize. 

These come 6 to a pack for $4.00 and are 25cm by 25cm. I have been toying around with the idea of making some interchangeable scenery and scenery boards. The idea would be to create a terrain board either 2' by 2' or 2' by 4' that had low relief terrain modeled on it. I would however leave square areas that could have higher elevation items inserted. This would provide me with plenty of options as the add-ons could be aligned in multiple ways, mixed with any number of other add-ons etc etc.

The thing was, I needed to cut some fairly uniform square tiles and that might be a challenge. These should do the trick. They are not 100%  25cm by 25cm, but they are pretty darn close. Any that are too far off will just be used a scenery bases. I could also create area where two such squares touch each other to allow for larger terrain to be added into the scene. 

So far I am in the testing stage of this project, I have them unwrapped and I am waiting to see if they will warp. I think they will not.

This would be too many for a 2' by 2' board but you get the idea