Flexible Sabot System

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One of the good things that comes from spending fifty plus years in the wargaming hobby is that you build reserves of toys which you can repurpose and use with new games. So when I found out about Joseph McCullough’s new fantasy rank and flank battle game, Oathmark, I knew I already had hundreds of painted models, mostly humans and undead, that could use for it.

But I had a problem, my fantasy model basing is all over the place. Just take a look at the picture below to see what I mean, that’s twelve different types of base I have used on various fantasy figures (or historical figures I want to use in Oathmark).

A job for sabots if ever there was one. In the past I’ve commissioned mdf sabots from makers such as Supreme Littleness Designs or Warbases. I’ve also paid to have my own designs cut a process that can be rather frustrating due to the need to wait for prototypes etc.

But my recent purchase of an Ender 3 v3 FDM printer gave me the opportunity to develop and make Oathmark sabots by myself. I’m really enjoying being able to turn my design ideas into prototypes in hours rather than having to wait days while someone else produces them.

Here’s what I’ve come up with for my Oathmark sabots. All of them are designed by myself and printed on an Ender 3 v2 FDM 3D printer. The wavy edge to the bases is a design decision as I’ve written about in an earlier article, I really don’t like big blocky sabots and the wavy edges really help to break up that look.

Those eight sabots cover all my bases, I now have to get together variants to fit the different unit sizes allowed in Oathmark. They are all 135mm wide, 10cm wider than the 25mm frontage per figure specified in Oathmark and I am told that is the same size as some of the plastic sabots/movement trays supplied by Renedra. That’s just over the absolute minimum size I could have used given I wanted to have sabots fitting 2p pieces.

And here they are painted and textured.