It is of course a paint rack - designed to
fit 70 bottles of Mig Acrylic paints.
Supplied flat packed in a stout card box, the components are well protected with bubble wrap.
There are 11 components formed from good quality dense particle board, suitable milled and slotted to enable the parts to click together and they are neatly laser cut with no splits or imperfections visible. One of the boards identifies the product as made in Poland.
Oddly there are no instructions and a quick trawl of the web confirms that others have no assembly information so it must be assumed that there are none – not a great problem for an average modeller but a little surprising for a company that goes to great lengths to make everything simple for its customers.
There is a single full colour illustration on the box and a careful check of the components reveals that there are four different patterns of shelf so a few dry runs are in order to ensure that the cut outs in the storage shelves are correctly staggered between alternate rows. The shelves are painted white on one face and there is a header board to the top edge which is drilled to enable the unit to be wall mounted. The assembled unit measures about 400mm wide, 300mm tall and depth about 70mm. The unit benefits from the joints being glued up for stability and strength and white glue or aliphatic resin is suitable.
A test run showed that Mig paint bottles slotted neatly into place and the unit is compatible with Vallejo Model Air/Model Color and AK interactive acrylics which appear to use identically sized bottles.
The unit is useful since Mig paints are supplied in squeezy bottles that are tall and narrow and although they are pretty well leak proof they are not as stable on a work bench as, say, Tamiya 10ml paints which have a squat wide base. The unit is best stored at chest height or above since the squeeze bottle acrylics noted above have similar tops and the best way of identifying colours is by getting in close to read the description on the bottle. Again this contrasts with Tamiya whose bottle tops have handy coloured caps that approximate to the contents. 17ml acrylic bottles have a standard colour cap. Mig colours are Yellow coded when the bottle has an agitator ball inside, White otherwise. Vallejo seem to use Black or White tops. AK interactive, Red.
This looks like a useful, if not a “must have”, product that being high rise does not take up too much shelf space and reduces the annoyance of paint bottles rolling around the work bench and enables paints to be sorted into project-specific sets.