HOBBY: Building a Brush Box on the Cheap
Tired of your brush tips getting bent out of shape? Protect them with a little elbow grease and some junk lying around your house.
Caleb with White Metal Games here.
One of the things I bought recently was this brush box! Pretty cool right? Here’s the problem . . . it’s 14″ long! So it got me thinking about how to build a brush box on a limited budget.
The idea behind a brush box is to give you a way to store brushes and at the same time keep the tips from warping or bending when you travel.
To complete this tutorial, you’ll need the following:
A hot glue gun
A pencil box (Another option is to buy one of these really nice looking boxes! )
Spare foam (Most of us have some spare foam lying around, either from blisters/clam packs or from our beloved pluck and pull foam trays. So grab some foam in roughly the same style. The stiffer the better)
Sharpie
Scissors
Here’s how it works:
Loosely lay out the foam in a parallel pattern. You want the foam to be two layers deep: one layer to provide cushion and the second to actually hold the brushes in place.
Using the hot glue gun, glue the 1st layer into position.
Use a sharpie to mark some roughly straight lines on the two pieces of foam. These marks are where you are going to cut. Lining them up now means when glued into position the brushes will line up too.
Using the razor saw, score the foam. You don’t want to cut all the way through the top layer of foam. Just about as close to 3/4 mark as can be .
I found in testing that cutting the to halfway point didn’t quite give me a good grip on the bigger brushes.
Now, using some of the leftover foam, cut the foam down so that you can wedge it into any deadspace on the fringes of the box.
Your goal here is to ensure the foam tightly grips your brushes, so by wedging the foam in, you are compressing the foam, thus ensuring a tight grip on the brushes when they are nestled safely inside the box.
Now proceed to hot glue the smaller pieces into your box. This was the messiest part of the excercise for me. I put blue on 3 of the 4 sides and quickly wedged the foam into the space between before it could burn me.
However, I DON’T recommend this method as that glue is really, REALLY hot. You might be better served to just put the glue on the bottom of the foam; safer and less messy that way.
Once done, test out your new brush box. The finished product should look like this.
As you can see (below) the foam is compressed enough that even gravity can’t drag these brushes down!
There you go! That’s it! Total time it took me to make this was less than ten minutes, with gathering supplies! So don’t make any excuses. Find your mom’s hot glue gun, grab some spare foam, and go to town on this thing!
PUT YOUR MINIS WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS!!!!
Caleb, White Metal Games
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Caleb, White Metal Games
