Bender Mini

Found this at Origins 2009, need to finish painting him someday...

1/300 Sci-Fi Buildings from Scratch (well almost)

I attended Origins in Columbus this year (as i do every year), and noticed a fairly nice looking city table that Reaper had set up for CAV2. On that table there were a lot of paper buildings, and a couple made from something that looked familiar...





Now where have we seen these before...?



Plastic electrical boxes! Now how come I never thought of that before? Easily available at local big box home improvement stores and cheap too.


I did some price comparisons and found there was virtually no difference in price at any of the major stores. So I bought a few to experiment with. The small 2 bay boxes pictured above were $1.86 each. I also found a few useful items in the plastic plumbing aisle.


Step One - Remove the nails with a pair of pliers, they just pull right out.


Step Two - Remove the bar code sticker. This was easily accomplished with the application of a little heat from a hair dryer and a #11 X-acto blade.



Step Three - Remove the "wings" along the sides. I use a dremel tool with a cutoff wheel at low speed to carve the wings off and smooth the remaining areas. I used some fine sandpaper as well.




I decided to open one end of this one up and turn it into an Ogre "garage". A couple of razor saw cuts vertically...



...and then snap the door piece off and clean it up. I reglued it in the open position with some gap-filling superglue.



A quick primer coat of white to show any defects...



Hmmm... roof looks kind of plain. How about a ventilator from my bits box?



A couple coats of "stone" spray paint and some cardstock solar panels that I ran off on the color laser printer...



And that's it.

JR Miniatures 1/300 Sci Fi Buildings

These are a bunch of the 1/300 JR Miniatures buildings that I used for Ogre at Origins 2009.

Ogre Miniatures Measuring Sticks

I'm an old school miniatures gamer, none of those newfangled laser rangefinders or tape measures for me.

I made a dozen of these measuring sticks from 1/8" wood dowels a while back.

Construction is very simple, cut off a 16" section of dowel, then mark off the following measurements from one end - 8", 10", 12", and 14". Since OM uses 2" for it's (hex) ranges, this stick gives you easy measurements of all of the weapon ranges and vehicle movements.

Range 1 - 2"

up to

Range 8 - 16"

I spray the whole stick white, then mask off the sections that need to stay white and spray the rest black. A shot of clear acrylic finishes the job.

Ogre Pictures

Here's a quick shot of the Ogre family...

Ogre Army Pictures

I've been thinking about taking pictures of ALL of my Ogre minis for a while now, so here goes...

Mushroom Cloud!

I've been working on making a nuclear explosion marker for the game table, out of expanding foam. I'll post some step by step instructions eventually, but it was pretty easy.

Still working on trying to get the colors just right...