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Friday, August 28, 2009

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.

4 comments:

 Ashley said...

Always a good tactic to check out useful stuff made for other applications, and then imagine how it could be made into a building for wargaming.

Nicely done too.

APJ said...

Great idea, unfortunately in Europe we have different electrical boxes :/
On the subject of 1:300 and 1:600 SF terrain, I am currently experimenting with plastic and paper egg cases/boxes. The plastic ones especially have a very SF look.

Reinwood99 said...

Cool, I'm going to try this for Battletech. Thanks!

Reinwood99 said...

Ok, I finished my buildings that you suggested. I think they look pretty good, but different then yours. I will be taking some pictures of them tonight and I will post them on my blog tomorrow. Thanks again for the idea or at least bringing it to a wider audience.