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.