Quinn Kelly continues the industrial theme with his fuel depot. This is Quinn's first project for TerraGenesis and it shows inventive use of found items and some nice details like a tiny padlock on the fortified door.
Quinn told me that this project was made entirely out of things he scrounged. He only paid for the glue and paint. This is how he did it:
Thick card for the base and door
Foamcore
Plastic rails from the GW model sprues
Some screws
Black card
Silk netting (for the grating on the catwalk)
Old prescription bottle and water bottle top
Wire of different thicknesses
2 Pop cans
Coffee straws (the really thick, stiff kind)
A Low-temp hot glue gun
An old computer fan
First off, I drew up a plan of how I wanted the Fuel Depot to turn out. I really wanted something with a cat walk, and the pop cans made such great fuel tanks, and the rest was designed around it. I used a hot glue gun for almost all of the gluing, as the glue looks a lot like welding once it's painted, which I thought added to the overall feel. It is also surprisingly strong!
I pulled the tabs off the pop cans, and glued on card circles to cover the holes. A piece of bendy-straw made a great outlet pipe. I cut out supports for the pop cans by setting the can on top of the foamcore, and tracing the curvature onto the surface with a pencil. I cut out the curve with a razor (careful!) and pressed the u-shaped foamcore pieces into place. I glued them to the base, and then made a foamcore building.
As it was supposed to look hastily constructed, I decided not to use the excellent technique for making buildings found here on TG but just slammed the walls together. Measure the height of the pop cans on their supports, and make the walls this tall. Wait to put on the roof!
After the building walls and tanks were made, I cut a platform out of foamcore that would fit nicely. I cut a supporting beam out of foamcore that was thinner than the walkway I intended, and cut away the building wall so that the support sat level with the tops of the walls, and glued it to the underside of the platform, gluing the platform to the pop cans.
Then, I cut out a hole in the back wall, and glued the computer fan in. With that in place, I cut out a roof and glued it on.
I then made a small walkway wide enough for a miniature and a half to fit on top, and glued it on top of the support between the building and the platform. I added the wires and straws (pipes) and screws at that point. The ladder is made out of the thick coffee straws, too. The roof structures were glued in place.
For the railings, I cut straws to roughly the same height (the height that looked natural on a mini), and placed them every so often around the perimeter. This took some planning, as the lengths of my old model sprues didn't go all the way across the long edge.
I cut up the sprues, fit checked it all, and went about gluing the straws to the platform, and the sprues to the straws. The hot glue holds the railings together very well!
The door was made of card with strips overlaid to look like bracing. I clipped off a cylinder from my model sprues, and bent a piece of paperclip for the padlock and superglued them together (I got the idea from Terragenesis!). Another bent paperclip glued to card made the hasp, and I attached it to the door.
At this point, I primed the whole thing with grey spray paint (masking the computer fan). I then added the black card with the screen glued on from the back side for the platform decking. I drybrushed the railings silver, and stabbed silver onto the pop cans, giving it a galvanized steel look (another one from TG). I painted the base with a watery black paint, and drybrushed black onto most of the building. I used a rusty wash on all the rusty bits. For the mural on the side of the building, I printed out the Imperial eagle from a computer font on red paper, and wrote graffiti on it. I glued it to the building, and painted some grey spots to make it look like the painting had worn off in places, and ran black wash down it for dingyness.