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This project started when I found a discarded PVC electrical casing, which was rounded and had two semicircular holes in it. They were just the right size for the figures! The rest of the bunker has been decorated, er, modelled with pieces of card that have been cut to look like reinforcing girders, air vents, etc. |
Though you may not have many electrical casings laying around the house, the bitz used to cover it may find a place in other's projects. The lights on either side of the doors were made from small Christmas tree lights that were pulled out of their mountings and replaced upside down, so that the pointy end is hidden. The hatch on top is from an old ketchup bottle. For rivets, I wanted really small ones that looked as though they were in scale with the rest of the model, so I made tiny cylindrical rolls of Sculpey, a oven-hardening polymer, and then cut it into sections and stuck them on with tweezers. The storage tanks in the foreground are film canisters and a spice can that have been worked over with drinking straw tubing, popper valves, balsa supports, etc.
| I started this project after arbitrating the third dispute over whether a Necromunda ganger halfway up a staircase was within line-of-sight of an attacker. I have found that players love going up and down it for some reason, though the low number of exits has made it a death-trap on several occasions. |  |
The whole thing is made from cardboard and PVA glue, except the rivets, which are cut from Sculpey. My concern when designing this was to be able to fit a figure on each stair. The radius of the staircase is therefore 2", with cardboard tubing in the center. I cut out two 2" radius card circles and cut them into 8 pieces evenly, and cut out the center portion so that they would fit around the support. I trimmed the tubing to the height of two Necromunda bulkheads, and spaced the steps evenly around it, using card buttresses underneath. A thin narrow piece of card was then wrapped around the outside of these steps, and the card railing attached, on top of which the rivets were glued.
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The hardest part of this project was calculating the right dimensions for the project. I like my stairs to have 8 steps per Necromunda level, as this looks correct while not being overly difficult to model. Each step also had to be an inch deep so that a figure could sit securely on it. |
The vertical supports were cut first from cardboard, and secondly a piece of card 9 7/8" long was cut, with edges similar to the card catwalks from the boxed set. This was then cut into inch-long sections, scored so that they would bend at 90 degrees, and attached to the vertical supports. Each end of the stair was cut from a tracing of a Necromunda walkway, so they fit securely onto the card buildings. The railing is from the smaller sized drinking straws of the sort used with coffee. They are fastened together with pins, and to the stair with strips of paper and PVA glue. The rivets were made from Sculpey.
| The building's shell is of corrugated cardboard, on a base of the same material. The edges were filled with plaster of Paris, and the tile is of paper glazed with PVA glue. The small trees are from a farm set; the large one is made from layers of plastic netting, and the dead one is a twig with sculpted clay roots. |  |