Terrain from trash – a look back to 2005

After watching today’s XLBS and seeing capta1n5kyhawk’s brilliantly crafted industrial condenser I thought I might share a project I had done in my early days of terrain building when scratch building was just about the only way to make tables.

So, long ago I used to spend nights in the garden shed making gaming boards out of polystyrene and junk for the 40K games with my kids and their friends.

My favourite was a conversion of a mini battery powered hoover that was passed my way.

The hoover still worked and I had a battery charger.

Weapon of choice at the time was an angle grinder and the project took 2 to 3 nights as I remember.

I had plastic boxes with all sorts of junk in them… old trains & track, broken toys, coat hangers, electrical components, jewellery, old kits and anything that had an interesting shape or texture and plenty of the white expanded polystyrene packaging.

I took the hoover bag compartment out to make the main cargo bay and made a roof from half a plastic coathanger, train rail and corrigated some cardboard.

With the angle grinder I cut out hatches and reshaped the body.

The baseboard was made with hardboard and polystyrene shaped with the angle grinder and covered with a mix of PVA and dirt.

I fitted a computer fan in a cowling to one side and wired it up and on the other side had it broken off and strewn behind.

The control cabin was made from plastic kit bits and bits of wire were stuck in the hull breach.  These areas, the tail lights and the top beacon all had flashing lights fitted.

A laser turret with lights was stuck on the top and other bit and pieces were added to the body to make thrusters and platforms etc.

The story for the piece was that the shuttle had been hit and crashed, ploughing a furrow in the ground, ripping up a tree and smashing into the side of a building.

The switches for the lights, engine fan etc and the motor were disguised as  the service pipes in the foundations of the house.

The best thing was that the hoover motor still worked and sound from it was epic.

The board even made an appearance at a 40K convention in 2010, where I used to do the tables terrain for a number of years, and it was great fun to watch them pause the tournament games when the discovered the hidden switches and start playing with it.

(Apologies for the poor quality of the pics – i only had a cheap, low res camera in those days)