Iron Chef Scenery III: Nillic

[nillic]

Ok kids, so in celebration of 5th I started Chaos Daemons army, and for basing I've decided to go slightly industrial. That being said, I've decided that my entry into Iron Chef Scenery III is going to be an abandoned imperial communications array (presumably abandoned after the daemonic incursion!) So without further ado lets get started.

Starting point:


Here we've got our coat hanger, I chose this kind that you can get from a dry cleaning place because it has both wire and a cardboard tube, so I have a variety of materials to start. Also we have some imperial bitz and a cool spring I found on the ground walking to the store today.


Shown here also are some plasticard strips, bars, and tubes; a yogurt cup (organic and fat free are optional) and where most of my bits are coming from. I picked up this tank for 15 USD at our local store's Warhammer Welfare/Welhammer sale. I'm sure bitz from any imperial or chaos tank will do.

Getting started:


take that tube and cut it a little more than 3/4 the way down.


now take the tube and rip off the paper in some places, it's abandoned remember? This is an easy way to make rust and decay spots before you even start painting. Next make yourself some rivets out of styrene rod and then cut yourself a strip of THIN plasticard to wrap around the top. The end result should look like this:

So what I've done here is glue the plasticard strip around the top of the tube, then take a smaller piece of strip to make a connector plate and glued on 2 rivets. Then take a knife to it and rough it up (abandoned remember?) And set it aside.

Wire parts:


Here I have circled the 3 pieces of the wire hanger part you want to cut off, get some heavy duty cutters because your hobby clippers just won't....cut it.....
You are going to use these pieces to make ladder rungs.


So cut off small pieces, put them in a vice (or if you lack one, some for real pliers) and bend those little things into shape. Careful cutting here, because a piece of metal flew off and ripped my finger open! I'll spare you photos of that, needless to say, it hurt. So i put something cold on it:

Base of the tower:


Take your yogurt cup and some kind of hatch looking bit and cut a whole in the center of the bottom of the cup. This may not be necessary for all hatch bitz, but mine has a lip on the bottom so it fits snuggly into the hole in the tank. If you don't make this hole, then your hatch won't be flush and it might look kind of silly.


So now take those little ladder rungs, mark yourself some lines and punch some holes into the side of the cup and make them as even as possible. Now you have a ladder to get up to the top of the base of the tower. Also you will note here that I gave the top of the base a similar treatment as the cardboard tube: plasticard strips, small connector plate, and some rivets. Then I took a knife to it to rough it up some.


You should now have something that looks like this as well as a long cardboard tube with rivets laying off to the side. NOTE: Be sure to sand or scrape the letters and symbols off the bottom of your cup! It may not be that noticable now, but after you paint it someone might think your communications array is both recyclable AND full of peaches.....not very imperial or industrial if you ask me.

Thats all for now, next update in a few days!

[miasma]

Excellent progress so far. I also love the zoomy inny picture you did of your ingredients at the start. Fantastico!


Of course... it's one of the mysterious Recyclable Yoghurt comms arrays that the STC forgot... *winks* I won't tell

[Shonuff]

Awesome work Nillic! This is what i love about these contests..Seeing what everyone else is doing and where your imagination takes you (obviously to the fridge to eat some yogurt )


Keep it up man, This is looking sweet.

[nillic]

ALRIGHT, time for round 2 *ding ding*

Power Cabling:


so what we have here is the left-over pieces of hanger and some 3/4 inch tubing. This kind of tube can be bought at a Lowe's or Home Depot or any large chain hardware store, it costed me about 23 cents for a foot. Large plasticard tube or ANY TUBE can be used for this part, this just happens to be what I had. So cut off 3 equal sections.


take the 2 longest pieces of hanger and clip them off. Next, clip them into approximately 3-4 inch lengths, until you have a pile of them. I needed even more hanger, so I got another wire hanger out of the closet and clipped it up too using those heavy duty wire cutters up there.


so now, you do this: take your pile of wires and start pushing them through the tube pieces until you have a fairly round shape. So now you have 3 tube pieces stuffed full of wires! If you happened to stuff enough, you can stop there. But I wanted to make sure they weren't moving so I took some SUPER THIN, like water thin, cyanoacrylate and dripped it in from the top, bottom, and sides. This way the really thin glue leaks down into the bundle and keeps everything steady. This will painted up later as a bundle of power cables being held together with metal straps.

Control Array:


now get those tank bitz together and do this stuff. This happens to be the armoured sponsoon from the annihilator, so i partially made it, then took some plasticard, scored and bent it and then glued it all together like shown. I also took an antenna piece and the twinlinked flamer and made a small communication array out of it. The next part is built to taste using whatever bitz you have on hand:


so this is the interface for the tower, it will be attatched via the large bundled power cables (shown furthere down) I took the flamer array and glued it onto the platform I put in the middle of the sponsoon armour.


get a small square of pink or blue foam and cut it to the size of the control panel. Next take plasticard strip and your prefered choice of rivet style and band the top of the foam square. And carve a hole in the back of the square: this is where the cable bundle will go.


so this is what you should have on hand now: cable bundle, control panel, foam box, and you'll see here and square piece of plasticard with a hole in the middle. It has been cut, bent, and chipped for the worn look I want. It is going to be the plate on the box where the cables go it. If you look at industrial reference photos you'll see that when 2 pieces meet, such as cables and their boxes, pipe and tanks, or those kinds of things, there is a connector plate where it meets, it usually doesn't just go straight in. I think it is the little details like this that really make scenery stand out and feel life-like.

So now put everything together so it looks like this:

here we have the front and back views of the control panel, as well as a close-up of the connector plate. It is deliberately bent up around the corners for aged/forgotten effect. You can also see I took a couple of the wires and bent them out, as if they might have exploded in half.

alright, enjoy! see you next post.

[GLD1]

Looks great, love the cabling idea!!!!

[avatar of khaine]

Looking good there, nillic. Some people may object to you using citidel stuff in your model, but i won't. Please tell me you're in the advanced group.

[Hemogoblin]

Avatar, i belive the rules say you cant use CoD sprues, or pre made stuff, or models and such making most of the thing. Nothing is illegal about the odd bit or two.

[nillic]

This is only the second piece of scenery I've ever made in my life, so I am in the newbie group.
Thanks everyone for encouraging comments!

[Commissar Grimsson]

Great job man!

[omgitsduane]

Really like seeing this, I think maybe another type of scenery comp is make as much stuff as possible out of one sprue!