Recently Tristan from Terrain From Junk held the site’s first terrain building contest. He asked for pieces that were 36”² or more and built from some of the types of junk he’d already listed on the site. I took it upon myself to enter a piece, if anything just to get through some of the junk I had building up around my flat.

engine-crash-finished

A while ago there was some renovation work going on nearby and on our way back home Ross found a medium sized PVC tube which he donated to me.

piping

So gathering up a few other bits and pieces I set to work on an entry, to be finished in a couple of days, in between revising for my HRD exam. I also used:

da-plan
  • Wooden coffee stirrers
  • Corrugated cardboard
  • Tub of hot chocolate
  • A couple of yoghurt pots
  • A few pieces of plasticard and some other odds and ends

I drew up a rough idea of what the piece should look like, although the finished version isn’t quite the same and I never did figure out why there had been a shack there.

construction

The general idea was to create a piece that indicated the presence of a large amount of scrap below the ground, or possibly as if a large lump of the space hulk had torn off hurling engines in all directions as it broke up.

I imagine the pipe as part of a connective structure in a bank of many similar engines that has been decaying slowly and recently was blown over, crushing the nearby shack.

In terms of gameplay I wanted to build something that would be big enough for most normal vehicles to pass under it, rather than being entirely blocked by it. I also wanted to provide a bridge for foot models, allowing combat to occur around it and to create a tempting vantage point. There’s entrances at both end of the pipe to encourage its use (and to prevent any one model being impossible to flush out).

A combination of PVA glue and hot glue were used to hold the whole thing together – hot glue where a quick bond was required and PVA where it could wait.

front-based
back-based

I added some detailing to the engine itself, although I really wanted to add more. Sadly I didn’t have the parts, nor the time, to add them. Let the chips fall as they may!

basecoats

It was spraypainted black and the base was given a rough coating of Snakebite leather. Essentially I followed the same painting procedure as for my mutie tent, the rest is mostly just drybrushing Tin Bitz and Boltgun Metal, although I did the rust using this method, et voilà:

engine-crash-finished

That’s pretty much it. Here’s some more photos, or thumbnails at least.

extra-3
extra-2
extra-1
unfinished-extra
extra-4
extra-5

Lastly, I’ve got this one. I took two photos that ended up so close together that they give a faux-3D effect when viewed as an animation.

faux-3d