Armory on Ebay

I put up a piece of terrain I made on ebay and linked from it back here to my blog, and thus, I must write.

Let's see. Well, the first thing is that this marks ultimately a transition for me from what I will call dry terrain building to wet terrain. In other words, having learned how to cast things, I've kind of changed my whole philosophy on terrain building, or I suppose heavilly modified my previous philosophy. What the hell do I mean?

Well, let's go with the old philosophy, of which this feature is pretty much a direct result. The old philosophy is something like this: SAVE EVERYTHING. Old chinese food containers, the sheets that house Oreos, plastic easter eggs. When I say everything, I mean everything. I've got twenty or so cans of Trader Joe's coffee upstairs waiting for the great big great big watertower project (and yes, I did mean to use the term "great big" twice). I've got three craft assortment bins, four large paper bags, not to mention countless boxes--big and little--filled with "unnofficial" wargame building supplies, plus enough bits to make Games Workshop thousands of dollars (and me nearly hundreds). My office and attic are otherwise full.

When attendant to such a philosophy, the dollar bins are your friend, as are fairs, clearance sales, tag sales (same as garage sales out on the west coast), dollar stores, church bizaars, and of course, flea markets. But no friend is greater than Home Depot, which is where I picked up most of the stuff to make this Armory in question. Would I be ruining it if I gave away the trick? I doubt it. The point I'm trying to make here is that this mighty conglomeration is nothing to you if you already have the stuff, and a pain in the ass if you don't. The building itself is a heavilly modified switch box, which means that it's designed to protect from electrocution. Folks, when I say sturdy, I mean sturdy. The rest of it is...geez, can I remember, lag bolts sawed in half, a couple of those power poles from Macragge cut in half. I like the front lights. They're lag bolts with little wooden caps. Here on the homefront, I pretty much litter our city fight board with them. That and those rubber door stoppers that look kind of techno in a steampunk kind of way. I digress.

The ground is that crazy press board that they make clipboards out of. God bless the Dremel corporation! Textured with...vynil spackling? Can't really remember at the moment. I think that's what it was, but then I'm always experimenting with various products sold in tubs. By the way Painter's Putty is all but useless.

Anyway, the new philosophy is that you don't need all that. No, no, no... you need one of everything and a whole bunch of molding equipment. Which means that where my house was once filled with trash, it is now filled with various molding chemicals, including plexi-glass resin, which I'm afraid to go near.

But notice that some sort of middle ground must be achieved. Without the proper prototype, what are you going to cast? And besides, this isn't a piece that one could mold (easilly anyway) in one piece. So, I suppose as far as craters go, I'll be making resin models of this, as soon as the new batch of RTV rubber comes in, but for buildings, it's still going to have to be piece by piece.