textfilter: chose text/plain from a multipart/alternative
Dear Brain Trust:
I had thought I had seen some company making 25-28mm sci fi terrain that
included a variety of non-square, non-rectangular cargo containers and
boxes. I'm thinking some were hexagonal, others were a variety of odd shapes.
I recall they had other products, but it was all of their odd shaped shipping
containers that caught my eye.
Only, just now, I cannot recall whom it was and consequently can't find their
site...
Some of you who keep track of who is who in the miniatures world must have
some idea. Help?:)
While Browsing....
I did find a small company that has done what I think are 28-30mm moulds
of Mal, Kaylee and Shepherd Book (though obviously under other names). They're
pretty good. I wish they'd do Wash, Jayne, Inara, Simon and River as well. I
think these same guys have a Corbin Dallas, a Leeloo, and a few other notables
(Doc Savage). They have a couple of kits which you can combine to
do a good K-9 and several 'Doctors'.
And another company making a 40mm Jack Burton (Kurt Russell). And somebody
did a lot of not-Star Trek NG in 28mm complete with Alternate Universe
builds of their (quite large) figure lines.
Unrelatedly....
I've decided my current building and moulding projects will include:
1) MALP/FRED from Stargate
2) Trauma Tube (armoured autodoc/stretcher for wounded to stabilize them
for
transport) - eventually I want to create legged and tracked 'mules' for
casevac and a grav version of the trauma tube for really high tech militaries.
3) AC Jeep GMS variant (or AAA variant) - kind of a Stinger POST module
on the back of a small AC jeep 4) Ship crew workstation (this is going to take
some time because I'm kind of sick of crew consoles looking like they have 60s
'Mod' seats, pipes, and 1970s TV sets for displays). 5) Making plaster wrecks
of the die cast cars I own so I'll have wrecks for my gaming scenarios of the
cars I put in them
My friend Kevin is scratchbuilding and moulding a Puddlejumper from Stargate
using 4" pipe and resin moulds for the front, rear (with working hatch),
bottom, weapons pods and interior detail.
He already built a MALP, but he carved it (!!!) out of foam and I don't think
it'll stand a casting. I think we'll have to build a hard one as the foam one
may not have the desired durability. But it sure looks nice. I'm expecting one
or both of these to see the light of day at the next ECC Stargate scenario.
Lately, when he was bored, he scratchbuild a 28mm Spanish Town for his
pirates games.... argh... if I had 1/4 the talent.... his home made 20mm
multi-level WWII row housing (from moulds he made) is good enough and
far
more game-friendly than most of what I see on the market today.
Of course, my own plans are interfered with by the 25mm wild west
phase...
need to scratch build a barn, make some terrain boards, cast some cacti, and
generally work on finishing off Tombstone. I've taken Desperado from MKP and
modified it to be a bit quicker and less fiddly in resolution. Everybody loves
a good Western.
I've discovered that permastone (dental plaster ish) casting in plastic egg
containers yields half-egg sized objects that resemble a back yard
composter. Of course, I plan to build some composters from these. But more
pertinently, it looks like they'd do in 1/300th (if I line 3 up in a
row) for a small 3 Mile Island sort of reactor. Maybe part of a local
municipal power grid.
I have some other plans to try to produce other 1/300th terrain from
some oddball bits of plastic packaging from computer bits and consumer goods
saved over the past few years. My inkjet cartridge plastic packaging became
mixing bowls for the Alumalite resin. The expended cartridges may become
1/300th or 25mm gaming terrain as well.
Not quite as good as Martin, Stuart, Mark, etc. but working on it....:)
Hey Tom,
I vaguely remember seeing something along those lines. I did some poking but
have yet to find what I remember (perhaps they were paper models?).
I did see some non-rectangular storage over at Ainsty?:
http://ainstycastings.co.uk/index.php/cPath/32/osCsid/a65bce76205d10458c
4beb8ad53877f6
I found the octagonal flat cases and the pod crates particularly fetching.
Several hexagonal types as well.
I checked also Armorcast, Antenocitis, JR, Itar's, Hirst, and Old Crow with no
luck.
I'll continue to poke...
Martin
[quoted original message omitted]
> On 05/08/2011, at 16:59 , Tom B wrote:
> I've decided my current building and moulding projects will include:
The TerraGenisis web-site (http://www.terragenesis.co.uk) is good for
inspiration and ideas:
> 4) Ship crew workstation (this is going to take some time because I'm
Some ideas for "holographic" displays:
http://www.terragenesis.co.uk/infopages/page530.html
http://www.terragenesis.co.uk/infopages/page429.html
http://www.terragenesis.co.uk/infopages/page428.html
> 5) Making plaster wrecks of the die cast cars I own so I'll have
Using aluminium foil to do the sort of thing you have in mind:
http://www.terragenesis.co.uk/infopages/page423.html
textfilter: chose text/plain from a multipart/alternative
> At 17:10 05/08/2011, martin connell wrote:
textfilter: chose text/plain from a multipart/alternative
My thanks to Tamsin and Martin and Robert, all of whom supplied excellent
info.
It was the Ainsty site I saw the odd cargo containers on... but for the life
of me, my googling could not turn it up. <shame>
Also a special thanks to Robert because THAT EXACT article on wrecked cars was
one I'd read before and which inpsired me, but I could not find it
(I
found somewhat similar, but more convoluted methods). I wanted to relocate
that article bug again my Google-fu was weak. <more shame>
The Grendel collection I already own most of (plus some older product not see
on here) but I do like their doors and cargo bay which I... don't think... I
have. I say don't think because I've turned up a lot of old unbuilt stuff
while poking around lately.
So, great help and much appreciated as it located exactly what I was looking
for.
When I get around to casting some of my own scratch-built vehicles and
bits, I'll post some links with pics. We'll see how that goes.I just shopped
the local hobby store out of all of its Alumalite Regular Resin and Alumalite
Quick Set RTV and ordered bulk quantities of those to follow. (I should get
some Alumalite HS-III RTV as the quick set isn't 100% on undercuts)
Some follow up questions:
Has anyone any idea the difference between Alumalite Clear and Alumalite Water
Clear? If I want to pour some water on terrain boards (ideally sans bubbles),
are these a good choice? Or is there some better choice that I should look at
for this?
For building 25-28mm vehicles (for casting), what sort of material is
best for the bulk body of the vehicle? I've wondered about wood blocks or UHD
plastic (but I don't think many adhesives will stick to this stuff to adhere
the details)... but I really don't know.
They'd be larger bulky pieces, to which detail would be affixed, but they'd
need to be able to be at least grossly shaped and seems like you'd use huge
piles of sculpy (more than seems sensible) if you went that route for the main
shape component of a 28mm vehicle (it's bad enough how much resin you'd
use to cast them - I'm looking at interior block insertion to reduce
resin use and maybe even adding Alumalite microbaloons to cut the resin
volume).
Any tips or thoughts on these fronts appreciated.
> For building 25-28mm vehicles (for casting), what sort of material is
A possible cheap option for the filler on your masters would be to cut a
slightly undersized styrofoam block (or several in the basic
shape of the vehicle and do the sculpty/green stuff over that for the
detailing.
If you are making several variants on the same basic hull shape, it may be
worth getting the styrofoam CNC milled at a local model supplies store or
engineer.
Another alternative - if you are good with 3D modeling software -
would be to do your designs on your 'puter then upload them to
Shapeways and get the prototypes 3D-printed by them. An advantage of
doing this is that you can do the design once at say 25/28mm then
just adjust the scaling for 15mm or 5/6 mm. Hmmm, I wonder if we
could persuade the T-man to do something like that so we can get the
15mm range as 25mm?
textfilter: chose text/plain from a multipart/alternative
did anyone else notice that this traffic has all been from FireDrake?
Michael Brown mwsaber6@msn.com
> Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2011 01:44:29 +0100
As much as I'd love to see the 15mm range in 25mm, the detail material you
would need to make a decent mold is quite pricey for 25mm scale. A solid 25mm
tank I designed was about US$600 for the hull alone. By hollowing it out I
managed to get it down to about $350.
Still, might be a possible route if there was enough interest. I wouldn't mind
seeing some of the 15mm vehicles in 6mm either.:)
[quoted original message omitted]
Name? I've probably seen same, spending a lot of time scanning LAF and TMP,
but I don't recall this mix.
As for 'Firedrake', I was so surprised and pleased at any traffic, missed it
completely.
Doug
Tom B wrote on 08/05/2011 01:59:54 AM:
> I did find a small company that has done what I think are 28-30mm
They're
> pretty good. I wish they'd do Wash, Jayne, Inara, Simon and River as
> On Sun, Aug 07, 2011 at 07:03:49AM -0500, Doug Evans wrote:
> As for 'Firedrake', I was so surprised and pleased at any traffic,
As far as I'm concerned, I'll keep running the list as long as someone wants
it. The Berkeley servers have been great in the past, but recently they seem
to have been having a lot of reliability problems. That's
life...
R