- by Iain Wilson
Regular readers would know by now that I have a habit of grabbing odd things from around the place that have interesting shapes and turning them into terrain. In the past, I've built terrain from various bits of building hardware, storage containers, food packaging, and Christmas tree decorations, amongst other things. This week, I ransacked Amazon's toy department to put together a communications hub!
The base for this model was a small light up laser gun toy that I found while browsing Amazon. This particular toy came in a set of 4 - three of this same design in different colours, and another blockier design that I'll find a different use for later.
The first step was to take the gun apart so that I could remove the pistol grip and any other un-needed parts. The cowling from the front will likely wind up as a building entry at some point in the future, and I saved the light and speaker just on the off-chance that I want something to light up and make pew-pew noises.
The main part of the gun was almost perfect as is, although I trimmed down the protrusion that the pistol grip originally clipped onto with a razor saw.
I then cut a piece of plasticard to fit neatly over the opening, and grabbed a computer panel from the first Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue to add to this plate.
I reassembled the body of the gun, and added a couple of aerials made from plastic tubing, aluminium rod and a post piece from the second Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue.
Finally, I added a base to make it a bit more stable, glued an exhaust fan from the second terrain sprue over the muzzle piece, and puttied over the screw holes.
With some paint on, it wound up looking like this:
I considered leaving the blue central piece unpainted as a shiny, translucent feature, but decided against it as the three guns have different coloured pieces, so the translucent piece would be different on each comm hub... and that would offend me on a deeply spiritual level when I build the other two.
To build your own hub of communicative doom, you can pick up the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprues along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge range from the webstore
here.
What are you working on? We would love to see your models and terrain in the
Comm Guild Facebook group!
For other building ideas, modeling tutorials, army spotlights and conversion walkthroughs, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website
here.
