Industrial

Industrial Structures

Each of these 28mm scale industrial buildings took Sam Balmond about 5 hours to construct, paint and detail.

(Click images to see larger versions)

All of the buildings use cardboard tubes. The first, a fractional distillation tower, uses a 75mm diameter tube scavenged from a local fabric shop and cut to about 300mm in length. Shorter pieces of the same tube were used for the group of tanks however I was unable to obtain a tube wide enough for the large tank so I constructed a 160mm tube by rolling up a length of white card. This leaves a join mark however I was able to hide this using a ladder. The chimney for the incinerator is a 25mm diameter cardboard tube from inside a roll of cellophane.
Caps were made for the tops of the distillation tower and tanks with foamcore disks. I then added bands of thick paper to represent braces. These also hide the joins between the foamcore caps and the card tubes.
The incinerator building was made from foamcore while the corrugated roof was made from a sheet of folded card adhered to foamcore to provide it with greater durability and to allow it to remain in place atop the slightly angled walls. The chimney was then inserted into a pre-cut hole in the furnace housing roof. I then added balsa wood windowsills before coating the structure in a layer of PVA glue, sand and filler to add texture.
The condenser (the box shaped bit attached to the distillation tower) was made from cereal packet type card folded into shape. The pipes connecting it to the tower are Plastruct tubes with the bends being manufactured from Milliput.
Railings were created around the top of the structures by drilling holes in the foamcore caps to accommodate halved cocktail sticks. When linked with florist's wire, attached with 'Bostik' then secured with PVA, these form a handrail which not only improves the visual appearance of the structure but also prevents models from falling off and getting chipped.
The idea for the ladder on the distillation tower (photo left) struck me when I noticed the metal steps located on the side of telegraph poles to assist workmen with their repairs. It was made from a number of curved staples arranged in an alternating pattern up the side of the tube.
The other ladders (photo right) were made from 5mm thick strips of balsa wood with florist's wire for the rungs. The wire was pushed into one strip at equal intervals and then a second strip was impaled on the free ends parallel to the first before being glued into place with blobs of PVA glue.

The hatch on top of the large tank was made from a foamcore disc studded with plastic rivets and a pop button handle. The rivets were made using a belt punch to punch circles from a piece of plastic card. These circles were also used as rivets on other parts of the models and for the controls on the control panels, which were constructed from card backs and frames. The drainage tube on the large tank was made from a spare piece of Plastruct with another pop button for a valve. Pop button valves were also added next to the control panels on the distillation tower.