Warehouse 51

When some of the Necromunda terrain at my gaming club got a bit tatty we decided to re-cycle the bulkheads into some larger buildings. This warehouse was made as part of a participation game, and will then become general 40K terrain.</td>
The warehouse houses a captured Falcon Anti-Grav Tank. Unfortunately it has fallen into enemy hands, and is now deep in Ork-held territory. This is a job for Colonel Shaeffer's Last Chancers - a do-or-die unit of ex-convicts who are dropped behind enemy lines on suicide missions in return for absolution from their sentence (if they survive...). This model was made for this participation game that we will run at open days and wargaming events. Thereafter it will make a nice piece of standard 40K terain.

Materials

1. MDF board (hardboard in the USA)
2. Mattboard (thick cardboard, such as picture-framing board)
3. PVA, superglue, epoxy, etc.,
4. 32 necromunda bulkheads, including 4 with doors
5. Plastic rod in an I shape and U shape (for the door tracks)
6. Corrugated cardboard
7. An old computer fan
8. Bits and pieces of junk, plumbing couplings, a waste elbow, and barrels for external detailing
9. Textured paint for the base.

Method

I used solid Necromunda bulkheads for the ground floor, and gothic-window bulkheads for the first floor. These were glued together to make the two sides 4 bulkheads long by 2 high (with a door bulkhead in each), and the rear wall 3 bulkheads wide and 2 high. The centre bulkhead on the rear wall was left out to make a larger door.
The front wall has a larger opening and sliding doors. To make the opening I cut down the bulkheads to make them narrower by removing the part with the ladders. The offcuts were put to one side to use inside the building.
I wanted the inside of the building to be more than just a large space, so I made a walkway out of thick card that would run around the two long sides and rear. The walkway also helped hold the building together by slotting into the tabs on the bulkheads (it was left as one complete piece). You can see in this photograph that I used the bulkhead offcuts from the front wall, complete with ladders, to act as support pillars to the walkway. I also used triangles of thick card in the corners to help strengthen the building. Eventually these were glued in place with a hot glue gun (or PVA).
The roof is part flat, and part sloped. The flat part is just more thick card which also acts to stabilise and strengthen the front of the building.
The sloped part was made out of two triangles and two rectangles of MDF (hardboard) glue-gunned together with some small blocks in the corners for extra strength. The hole for the computer fan was cut out first. The sloping roof just sits on top of the walls so that it can be lifted off to gain access to the inside of the building.
The whole roof was then covered in corrugated cardboard. The small stair-top building is just four more bulkheads, one of which is a door, glued together with a cardboard roof. The one on the ground floor has three bulkhead sides. Leave these unglued until you have painted the rest of the building.
The doors are a bit of a feature. These were made from a railway bridge kit that I bought some time ago but hadn't found a use for until now. The small panels were really intended to make one of those metal bridges over a rail track. I glued them all together into two large doors and reinforced the backs with some plastic strips. You could make a similar door from thick card with thin strips of card glued on to make the panel effect. It was important that the doors opened so that gamers could get their hands in to fight some battles inside the warehouse. I decided to make them slide open, rather than hinge them.
The doors just slide in U shaped plastic track glued to the baseboard at the bottom. At the top I glued some I-beam across the building first, to bring the track far enough out from the building to allow the doors enough clearance to slide easily. You need to fix the building to the baseboard before gluing the bottom door track in place, to make sure it goes in the correct position. Paint the inside of the warehouse first, before it is fixed to the baseboard, and then glue it down.
Some external detail was added by gluing two plumbing couplings on the flat roof, and a large waste pipe elbow to the side building. A few barrels, computer bits and wheels were added to the baseboard to give a bit of ground cover. The door mechanism and winch is the motor from a broken disk drive (or CD-ROM) glued to the wall with a length of jewellery chain draped over it. The whole base was then given a thick coat of textured paint.

Painting and finishing

This was one of the quickest and easiest models I have ever painted! I sprayed the whole thing black, and then used a camo-green spray to get the camouflage effect. The whole operation took about 15 minutes. The barrels and bits were dry-brushed with silver and washed with black ink. I also dry-brushed a bit of silver in the doorways and on ladders to give the impression of wear and tear on the building. The base was dry-brushed with dark brown, highlighted a bit with lighter brown, and then embellished with a few patches of static grass.
The 51 lettering was done by spraying white paint through a stencil. I printed out the large numbers on my computer and carefully cut them out to make the stencil. To avoid too bright a finish on the letters I dusted them with black and green spray to tone them down a bit.
When playing around with a 9v battery I discovered that the computer fan still worked! So I added a small switch to turn the fan on and off, and stuck the battery inside the roof with blu-tac. Now we had a model with working fan! This gave me an idea for the game we were designing. I shall make the fan the only way into the warehouse - the saboteurs have to get onto the roof, turn off the fan, and lower themselves through the now static fan blades. Sounds like a suicide mission to me!