Shipping Containers 101: How to do a moderately non-awful job for idiots like me

[Bonehead]

How to Make Shipping Container Scatter Terrain for 40k/necromunda/kill team, etc

A guide as requested, written down to the mental age of the person writing it

 

As should by this point be pretty obvious, I've been making shipping container terrain pieces because the GW ones are both absurdly expensive, and also kind of dumb-looking. So much wasted space created by making them octagonal. I mean, it totally jives with the general imperium vibe of never letting practicality get in the way of an overwrought flair for the dramatic, but it also rubs me up the wrong way, so here we are. I made a bunch of my own, and without overt '40k imperial' visual design clues, they're pretty much good for any roughly 28-32mm scale modern-day to sci-fi setting too. Here are a bunch I haven't finished painting yet, so feel free to take the piss out of all the mistakes:

In the finest tradition of 40k, the varous company names and logos are a string of pop culture references and goofs on real world comanies. How you paint them is up to you, but I painted these ones so naturally they're about 80% terrible jokes and oblique references.

Crucially, they're also 6cm x 6cm x 12cm, which is the exact same size as the GW ones. Therefore, placed on a game layout with such items, they'll look right, which makes a difference. The proportions are slightly off, in terms of scale, compared to the real-world ones they crudely resemble; but so are all proportions in 40k minis, so get off my back.

Ok, materials. No, wait, let's do it like this:

Materials and Tools

 

So much more offical-looking. 

You will need:

Plus also a decent pair of pliers, and possibly tweezers, and also 1mm plastic rod. Which I have run out of, because you get ten containers' worth in a packet, and no, I will not be handing out prizes for guessing how many I have built to time of writing. I used 1.5mm rod in the example I made for this guie, and it felt wrong the whole time I was doing it, so it's not in the photo. This is a clean house.

The tools are:

Rulers of various sizes. Don't have to be metal ones, so long as they're consistent and straight. But metal ones are best. 

A good sharp craft knife or two. I have one with a point here, useful for picking up and placing small pieces of plastic, and one with a replaceable balde, good for keeping a sharp cutting edge.

Engineer's squares. Can't stress how important a proper square is. I ordered these really very smart examples from Axminster Tools for my business, and they've served me long and well. You'll do just fine if you have a carpenter's set square, a roofing square (so long as you don't mind it being three feet long) or a right-angled triangle geometry thing from your old school stuff, or more probably your child's old school stuff.

The materials are:

Corrugated plasticard (Slater's 0437). Three standard sheets will get you enough stuff for five containers, at a fraction of the cost of the GW kit. Not a small fraction mind, but you do make out better in terms of numbers by a long way. Other brands may be available, and indeed other sizes. I'm not your dad, buy what you want. You could certainly do a perfectly fine job using corrugated paper glued onto a smaller box, but you'll have to work out those measurements yourself. I hate working with paper, I always cut myself. Slaters for me, and nothing but. I'm worth it.

Regular plasticard, in 1mm sheet and .5mm sheet. Styrene sheet. Should be clear enough.

Polystyrene cement. You don't need me to elaborate on this. If you do need me to elaborate on this, give up now.

1mm plastic rod. This will make the door release mechanism on the front, or more accurately this will look a bit like a door release mechanism to a degree I ffelt was up to snuff and that sort of subjectivity is something you're just going to have to live with if you keep reading.

 

Initial Construciton

Right, a shipping container is a big oblong box. We're going to make an oblong box. You can do this if I can do this, and I can do this, I've already done it ten times. Therefore, Q.E.D, time to crack on.

First thing to do is cut out the pieces. Be aware, the plasticard sheets you get, when they turn up, are probably not going to be proplerly 90-degree square. This is apparently to do with the cutting process, and it's important because you really need square pieces or the whole thing is going to look wonky. Plus it won't stack up properly, which will get on your wick something chronic if you're anything like me. See below:

Not square. Further investigation revealed that in this case, it was actually the lower edge of the sheet that was cut out of true with the corrugations, which is the important thing. It was carefully trimmed, wasting as little material as possible, because the tolerances are tight.

With the material readjusted so it's properly true, you need to cut five pieces of corrugated material per container. They will be: 3 pieces 6 x 12cm; 1 piece 6 x 6cm, 1 piece 6x 5.9cm. For the 12 x 6 pieces, don't cut them in the wrong orientation. The long edges should be at 90 degrees to the corrugations. This is important. Look at the picture below.

You also need to cut 1 piece 12 x6 cm and 1 piece 6 x 5.9cm from plain 1mm plasticard.

That'll get you this:

Hooray, we have achieved step one. Have a biscuit.

 

 

Edited 6 hours ago by Bonehead
spelling

[Bonehead]

Part Two: Continuing not to bollocks it up with proper care and attention

 

Ok, we got the basic pieces cut out. Now we need to deal with the admin.

By which I mean, joints consisting solely of an intermittent contact along a 1mm seam are going to be less stable than a government led by Liz Truss and Kim Jong Un at the same time, blindfolded. Therefore, we will create reinforcing pieces that will simultaneously stabilize the joints, strengthen the whole and properly assure a good 90 degree angle.

If you're like me, you'll have a box full of offcuts of plasticard, like these:

I don't think younger me had a particular use for those in mind when he obsessively stashed them away but they've turned out very handy in the end, so maybe he was smarter than I gave him credit for, the dozy prick. I've used dozens and dozens of them in the last few weeks, so it was clearly worth the effort.

Edit them so that they have at least one good 90-degree angle, using the square and knife. I also made a bunch fresh out of the strip at the bottom of the picture, just to show any more unimaginitive readers that a bits box full of useless microplastic tat isn't a hard requirement:

That is a completely arbitrary amount I stopped at without counting, that turned out to be almost exactly the right number. I'm still not counting them, you do it.

We're almost ready to actually put glue to plastic here, so conduct one last check. You want to make sure all your 12 x 6cm pieces are actually the same length. It's really easy with the corrugated material to let the knife shift a bit, so do check now because it's easier to fix any mistakes before you start gluing. if you have  short pieces, just trim all the longer pieces down to that length. As here:

Base piece slightly too long, I edited it quickly off-camera.

Right, ready to roll.

To begin, take your plain plasticard 6 x 12cm piece, and lay it flat. Glue on, flush with one long edge edge, three angled brace pieces as in the photo below. I like to use a nice big one in the middle. Matron. 

With that done, take one of your corrugated oblongs and glue it to the base piece and brace pieces, as below:

Right. Getting somewhere. At this point I want to leave a disclaimer:

Don't ask me how to build a container without the brace pieces so that you can have the doors modelled open, because I haven't worked that out yet.

Next, take your plain 1mm plasticard 6 x 5.9cm piece. Distinguish which edges are the 6cm edges and make sure one of those goes on the bottom, and then glue it into the container, roughly 2cm from one short edge, as in the photo below, using several further brace pieces:

Pretty sure you can work out most of the rest of it from this point, but in case you can't here's some more.

Next you want your 6 x 6cm corrugated piece.  Again, using brace pieces, and paying atention to which way up the corrugations should go, glue it onto the end of the base piece and the one corrugated edge already attached:

That one triangle is just holding up the brace piece while the glue dries. Don't glue one there.

You're a grown-up, you can see where this is going, but for the slow ones at the back, next we're going to add in the other 12 x 6 side piece. No one will be surprised to learn that this will require the brace pieces in the image above. Thus:

Do please note that there are brace pieces that run horizontally as well as vertically. They're just as important when it comes to making the whole thing square and true.

Ok, next we're going to close the box off. This is the trickiest part, because it's very probable that you don't have an entirely flat series of pieces to glue it to at this stage. Corrugated plasticard is ten kinds of tricky to cut out and I always seem to end up with one side higher than the others at this point. In this particular case, it was that the plain front piece was slightly lower than the rest, by about half a mil. In order for the whole thing to fit really nicely together, I decided to slightly narrow my top piece and set it down between the two side pieces instead of on top of them. Accordingly, when I glued in my brace triangles, I left them just below the level of the top and then very slightly trimmed the top piece to be a little narrower and shorter than exactly 12 x 6cm. You may find that your top piece touches all the sides when you lay it on top: in that case, no need to trim. Set the brace triangles exactly at the level of the top and you're away. It'll look like this once the braces are in:

I found it useful at this point to slightly overlap one top bracing triangle piece per side with one of the ones on the bottom. You can see this on the leftmost and uppermost pair of braces. This allows you to glue them together for greatly increased strength and stability.

Anyone who is surprised to hear that this is the point at which we attach the top, I'm genuinely interested to hear why. Because this is the point at which we attach the top, and it seems really very obvious.

So, glue the top on. If you expected rocket science, you've come to the wrong place.

You'll get a result much like this:

Note that the top piece remains slightly too long despite my best efforts. This is fine, we'll trim it back with flush-trim cutters or a knife. You'll also notice that there's a bit of a gap here and there. Don't worry about that at all, because the next stage will totally get rid of the problem.

Ok, last phase of corrugation-botherment. The front doors. Take your last remaining piece of corrugated plastic: it'll be the 6 x 5.9 piece. In an ideal world, this would fit in the void at the front nice and easily. More likely, it won't. Trim it as necessary until it does. Bear in mind that you want there to be a visible gap between the two doors so that they actually look like doors as opposed to another blank solid piece of corrugated material. You want something that looks like this:

The white line down the middle is the gap between the doors, which should have a physical representation so you can shade it when painting.

Ok, box built. Have another biscuit.

 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by Bonehead