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 August 6 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 August 7 by Bonehead

[Bonehead]

Part three: Fiddly Bits That Make it Look More Convincing

For a given level of moderate convincingness

 

Right, so we left off here:

With what is best described as a big wobbly-sided box. There are visible joints with a few gaps in them.

Time to fix that. This is where the .5mm plasticard comes in.

Fetchez a ruler and your sheet of .5 plasticard. You don't need to worry about the sheet being square, we're going to cut thin strips here. You may find it helpful to trim the sheet down so that it's just over 12cm wide; this way you'll have to hold the ruler steady across the smallest necessary width while you cut the plasticard. If you've got one of those guillotine things, you'll be laughing.

Measure out 2mm intervals along parallel edges on your sheet. If you've trimmed it down to just over 12cm width, then you want the edges that are 90 degrees to the 12cm one. Then, use a ruler to guide your knife between the marks so that you cut out a 2com wide strip. You know the drill, gentle pressure and several passes gets gets gets the job done.

Like this here one:

This is going to be your edge banding. You'll need at least 6 full length strips and multiple shorter ones- which will either come off the end of full size ones if you didn't trim down your plasticard or be composed of whole strips split in half if you did. 

Now, once you've got them cut out, it's time to accessorize your box. First, get used to the job by gluing on a strip at the bottom, leaving a little overlap at the rear like so:

Once you've done that, you've got the trickier ones at the upper angles. The important thing here is consistency. You're going to have an overlap on one side of each upper seam between a side and the top, and in order for the container to not look subtly weird, you want that overlap to be symettrical. Therefore, you're either going to glue on both of the upper side edge bands first, exactly as you glued the lower side edge bands, or you're going to glue on both of the top edge bands first, same method as the first ones you did. Look at the picture below. You can see on the face of the container that is closest to the camera (the top face), the edge banding is slightly wider than the edge banding on the side facing away to the right. I chose to build the container this way because it means that the two side faces will have equal-width edge banding at the top and bottom, and the top, which is a unique face, has slightly wider banding on both sides.

Similarly, the edge banding has also been done on the vertical edges of both sides in such a way that both the front and back are equally narrow, and the edge banding on the rear face is all slightly wider, except for the bottom strip. 

You can decide if this is important to you or not; you're presumably a legal adult with the wit and self control to judge your own capacity for giving a crap about minor aesthetic detail, but to me the chief thing about shipping containers is that they're mass-produced. The only distinguishing thing about them really is the paint, and relative rust level. 

Therefore, having a set way of constructing them so that they all look exactly the same, or as near as you can get with hand tools and tourette's syndrome in my case, is a relatively easy way of creating exactly such a mass-produced feel.

One thing I will also note about the photo above relates to the rear edge-banding on the closest edge of the rear to the camera. You will certainly find it easier overall to glue on the edge-banding on the long edges of the side pieces first. This is because the nature of the corrugated material typically means that at least one side piece will have a rather low profile at its very edge, which, if you try to glue edge banding onto it first, will result in the edge banding being at an odd, 45 dgree angle to the side.

Instead, if you've glued the long pieces on first, you'll have a convenient hard stop for you to glue the rear face's side edge pieces to that makes it dramatically easier to keep them parallel to the rear piece. These will have the effect of extending the proper high level of the side pieces to the very edge of the container, so that gluing the side faces' rear edge pieces on parallel to the sides is also dramatically easier.

If that chaotic word-salad doesn't make much sense, just remember this: Long side pieces first. Then rear pieces. Then short side pieces. Finally short top pieces. That'll see you right.

Right. Edge banding on and glue drying. Time for a quick detour into door release land. This is where you want your 1mm plastic rod. Ignore the indecent 1.5m rod in the image, I was young and needed the money, ok?

Refer to pictures of real shipping containers to judge precisely how far apart the inner pair of door release upright bars should be: I found that somewhere around a quarter inch/6-7mm looked about right. Start with these, and try and get them roughly the same distance from the seam in the middle of the doors. Not a terrible high priority at this scale, and you'll see in the photo below that I basically made this impossible for myself, and despite this error things are and remain, incredibly, still just fine:

I settled for having the bars roughly one entire corrugation and whatever extra material remained in from the side, which ended up being a different distance on either side and no-one would have noticed if I hadn't brought it up. next I simply count foru corrugations away from the first bar and glue the second bar in to the trough of the fifth corrugation. Bosh:

Paying attention to the painted container will show you that for the sake of consistency, I've mounted all the 'handles'- that is, the one-eighth-inch pieces of rod that I could cut four equal lengths of out of the remaining stub of the 30mm length the rods come in- at the same height across al the containers. Again, mass-produced regularity. Arguably this matters more than the edge banding, becuase the release bars are usually shiny metal on a container and therefore stand out more.

Note also the 'lock housing' added above the handles, spanning the gap between the doors. This is just a 2mm by 2.5mm rectangle of 1mm plasticard glued on at the same height on all containers. Decide for yourself if this detail matters enough to bother with; I didn't on the example I built for this tutorial and my conscience is untroubled. By this, anyway.

Right, nearly done. No small number of builders may consider this point 'entirely done,' and fair enough. For me, I just like to tidy up the edge banding a little. Again, it makes the containers all look a bit more regular, especially on the front.

Be extremely confident your glue is all dry and get your 400-grit sandpaper:

I have wet and dry sandpaper around the workshop because I have to wet-sand finish repairs on instruments in my job. I don't even know if you can buy 400-grit regular sandpaper, come to think of it.

Anyway, take your paper, cut a piece significantly bigger than the container, and lay it on a flat surface. Hold it down with one hand, and with the other hand, firmly but not aggressively hold one face of the container flat on the paper and move it in a figure-of-eight motion:

You won't need to spend much time per face, maybe 20-30 seconds, and then you'll want to dump out as much plastic dust as you can from the paper. A hoover or dust-buster type thing here would be good.

You're not going for levelling all the edge banding at this point, you're just trying to disguise all the joins and glue spillages. Like this:

There are still a few uneven areas. Save yourself a bunch of time and effort by just taking the sandpaper and using a finger to sand the remaining uneven areas individually:

Won't take long, just seconds per spot. Unless you've really bollocksed up the edge-banding. In which case, probably try trimming it down with a knife first. Carefully. You may, at this point, catch the corrugated material slightly with your sandpaper; if you do, no-one else cares and neither should you. Get over it.

Ok then, we end up with one nice, neat face, like so:

Home straight now. Repeat on all faces, taking especial care on the front to do your best to blend the edges of the edge-banding and side-piece together.

Once you've done that, you're finished. Start thinking about fictitious company logos and serial numbers to paint on the sides.

Huzzah, it's a particularly swanky box:

Well done. Now repeat this process as many times as you want shipping containers or until you grow irredeemably bored.

Biscuit time.

 

You'll note that I didn't model hinges on the doors: I don't care enough to do that. If you want hinges, knock yourself out. I'd use more .5mm plasticard, or probably .25mm for best results, but I'm not your mum, do what you want. Especially swanky modellers may make actual working doors with styrene tubes and brass rod. Don't look at me like that. No.

 

 

 

No!

 

Edited August 7 by Bonehead

[Bergje1984]

Hi!

 

I can't believe it's actually that simple haha!

Thanks for the quick and easy tutorial, I'm definitely gonna try building some of these over the weekend!

[Bonehead]

Thanks mate. Go for it, it's really not hard at all. If I can do it, it must be. Post a picture or two of the results if you can!

Meanwhile, as a bonus, I asked for suggestions for more pop-culture company livery and someone suggested something from Lost. I never watched it, but I googled some things, and here we are:

That company logo was, frankly, a complete pig to mask up. And it looks kind of terrible. But I'll cover it up with paint chipping and weathering effects and it'll be fine.

The numbers were a set that were apparently significant in the series. I thought it would be fun for one container in the collection to have a different serial number on each side, and then a reference to the plane that crashes at the start of the show on the doors.

So there, that's what became of the container I built for the tutorial.

No biscuit this time, I'm watching my weight.

 

[Bonehead]

Alright, no-one asked, but I have ordered some brass rod and styrene tubes and will be prototyping a version with working doors. Don't expect fast progress, but if I can make it work, I'll post a how-to.