Junkheaps

No true scrapyard is complete without large piles of rotting machinery and industrial slag lying around looking like a tetanus shot waiting to happen. So the final stage in completing the Scrapyards board is naturally to create some slag piles.


The first step is collecting a bunch of junk. A trip to Goodwill scored me several constructable toys, including a large bag of Robotix bits and some Lego motorcycle things, as well as bags of hot wheels. To this I added more bits from the harddrives my roommate disassembled, as well as the remains of some old instamatic cameras he salvaged for the optics. The great thing about this project is just about anything can be used. To the pile I added some scrap balsa wood bits and pieces, and I threw in some spare Plastruct tubes, rods and corner joints.


I sorted the pieces out into two large piles. One of these piles I spray painted with the Ruddy Brown primer.


The other pile got black primer followed by Gunmetal.


To age the wood I mixed a small amount of india ink with tap water and soaked the balsa wood bits in it overnight.


This gave the wood some interesting stains and discolorations. Try using something other than india ink, like maybe coffee or tea, tell me what kind of results you get.


I also found an old coffee can full of rusted metal bits in my dad's garage. I'm going to save some of these pieces for later projects, but tossing in some random chunks of real rusting metal could work out well.


So now I've assembled everything into one place. Time to make industrial slag salad. Dump everything into a large mixing bowl and mix it all together.


For the "dressing," I'm using a mix of 2 parts white glue and 1 part water. I used a whole 32 oz. bottle of Elmer's, and two cups of water, mixed up in a juice jug. I poured it in, then just dug in with my hands and mixed it all up. Obviously you'll want to wear gloves.


I laid out a half dozen terrain rounds on to sticks (so the overflowing glue doesn't weld them to the painting surface) and used a slotted spoon to scoop out the junk and dump it on. The spoon didn't work as neatly as I had hoped, and so I had to do a lot of hand shaping to get everything piled up in a stable manner. After I was done filling rounds I drained out the remaining glue and dug through the left over junk, fishing out any small bits, tubs, and rods I could find and adding them to the bases.

Once they were dry(ish), I gave them a thin coat of the minwax Antique Walnut and followed it up with some drybrushing with the Autumn Brown. Voila! After a week's worth of work, I have transformed a single giant pile of crap into four smaller piles of crap! Wait a minute...