Delving back into Deadzone

4th March 2023

Over the last few days I have been finishing off the last of the terrain for this project.

I still have a few other bits to work on at some point (including the starship scenery set), but as I mentioned before I just needed to set an end point for this.

So, as you may have seen in the post that got duplicated, I spent a bit of time on the computer panels.

For these I went online and found some suitable images (Sundancer already identified them in his comments on the previous post ? ). Because I didn’t have the terrain to hand I simply copy and pasted multiple images, reducing the size each time.

Then when it came to use them, I found the best size, and after painting the edge of the screens black I glued them down. This was followed by several coats of gloss varnish to make them look a bit like real screens.

I also painted up some guns, rubble piles, wall lights (using multiple thin coats of green followed by gloss varnish) and the cash machine. On the cash machine I made a mistake on the side of it – so painted a fresh rectangle of white and tried to make it look like a poster that had been stuck on.

The conveyor belts and small pipes were a little awkward. I had to construct them in such a way that they could be used in multiple layouts (since the rest of the terrain is meant to be modular). In a permanent terrain layout you could have them running across buildings, or down the sides etc. But for mine I opted to build the conveyor in a sort of spiral, dropping down in height as it went. I kept it in three main pieces, for ease of storage.

The pipes I made into two pretty tight pieces, to take up a small footprint, but still have some semblance of ‘reality’. The main section is something like a small pumping unit (although I would have like some pieces with vales on – may add some in the future if it niggles me) and the smaller is just some pipes that come up then back underground.

They all received a black undercoat. The conveyor parts were masked off to keep them black (curving masking tape is fun…), then all sprayed dark silver. A bit of tidying, addition of some copper colours and some mock gauges on the side of the ‘pump’ and they were done.

When I pick up somegood rust effect paint I will use it for these pieces to weather them in a bit.

With that, I am now calling the project terrain complete.