Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Cheap shipping containers

Shipping  Containers


Everyone out there that has a Miniature company has a shipping container of one sort or another. With the cost of their models, a large area for a Post Apocalyptic world can add up in cost really fast and model train supply companies are not any cheaper by any means. Paper models can work but the draw back is they are very light and can be blown over too easy at times, don't stack well, plus they are not strong enough in my opinion to risk stacking minis on.



So I have been checking out 1x1x36 inch square wood dowel you can get one for less then $3.00 (USD) and the math is 15mm scale = 1/100 as general rule, it's not written in stone so don't blast me with comment as to it being other scales. So 1 inch in 1/100 scale would be 8 feet and 3.3 inches so a 1x1 inch square would be 8.3x8.3 foot, the average height and width of a container, so a 20 foot container would roughly be 2 and 1/2 inches long.


I should then get 14 container. So one can also get 7 containers at 5 inches equaling 40 foot containers 

That's 14 containers for about .21 cents each! Plus time to fix then up to look like containers or 7 containers for .42 cents each and again the time to make them up. Okay I only got 13 remember measure twice cut once oops!



One could make the outside of the container different due to different manufactures, or for a future time set as well, which in turn would give more of that random feel as, You could make one if you like and then make a mold and cast the rest you need as well.

So here is the start and some more pictures for size comparison



Again it's only the begining of this project and will update as I go along, blocks still need some cleaning up and adding the details and painting but you can see from the next picture you can have a whole shipping yard full fairly fast and cheap.


Hope you have a large shipping yard for your port you'll need it for all your cargo and your containers too.

4 comments:

  1. Great start... makes a lot of sense. I look forward to seeing how they turn out.

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  2. Yeah me too! just trying to find the time to finish them now.

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  3. It's elegant in it's simplicity! I'll be giving it a shot soon. Thanks!

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