Tutorial: Modular tin can silos

This is some old school terrain, the kitchen scrap terrain. I wanted some easy to build, line of sight blocking, modular terrain for my industrial board. These terrain pieces was the last I needed for it, to fill it out.

The resulting terrain is perfect for Deadzone, Necromunda, Scrappers, 40k and even works for 20mm vehicle combat like Auto Kill.

Build the silos from tin cans and various bits I found in the bit box.

Painting tips and photos of the done pieces are at the end of the blog post.

Step 1
Find the right cans. I took a 3" battle system tile to the grocery store, because I wanted my silos to fit into the Deadzone grid system. Found some with a top fitting perfectly into a 3'' square and 4,5'' high.

Step 2 - bit box diving

Found some different bits in the terrain bit box. Ladders are from Mantics battlezones, hatches and top pieces are from cheap russian Tehnolog, lamps are from Games Workshop. 

Step 3 - detailing

Added ladders to two of the silos. As you can see, 1,5 ladders pieces is a perfect fit. 

To give the hatch doors a curve, fitting the can, I heated them up with a candle - easy to bend them after that.

Added the same detail bit (the ending of a tehnolog pipe system) to the top of each silo. As well as some half pipes on each silo.

Step 4 - pipes

I wanted to have some pipes for the silos, for a better modular feel to them. Tie the entire silo complex together. The piping is made from a cut up dinosaur toy (a big dinosaur cage). Great detail and it was nearly free at a charity shop. 

I've glued some small magnets to the ends up the pipe, so they can be switch around the silos with no problem.

Mix and match
Time to put together some silos.

Painting
I wanted to match the terrain for my other yellow and grey industrial terrain. I base coated the silos with a cheap gray spray paint. The hatches, lamps and top pieces got a single burst of brown spray. The piping was spray painted brown.

Went with the freehand hazzard stripes on the top of each silo. I tried using masking tape, but it didn't work for me.

All the metal detailing (including pipes) was done with a wet palette mix of different brown, rust and iron colours. Not done nicely, just splashed together for some easy nuance differences.

The lamps were painted flourescent green, that I also used for some ooze from pipes.

The grey was a bit boring, so I added some extra detail with white stencil letters / numbers on the front and back (freehand painted though).

I used some near black (super dark brown) wash for run off weathering from rusted details. And the entire silo was given a wash of watered down strong tone as a last layer.

Showcase
Two evenings of work. One night building and base coating. Another night of painting the pieces. Six pieces done.

Had a lot of fun trying out different configurations of the tarrain.