Continuing on my Medea Refinery terrain build for our LibertyHammer event, I’ve finished up Smelt Furnace #17 to go along with Primary Pump Station A1. I’m pretty happy with it and think it will serve well as a big LOS blocker with a good amount of detail. Hopefully the remaining pieces for this terrain set come together much more quickly. They currently consist mostly of random interestingly shaped trash and won’t be as detailed.

The furnace was made by a combination of throwing rubbish together, traditional scratchbuilding, and 3D printing. The foundation and major heat sink are just trash packaging foam. The big smoke/heat column is plastic trash from a broken pool filter. I hope to make an insert for it with billowing smoke out of dyed cotton balls but have not started on that yet. The ladders were constructed as described in this tutorial. The small antenna cluster, tank stand, and rooftop mechanical box are 3D printed parts I designed, available as free downloads from those Thingiverse links. The other printed parts are downloads I found. A walkthrough of designing and printing 3D parts based on the antenna cluster is posted here.

Getting into using 3D printed parts for this terrain was interesting, and somewhat bittersweet. Though not astounding, I think I have above average scratchbuilding skills when I set my mind to it. But I can easily see them atrophying a bit as I drift into making more and more elements on the printer. Still though, you do need good fundamentals to pull it all together, and especially to make big pieces. And certainly there are a lot of things I can model and print much faster and better than I can construct by hand, let alone downloaded pieces.

More to come as I wrap up this set over the next week for a club terrain build/paint workday over Memorial Day weekend!