The Midwinter Minis video that helped inspire the previous post also suggested using copper pipe couplers to make modern oil-drum style barrels – perfect for an oil refinery build! But there was a problem: I couldn’t find pieces of the appropriate size and shape anywhere locally. There were corners and plugs and adapters for connecting to larger types, but nothing that wouldn’t require a lot of cutting of metal to get useful shapes.

I thought about grabbing some from online somewhere, but I was too impatient to wait 24 hours for an Amazon Prime delivery so I just 3d printed some barrels instead. I found a model that had a separate lid with a little detail on it and decided to resize it to an appropriate scale and go with that.

Over the course of yet another series of failures to take any photos, I based and painted the barrels in a few configurations.

I cut some bases from eXPS scraps and glued the barrels down to them. Barrels themselves were painted in a few different colors for variety and given a generous black wash to not only highlight the lid and side details, but to make them look blotchy and dirty, with maybe some grimy rainwater on the lids.

Two of the barrels were set on their sides, lidless. I used some of the Vallejo Still Water (paid link) I’d bought for my black dragon swamp base, mixed with brown or green ink, to create spilled liquids around them. Another was left upright and open but filled with a small amount of clear glue mixed with brown.

Bases were grouted up and flocked in the usual ways. I later added a little bit of rust when I rusted up all the other parts of this build.

Are Jersey barriers designed to protect us from New Jersey or vice versa?

I also wanted a few concrete barriers and decided to just try to make some simple ones with foam. The Proxxon (paid link) definitely made this easier, though I suppose it could be done by hand.

From some scrap 1/2″ XPS foam I used the guide lines on the hot wire cutter to cut some 1cm and 2cm strips. If I had it to do again I’d probably go slightly smaller, as these seemed a little bulky next to a mini compared to the real ones I see around road construction, etc. next to human-sized me.

Next I set the angle of the hot wire so that I could trim the sides at an angle such that the top would be cut in about 5mm, leaving a 1mm “platform”. In retrospect I might have gotten a little better look if I’d added slight angles to the top pieces as well.

The 1cm strips were glued to the tops of the 2 cm strips with white glue and those were cut into three strips each because the resulting width looked okay to me.

The glue was setting slowly and the joined strips were sliding around. I also wanted to put some little screws in the bottoms as ballast, but I was out of little screws, so I pushed some small nails into the undersides instead. The weight they added was negligible but more than none at all, and they helped keep the parts from sliding around.

Nailed it!

I wanted to find a way to cover the seams between the top and bottom pieces and add some texture, so I decided to experiment with one of DM Scotty’s favorite high-end crafting materials: toilet paper. I started painting some watered-down PVA onto the pieces and trying to wrap TP around them.

What resulted was a soggy mess of tears, ripples, and fingerprints. After struggling for a while to try to smooth everything out, I ended up pulling it all off. Instead, I textured the surfaces with a light beating (not scratching – I didn’t want lines!) from a wire brush.

Pictures of other builds of these often show broken pieces with bits of rusty metal sticking out, but these particular barriers are going to be of relatively recent manufacture so I didn’t add any further embellishments.

After a coat of black-and-Mod-Podge, I decided to play around with stippling paint on with a sponge. I medium grey covered most of the surface, followed by a sparser coating of light grey and a few dabs of tan here and there. A black wash finished them off.