Trash Terrain: Nerf Cooling Tower

Urban Explorers encounter Rad-Zombies within the Exclusion Zone

Nerf guns were never something that I personally owned, probably because I became old and fossilised by the time they were doing the rounds. Sure, I picked a couple up in charity shops at times and had a go at painting them up to look like something that you might find on the set of a Sci-Fi TV show. But I never actually set out to buy one, let alone amass an armoury of the things either.

A Nerf gun painted up as a Sci-Fi pistol, such as any normal person might happen to own...

All of that changed when my friend Mike told me he was being forced to do a better job of pretending to be an adult and so needed to offload a ton of Nerf guns that he could no longer get away with keeping stashed in his house. Admittedly, most of these were supposed to be for my own kids, but some of the stuff he brought was too battered to function as an actual gun, and so it went straight into the queue to be made into terrain.

Millennial Mike - last seen pretending to be an adult...

One of these pieces was the barrel of a Nerf gun that immediately cried out to me as looking like something from an industrial wasteland, and so that was the exact direction that I took it in, knowing this would be a quick, but hopefully effective project to pull off.

The Nerf gun barrel in it's original colours

All I needed to do was attach the barrel to a CD for a base and add some bits to make it look a little more part of the environment. A bottle cap on top gave the look of a vent and a boom from a Micro Machines Action Fleet set helped to break up one side, while a sprue fitted the other perfectly. The base was just coated in PVA and then covered with Budgie grit before the whole thing was primed black and then hit with layers of grey and white.

Last of all I weathered the entire thing with a sponge, using black and brown craft paints and then washed it with the same paints watered down. The base got a coat of slate grey emulsion and then a highlight with a light grey to finish it off and I sealed the whole lot with matt varnish.

Not the most exciting of builds, but the result was a large piece of terrain that will work in a number of settings and situations, and which cost almost nothing to put together in terms of the components used and the materials required to get it to the tabletop.

As always, let me know what you think, either here or on social media.