So over the years, I'm sure we've all discovered various tips and tricks to help out our hobby. I've found that sometimes stuff we would think of as trash is often incredibly useful. So this thread is for any one who has found good hobby uses to reuse or recycle what would otherwise go in the garbage.
I've got a few that I'll add as I get some stuff done. Feel free to add your own. 😁
To start here's a piece of scatter terrain for industrial/sci-fi gaming.
PROJECT: Poo bag rolls ---> stack of pipes scatter terrain
TIME: 10-20 minutes (depending on how long it takes the glue to cure)
If you have a dog, walk that dog, and scoop the poop (which you should if it's in someone else's yard), then odds are you've ended up with these little round plastic tubes that the poo bag rolls are wrapped around.
So you get 6 of them, some super glue, and (optionally) a file or emory board. (NOTE: the cannon fodder infantryman is for scale)
If you have the file or emory board, rough up the edge of the tube so the super glue sticks better. I've found that super glue works better on industrial plastic if it's been roughed up a little bit. Here's a comparison of a roughed up one compared with an intact tube.
Super glue them together into a pyramid shape.
Now you have a stack of pipes for industrial or scifi gaming that's large enough to provide respectable cover. Since the plastic is usually black or gray, you don't even need to paint it.
Super simple ine from me, but bread clips. You know those plastic squares with the hole punched in them that hold closed bread bags? They are a consistent thickness and plastic glue works on them. They are perfect for spacers or whatever else you would use plasticard for. And they're practically free.
if you buy an action figure like a child it is normally tied down with a wire of sorts. i used it for reigns when I made a dragon-riding mini.
@BS Kitbasher This is a quality recommendation. I was using the bread ties as plasticard for a while. (Chopped up, they're great for making flagstone bases).
Now, all the bread companies here use cardboard ties that don't even last a day on a bag of bread.
Another piece of really useful trash is the plastic soft drink twist cap (and the ring that attaches it to the bottle):
For starters the cap itself is a pretty decent container for mixing a quick homemade wash or as a container for other small amounts of liquid.
Second the ring is a good marker on the table. Taking this:
Which time lizard was poisoned last round?
To this:
That's the time lizard that was poisoned last round.
You can also turn the lids into decent scifi barrels. I'll take some pics and put together an easy tutorial for that this weekend.
I love how they look glued bottom-to-bottom to make Sci fi barrels. They remind me of the conveniently phaser-proof storage containers from TNG's shuttle bay.
Great topic!
Here in the USA for a while there, it seemed like credit card companies were sending me unsolicited mail on a pretty regular basis trying to get me to sign up for their cards, which included (fake) plastic credit cards with "Your Name Here" and a fake number printed on them.
I've saved dozens and dozens of them, and use them for pretty much the same generic stuff I'd use plasticard for - quick-and-easy bases, scratch-built shields and weapon blades, the sides of scratch-built crates, etc.
They're pretty much free - waste not, want not.
At the grocery, onions are often sold in these bags of plastic netting - I've saved the netting for years to turn into that camoflauge netting stuff that gets draped over artillary and the like, and I've also once used it for fishing nets on a scale fishing boat model, and even scratch-build model ship rigging (the sort of stuff that looks like rope ladders or nets, bracing the masts....) Again, totally free - why let it go to waste?
The scratch-built ships I used to build back in the '80s were made from "trash" treasures: cereal box cardboard decks and hulls, soda straw cannon and masts, paper napkin sails, etc.
Another one of my scratch-built model projects from the 1980s was an inexpensive 1/700 scale Nimitz-class aircraft carrier thrift-store find, missing the aircraft and a few other bits, which I souped up into a "20 minutes into the future" concept by using bits of sprue and cereal box cardboard to fashion the fuselages and wings of some tiny, tiny stealth fighters (or at least, the best public guesses of what stealth fighters might look like at the time!) I did some other work with the base model as well, such as using cardboard to build interior hangars with, and bits of spare model parts to make little scratch-built deck vehicles (fuel trucks, fire trucks, tractors, missile-loaders, forklifts, etc.) Lots of "trash" got recycled into that project!
As old-school plastic scale model builders know, those plastic sprues/runners that Wargames Atlantic figures are packaged on have thousands of uses for scratch-building stuff. For example, if you hold a length of sprue carefully over a candle flame while pulling the ends away from each other as the plastic softens and melts, it'll stretch into a long, thin strand that makes great antennae/aerials for scale model tanks. Here's a link to a YouTuber who loves coming up with new uses for sprues: (link) - his channel contains lots of that sort of thing, including building entire vehicles and buildings from sprues. You've probably got tons of sprues sitting around in this hobby, why not put them to use?
Spare miniature "bitz": anyone who has been in this hobby long enough has surely learned to keep all the leftover bitz stashed away in carefully-organized bitz-bins, waiting for a rainy day to find a use: extra heads, arms, weapons, shields, etc. Many of us end up with more bitz than we'll ever practically use in a lifetime! Find inventive ways to put them to use: severed heads for your barbarian horde, loose arms to embed in your trench diorama, Wargames Atlantic Classic Fantasy skeleton arms and skulls to clip into loose bones to decorate bases and add to dungeon dressing, weapons to clip from hands and cut in half as broken swords for dungeon tiles, shields to hang from dungeon walls, etc. Also, you can save some of those weapon bits for repairs to other gaming miniaures (I find that these extra weapons and shields, and replacement heads and arms, work great for dressing up Reaper Bones figures with droopy spears and other troubles, such as the relatively blank and featureless faces found on some of the earlier Bones miniatures. I tend to find a lot of Wizkids gaming mini sculpts to be painfully bland-looking, and often Wargames Atlantic bits are the perfect thing to breath life into a dull or poorly-molded Wizkids mini!) Think outside the box for some of those bits, too: spear shafts can be trimmed into sword grips, bows can be repurposed into horns and claws, etc. Unless you are gaming in a strictly historical setting, nothing is stopping you from experimenting with mixing genres, either: for that weird and seemingly distinctly '80s sci-fi/fantasy mashup vibe, go ahead and give that Dark Ages irish warrior one of those spare laser rifles and a leftover WWII German soldier's helmet from your bits bin - what would John Carter, He-Man, Luke Skywalker, or Yor (hunter from the future!) do?
Not really "trash", but: Don't be afraid to mix-and-match scales, either - I've saved some of the spare missiles and rocket-launchers from an inexpensive 1/72 attack helicopter kit to turn into some sci-fi weapons for some of my 28mm sci-fi guys: I figure it won't take very much trouble to scratch-build some sentry robot rocket launchers and other heavy weapons from this stuff! Cheap 1/72 scale historical Roman, barbarian, and and other infantry are just about the right height for 28mm gnomes, gremlins, or sprites. Similarly, dollar-store "green army man" figures are troll- and ogre-sized compared to 28mm figures, if you find some figures suitable for giant monsters. Those '70s and '80s era Tim Mee Galaxy Laser Team toys include some great "giant" sized lobster/turtle/alien-things, droids, and other characters that might fit the bill, and there was a Tim Mee fantasy action figure set as well that included "cave man" figures that make great quick-and-dirty cheap ogres. If you have some of these Tim Mee figures hanging around from childhood, this is a great opportunity to put them to use - and Tim Mee recently re-released both of these sets (along with their classic Green Army Men figures) in all their original, classic, vintage style we remember them for!
Cheap toys in general are a nice source of stuff to work with on 28mm gaming projects - you might need to add some weathering or other interesting detail and paint over some garish colours, but toy aisles and bargain bins, thrift stores, flea markets, and garage/yard/boot sales are some great places to find some outgrown toy vehicles, buildings, and action figures that can find new life as gaming minis. (For example, I've seen at least one or two YouTubers who have gotten a lot of mileage out of turning cheap superhero toy action figures into fantasy terrain statues....)
And, a heads-up: I've been able to find second-hand Wizkids "Hero-CLix" 28mm pre-painted random-package superhero figures being sold in bulk quantity for astonishingly low prices - I recently got a bulk lot of these for something like US$ 30 for something like 70 or 80 minis. The paint jobs are dreadful, the sculpting occasionally dodgy, and three or four of the figures were damaged, but all of this is easily fixed with some of your spare bitz from WGA figures, a little paint, and a little Wacky Gloo. One of the fun things about traditional superhero characters is that they are a product of pulp literature, which set a lot of modern sci-fi and fantasy genre conventions, without really being bound to modern genre conventions - that is, many of these minis actually translate pretty well to either sci-fi or fantasy characters with a simple weapon swap at most (along with a good paint job.) And, not a few of them work equally well for either fantasy or sci-fi characters. The lot I'd gotten also contained almost a dozen ninja characters (along with at least one complete set of ninja turtles!), who will make great fantasy RPG assassins and the like. I think I might be able to make use of about 1 in 4 of the minis I got, and the rest I'm giving away as Christmas stocking-stuffers. I'm guessing these HeroClix figures are on sale so cheap right now, because nobody else wants them - thrifty 28mm gamers who don't mind sorting through a grab-bag of this sort looking for a few to give a good make-over to should consider tracking some of these figures down and giving them a good home!
Styrofoam packaging: When I was a kid in the '70s or early '80s, my parents - running on a working-class budget in a thrifty '70s economy, ended up being forced to buy their first colour TV after the black-and-white set broke. I got the large, oddly-shaped styrofoam packaging - spacers and the lot - with a package of green army men and a fistfull of plastic astronauts and cowboys and indians from a neighbor's garage sale for Christmas.
I don't think I'd ever seen this sort of styrofoam packaging before, and was pretty confused - "What is it???" My father replied: "You figure it out. Looks to me like a moon base for your astronauts. Or, maybe it's a barracks for your army men, or a town for your cowboys and indians. What do you think it is?" Those big dumb chunks of styrofoam were maybe the best "toy" my parents ever gave me, short of the occasional shoebox: I used them for moon bases, castles, trenches, all sorts of things for the next couple years, until the stuff had seen so much use and abuse, my mother threw it out. I dare say, I spent more time playing with the styrofoam packaging "trash" than I ever spent watching the TV it was packaged in. So, that's my story of how I got a couple giant chunks of glorified styrofoam peanuts for Christmas in the 1970s! :D
Anyway, all sorts of stuff gets packaged with sheets and blocks and spacers made from styrofoam, which can be turned into terrain with a little creativity! YouTube is full of tutorials for how to use foam for gaming terrain projects - usually the crafters buy construction-grade foam sheets, but why do that, when there's lots of this packaging floating around for free??? (The stuff doesn't react well with solvents, as a warning: spraypaint and certain glues will melt the stuff down into nothing in an instant.... Try brushing on acrylic paint, and using hot glue or PVA glue, for anything other than disastrous results.)
@Yronimos Whateley
That's quite the post Brother. Lots of good info there. I'll be honest, I'm a little emotionally exhausted post read ;)
Thanks for the trip back into childhood as well!
It was a lot like watching Stranger Things - minus a lot of monsters and bicycle riding.
Here is my dollar store tank with some useful trash and about $3 worth of stowage. I'm not sure whether I want to add side sponsons or just finish the thing off.
My family call it "the Borders tank".
Can anyone recommend to me some good resources for painting and weathering tanks? Also, how stowage has typically been applied? Thanks.
And with some additional dollar store crap, voila! It's done.
@BS Kitbasher
That's a pretty convincing Leman proxy.
Your stowage looks good!
Tanks tend to have most of their stowage out of the way behind the turret in the bustle area. The Germans occasionally like to stow Jerry cans on top of turrets but that's rather atypical.
Track links on a vehicle might be actual spares, or field expedient armor, or both. As armor they would generally be found on turret and hull fronts.
When you see track links from a completely wrong vehicle attached you know for certain that's field expedient armor.
(MKIV with liberally applied T34 tracks.)
(Tiger I with Jerry cans on top of turret and spare track link attached to front.)
Any gear stowed on the sides of vehicles is liable to get brushed off during movement. But there are certain vehicles (particularly with a ramp) where you have no choice but to store equipment on the sides. Looking at you M113.
Light vehicles like HMMWVs often have the stowage on top of the trunk, and on the rear. You might see "light" stuff like coiled concertina on the hood.
As a rule of thumb just remember the primary consideration with vehicle storage is not to hinder the operation of the vehicle and the visibility of the crewmen. So stowage can't hinder the operation of the turret or crew served weapon up top. It can't be stowed on a ramp. A secondary consideration is still having your storage after movement.
I meant to post this a week ago, but here's a little how to for the lid barrels BS Kitbasher and I mentioned earlier. For the folks who are relatively new, these things are awesome. They make great objective markers as well as scatter terrain.
PROJECT: Soda Lids ---------> Scifi Barrels
TIME: About 5 minutes
Grab 2 soft drink twist caps, some super glue, and a file (or emory board). This can be done without a file, but in my experience it works better with a file.
Rough up the edge of the lids. This makes more surface area for the glue to adhere to. If you don't do this, the barrels require more precision to glue the edges together, it can be frustrating when they don't line up exactly, and they tend to be more fragile.
Here's a pic of a roughed up lid next to a pristine one.
Apply glue and stick them together.
Then you just have to prime and paint them. These things are all over the place. You can even spot them in some of WGA's photo work:
I've got a few of the thinner water bottle lids, and when I get enough I'm going to try to make them into 'moon rover' tires.
@BS Kitbasher
Just check that post ... could give you some hints and tips
http://roebeast.blogspot.com/2012/10/trash-bashing-sci-fi-vehicle-from-start_19.html
post is divided in 3 parts.
Hello there! This stuff isn't trash, but I didn't want to start a whole new topic on Dollar/thrift store finds.
I picked these bad boys up at Dollar Tree here in the US (Tau for size reference):
Gotta run, but more to come...
Edit: Okay, I'm back. Check this out:
This is the accessory pack for an alien vehicle in the Final Faction line of action figures at Dollar Tree. With a little bit of basing and a paint job, it could easily be turned into a large burrowing monster with claws that's broken through the surface to attack your Stargrave/Five Parsecs crew! Maybe each body part acts like a separate model, as though it's moving its claw-tentacles around and attacking you from multiple angles!
The vehicle itself has potential, too (I was seeing how it looked upsidedown in the first pic):
Here it is right side up:
@Benjamin Hayward Oooh. Looks like a Dollar Tree run is in order. Though the Dollar store is now more like teh $1.19 store....
The little buildings come in pieces, so you can build them as pictured, or kitbash with them:
@William Redford
@William Redford
Dollar stores over here (Quebec) are now more like 5 or 6$CAN... Crossing the Lines to pay a visit to shops in Plattsburgh is quite expensive thanks to gas pricetag. A pity!!!
@Steven StGeorges Yeah... that sounds like the world we live in... :(
@William Redford
Ontarian Dollartree or any other Dollar store there are far less expensive... but gas is still a problem (almost 2$CAN/liter, so 1,59$US/0.26 US gal... ), especially for some 1$CAN -very interesting- toys. 😬
@William Redford
I could ... I could order 25 times the same object at once -25 is the min one can order + shipping. So almost as expensive than going to a DT shop in Ont.😬
Well, I went to the dollar tree after work.. Managed to get some good stuff, but none of the modern scenery stuff... :( though I did snag the last 3 doll houses... I saw @BS Kitbasher mention them on Dakka.
All this was like $6.70
@William Redford
Hate you... especially for all that Final Faction stuff (Kharn Synthoid is an absolute must-have for kitbash, same for all these accessories kits) .. and look at those little doll houses.. 😬
There is another dollar tree Close-ish, so I plan on going Saturday to see if I can find some more of the houses.
Made a gun drone out of the 4 rotor thing and some bits... Pictured here with a cannon fodder guy and my wheelchair tech girl conversion...
@William Redford
Nice! The gun drone looks Nurgely. Or maybe tech before it gets Nurgled.
@William Redford
Can you tell us more about the tech girl?
@JTam She is a malifaux plastic mini (I think she was one of the old show girls). The wheel chair was a hero clix (I think Professor x.) I cut the malifaux mini up and arranged it to look like she was sitting in the chair, used Greenstuff to cover up the torso/leg join and made to look like blanket. I used a GW auspex to look like the controls on the wheelchair. Also added some aitfilters and other metal bits to the back of the chair. the sub machine gun was from an old metal bit from the Malifaux pack. And some GW lizardman shields to the wheelchair wheels as the heroclix chair was pretty basic.
This was going to be a character in a Savage Worlds Firefly game that never made it past session 1... the character was sort of like the guy in Aliens 4...
Edit: It was a "Beckoner". The one on the left...
@William Redford
Nicely done. Really creative conversion. Thanks for your notes.
One hack I used to do was to snip the cotton bud ends off used cotton wool earbud sticks, leaving about 5cm of perfectly good ~3mm polystyrene tube. Literally thousands of uses. And helping to keep a lot of plastic out of landfill.
No longer possible as they've (quite sensibly) gone back to paper based sticks, but I have a bag with thousands of the things (they also happen to store very efficiently).
Quite proud of this one.
Tropicana Orange Juice caps:
Make perfect Imperial gothic scatter terrain.
You might want to sand down the raised "Tropicana" on top, and/or glue on a disk, or mesh, or other gubbins. Is it an Imperial bench? Holocaster? Vent? Statue base? You decide.
All the different orange juice or iced coffee lids are great. Check out Stokk iced coffe, which has lids with more classical arches rather than gothic, and another orange juice (Minute Maid?) has somewhat industrial lids. The Stokk and Tropicana lids at a certain size also stack well, in that the the arched alcoves line up.
As for useful trash/dollar store stuff: googly eyes. You can get a bag with lots of googly eyes for cheap, or gather them up from arts and crafts tables at kids' parties. Cut a slit in the bottom and squirt in some super glue to keep the eye from rattling, and you have a dome shaped bit you can use as a hatch or a lens or whatever.
plastic clothespins. At the 99c Only stores, they sell big bags with lots and lots of plastic clothespins for $1. Slip the plastic parts off of the metal spring, and you've got yourself some great detailing for terrain or vehicles. I tend to snip them at the transition from one side being convex to the other side, so I end up with a rectangular slab of plastic and a curvy bit of plastic, both of which look good when glued to the side of your shoebox-with-Medge-bits building.
Made another dollar tree run. Got 2 cool robot/mech/power armor guys, an alien monster guy, and 2 packs of spiders. The spiders are my favorite...
I hoped to use the plastic tubes that come as protection on decent paintbrushes for something, but at least this very clear one I tried didn't get glued with butyl acetate and instead got permanently melty with cyanoacrylate. Had to drill out a piece of WGA sprue (they seem to be 2.9mm OD, and my 2.05mm bit worked pretty well).
If you still have a gas stove without an electric lighter (or one that works consistently) you might use matches. Matches are really useful building materials if you have the patience to use them, as they typically glue very well with the usual white PVA glue.
For example a small shack for a sniper:
That is not big enough for you? :)
You can always make something larger:
Other examples of useful materials are the balls from deodorants and most plastic containers from desserts and such (the balls rotate and I should be able to keep them rotating even after painting):
All sorts of bottle caps and such can be turned into useful things:
Not trash but 1:43 metal scale cars are typically cheap and work well for 28mm vehicles:
Plants that dried out, especially small bushes with stronger branches can be varnished and turned into trees (same goes for tree branches):
Containers from other things beyond desserts might be useful as well:
Imagination is typically the limit and while most of the things I have shown are quite easily to identify right now as the original trash, you can be sure that after painted most of those things will look as good as premium terrain ;)
@William Redford I hate you! 😝 I've been trying to find those mechs and crawler monsters and none of the Dollar Trees in my area have been getting them in stock!
My wife wears contact lenses, and each time the cleaning solution comes with this cool little bottle which has a place to keep the lenses safely in so they can be washed overnight. The bottle is straight and round - a nice little cylinder - and the lid is a lovely octogon. The interior pieces can be disassembled and have two rather nice little domed gratings.
@Benjamin Hayward
Just order them directly if US-based or in Ontario, or order them and ask them to be delivered at a DT store near you ;)
I'm always looking for ways to make things cheaply & generate less trash! (Especially since I'm in an area where it is hard to recycle some things). I'm 100% going to use these tips, thanks for sharing them everyone!
If you use acrylic paint & a dry pallet, always save any paint that dries in the well, it makes for great puddles, or strangely colored ground effects!
Plus, it is sometimes has neat textures left over from the painting process!
Second, if you buy a game with push-card components, the remaining pieces of sprue can be used to make some extra bases if you have a spare one to use as a template!
Third, in addition to the normal uses of the cardboard box that minis come in, you can also cut out great tokens that can greatly aid in a lot of games! I primarily use them for d&d or lesser fights. Just trace out a base, glue or tape it to some cardstock or wooden disc & you are good to go!
My hairbrush is falling apart. The tines have a significant flare before they touch the membrane, which works out pretty well for a blowpipe cone (and the rest turns into a wand for a wizard).
Toffifee trays are decent dry palettes, at least for colorless tasks like glue and putty. There's even a lot of ridges that help putting down a brush without it rolling off. If you're trying to colormatch something though, I think the golden coating makes purple look a lot browner than it is.
Bent spots of the thinner (2mm) WGA sprue beams can be carved to a point as boar tusks. The injection spot in the center meanwhile could be used as a big shield (with a wannabe shieldboss on the one side, and iron bars that can form spikes on the other) or maybe a foot for a cauldron.
The main body of that cauldron will be an Überraschungsei, obviously.
While performing my weekly mundane inspection of neighbourhood waste bins, I recovered a couple of tower fans, an pedestal fan, three alarm clocks and an old dvd player and put them aside in order to dismantle them both later.
Last friday, wife told me I should clean up the garage or she will bring all my pile of intersting trash to the municipal waste bin -you know casual blackmail attempt..🙄
I spent about 2 hours stripping my marvelous articles of every single useful gear, small electric wares, plastic casings, whatever... only part of the small engines and metal tubings met a tragic end in the waste bin.
