Shipping Containers — Borthwick Family Site

I got inspired by watching the Black Magic Craft video on making Shipping containers and remembered the ones i built over 10 years ago.

I had realised you never really want just 1 container and i always wanted to play a game that was set in that awesome scene in Batman begins when he is taking down bad buys in the container yard.

So i decided to make my own. now back then my ex wife and I ran a painting studio (well she did the painting) and we also sold resin bases - business was Ironhalo Painting. the business is defunct now, but i have all the molds and originals if i ever need anything. so i had all the rubber and resin i needed and just needed to make the container. to save space and make it easier for shipping i decided to make a kit rather than case a solid one).

I got some plans for actual containers from a friend of mine who worked for a shipping company and worked out the scale. this is meant to be a 10ft tall and wide and 20ft long container, but i also scaled it to look right, rather than be 100% scale accurate. as models get taller it will start to look smaller, but there are also 8ft containers so its ok.

I used plastic card, a 1mm card for the base and then corrugated plasticard for the walls and roof and back, making sure to make the corrugations fit properly. i used thicker plasticard pieces for the side walls, and made it fit as best possible so the container would slot together.

the floor has diamond plate for texture. usually the container is closes, but its actually designed to be able to be opened so i wanted the floor to more than plain.

the front door is different to the rest, so i used different card for this. the handles are just rounded plasticard, and one of the handles fell off and i never bothered to reglue it. the door can snap down the middle if you want to hinge it to open, you just drill a pin through the roof and floor to each of the door pieces.

I then made panels for the side for name plates using model railway rivets and made some control panels so i could make some more scifi containers.

i glued it all down to a piece of thick plasticard to make it easier to make the molds (which i forgot to get a photo of).

Here you can see a cast run of the container bits. I think this is one the ex did in a rush as the far right wall is warped, but normally it was nice and straight. takes about 10 minutes to assemble.

and here are painted pics next to a mantic Mar attacks model i use for scaling.

easy to paint, take drybrushing well, and look awesome with rust on them. i need to get some more resin and run a bunch more off, i want about 20 of them ideally.