Making scenery: WATER TREATMENT PLANT

I was going to put this under "other buildings", but decided that it deserved its own section.

Be honest now, have you ever seen a water treatment works on a wargaming table? I was inspired to make this the moment I saw the lid for the cheese packet I bought. The cheese was a sort of ersatz Boursin (soft cheese with garlic and herbs), and the packet it came in was a little plastic pot with an inset lid. Fortunately for me, I quite liked the cheese, because I needed four packets to make this water treatment works.

The four sunken tanks are the cheese packet lids. The arms of the water sprinklers are lengths of steel wire cut to length and bent to shape, glued on with super-glue. I made the central pivots for the arms from Milliput. The filtration/precipitation tanks were painted grey, and varnished, then the very finest dust from my supply of cat litter was glued to the bottom of each tank with PVA.

The box on the left is made from thick card, glued to a core of cork. The pipe coming from it is a bendy drinking straw. The man-hole cover in front of the place where the pipe goes into the ground, is made from a ribbon of fibrous plastic which I bought from Ikea for £26. This may seem expensive, but these fibrous strips came wrapped around a shelving unit which came free with the ribbons. The ribbon has a cross-hatched texture on it, which I dry-brushed for emphasis.

The base is foam board (also called kappa board, or foam core), in which circular recesses have been cut for the tanks. The edges have been cut at an angle, and the exposed foam covered with brown acrylic mastic. The rest of the earth is a mixture of wall filler, brown poster paint, and PVA. Flock the base and hey presto - become the envy of all your friends! In my games of Crossfire, I count this as good cover, which does not block sight. I hope that your troops don't object too much to the smell.