BUILDING THE BOX BUNKER Hello and welcome to my first attempt at documenting a terrain project from start to finish. This is the first time I've ever done anything like this before and... to be honest... I'm so pumped I could kick myself in the face. This project is quite different from most of my work, in that I don't use any styrofoam at all. In a radical departure from my normal modus operandi, the entire thing is made of wood. And yes... the wood makes it good.   INSPIRATION They say inspiration strikes in the most unlikely of places. For the uninitiated, that's code for "on the shitter". But not this time. As fate would have it, inspiration struck while I was poking around in a big craft store. I saw a pile of small wooden boxes w/ lids on clearance for $1.99 a pop and instantly thought "BUNKERS". So I bought a stack of four and brought them back to the lab for experimentation.   WHAT YOU'LL NEED TOOLS: Miter & Saw, Needle-Nose Pliers & Nippers, Dremel SUPPLIES: Wooden Craft Box, Square Wooden Dowels, Wooden Craft Rectangles, Elmer's Glue, Kitty Litter, Granny Grating, Masonite(optional), bits for piping, craft paint, craft brushes, spray paint, clear coat.   BASING / BULKING UP First thing's first: I cut out a 6" x 6" square of masonite, sand the edges, and secured the box to it with Elmer's glue. Masonite can be a bit of a bastard to work with if you don't have the proper set of tools to work it with... so feel free to substitute your own basing material of choice. After that, I bulked up the outer walls by attaching 4 wooden craft rectangles to them.   RAISING THE FLOOR As opposed to the roof. Since the craft box was too deep for models to peep over, I needed to raise the floor a bit. I decided to cut a simple figure-8 frame of square wooden dowels. This way I could use granny grating for the floor- with pipes and stuff visible beneath it. I performed a similar procedure with square dowels around the bottom of the lid (not pictured). This frame will help to hold the roof in place when it's raised up above the rest of the bunker.   PIPES 'n' SUCH TECHNOLOG's plastic kits are, quite literally, the shit. One of their newer sets, THE CHEMICAL PLANT, is especially good for this sort of thing. I simply glued pipe halves from the kit to the floor of the bunker- with a plastic hatch from their PLATFORMER set for good measure.   SPACKLING Time to get my hands dirty. I covered the entire bunker with a thin coat of spackle (all except for the sunken floor) and then stippled it with an old craft brush and my fingers. The result was a nice looking concrete effect you see in the magazines. Just remember to let it dry overnight before working with it anymore.   ISTALLING THE FLOOR The next day, after sanding the dried spackle, I clipped a sheet of granny grating with scissors to fit the bunker, and then strategically tore holes in it with a pair of nippers to expose the pipes/hatch beneath.   THE GOOPING And here you thought spackle was messy. This phase involved me spreading a mixture of Elmer's glue and kitty litter around the perimeter of the bunker, with an emphasis on any damaged sections. The photos on the left show the second bunker (with the ruined wall) immediately after the gooping and again after a few hours in the lab under a lamp.   BASECOATING One of the benefits to the all-wood construction method of these bunkers is that there's no foam to worry about, so I just threw a basecoat of flat black spray paint over the entire piece once all the goop had dried. It was actually pretty cool not having to do it by hand for a change. That being said, I did have to go in and do a few touch ups around the kitty litter. There were a lot of nooks and crannies the paint just couldn't get to.   PAINTING THE BUNKER Now for the fun part! I simply took four shades of grey craft paint and drybrushed them onto the bunker (and roof) with a big craft brush in successively smaller amounts. After drybrushing the walls grey, I spent a little time drybrushing the pipes, granny grating, and four short lengths of square dowel in metallic shades.   SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED The bunker, roof, and floor grating was all painted... now to put it all together! I first inserted the granny grating, and then glued the four lengths of square dowel into the corners. These posts both keep the floor grating down and keep the roof up. Before putting the roof on the bunker, I took everything outside and hit it with a few coats of clear spray varnish. This'll help toughen the piece up a little. In my experience, pieces with a texture made up of spackle can really use it.   ROCK & ROLL Then I put the roof down, slap the taste out of grandma's mouth, and I'm good to go!