Warsenal containers

I bought a whole bunch of Warsenal terrain last Christmas and (apart from a set of wooden shipping pallets) hadn't had a chance to work on putting these together. The first half of the storage crates started their journey over the Easter weekend. 

The storage containers come in 2 sizes - small (single 'square') and large (double square with a connecting section of ladders). All the Warsenal kits I have seen are very well made, the detail is great and the designs fit together in an interesting way without being too square/generic. The shipping container range also comes with waist-height armour panels for cover, connecting bridges, bolt on ladders to make them 'climbable' and all of the crates lock together neatly with a rather ingenious tab system.

I had ambitions of building all the sets that I had - 10 small crates, 10 large crates and a bunch of extras to add to them. Have pressed out parts for the first 5 small crates, it was clear that smaller batches was going to have to be the approach, so started that way... 

The bottoms (left) and top (right) of the small crates - once assembled, the doors can be dropped through the top slots and catch on the smaller notch at the bottom. 

Growing pile of doors and frames... this is just the first set of 5x small containers. 5 small + 5 large containers = 50x doors... by which point I was getting over sanding. 

Not necessarily 'required', but I prefer to give the edges of all pieces of MDF terrain at least a bit of a sand and this seemed even more critical for the containers. The doors straight off the frames only fit through the slots with a good bit of wiggling; once painted these would be really tight, hence the extensive sanding to make this fit more comfortable. 

Maybe not quite a huge step of innovation... but I found wrapping a bit of (rough grit) sandpaper around a metal ruler was the quickest way of smoothing the inside of the 'slots' for the doors to slide into.

I also ended up giving the tabs at the top and bottom a few passes of rough sandpaper to bevel the edges. While minor, this extra bit of sanding makes it significantly easier for the lower tabs to self-align into the bottom of the frame when pushing a door in; as well as for the top tabs to lock into crates being stacked above. 

Do this 49 more times to get the first 10 crates done... 

Smaller boxes made up of 8 parts in the 'shell', plus 4 doors. Clockwise from left... I'm referring to these as: doors, bottom, top, 'struts', 'frames'. 

One of the larger crates being assembled.

Again... probably being a bit OCD, I gave each of the little rungs for the ladders a sand before gluing into the side panels. This took longer than I'd like, cost a couple of mm of fingernails on the sandpaper and some swearing. 

In the pic above - this gives an idea of how the shape comes together. The frames are held in at the bottom with a tiny dot of glue - but bond much more firmly to the top. The little corner holes then each get a strut at 45-deg and give the whole shape a lot of rigidity. 

And... after much sanding and gluing... 10 boxes done in the two sizes. I should pose these in a few more ways - the frame/strut setup makes them ridiculously strong & stable, and the little tabs that form the top of the doors lock neatly into a box above. The fit between them is excellent and can see these being used to make some interesting platforms in more of a necromunda style too. 

The other pieces I put together at the same time were a set of ladders for the small crates - another quite ingenious bit of work in 2 parts... 

The ladders themselves start with a set of steps...

Then the two hooked pieces go through the sides to make a detachable ladder. 

When you want to use it, the second 'door' part with holes slides into the box like a regular door, then the ladder part hooks onto this from the side. The fit is very snug, but should be able to file/sand these later without the holes being visible. 

All in all - very happy with the kits so far, but suspect that the snugly fitting parts will be a bit more of a challenge once there is paint involved too. The extra time sanding at this stage should hopefully make that a bit less of a challenge later on.