Warrengas station (Plastic Posse Podcast Group Build)

The folks at the Plastic Posse Podcast celebrated a big landmark recently: 100 episodes in the can. As part of the celebrations, they launched a Group Build project (#100PosseGB). And while I don’t normally jump on group builds, this one captivated me for some unknown reason. The group build was simple, meant to be a fast build: Any Tamiya kit in 1/48 scale.

I don’t normally work in anything but 1/35 scale, and the 1/48 stuff seems so small. I figured it would be a fun quick project between the other three very active projects I have in flight right now. Of course, anyone who knows me will not be surprised to hear that the project blew up. I’m rushing to get the vehicle painted in time for the deadline. The rest of the diorama will come later.

The core idea

I have been doing a lot of demobbed, post-war army equipment getting repurposed to civilian use. I didn’t originally think I’d jump into the group build (GB) because none of the Tamiya 1/48 kits delighted me… until I saw this fuel truck.

“Oh, now that’s something I can use!” I said to myself. Plenty of ways to turn that into a civilian overhaul version. I quickly landed on the idea of using this truck in a rural gas station scene filling up the station’s fuel storage tanks. I did some digging online to find reference photos for the station and the truck and hit on another twist of this project.

My grandfather was the CEO of Warren Petroleum (eventually sold to Gulf Oil). As an homage to him, I thought “I wonder if Warren had actual gas stations?” Turns out they did. No clue how many, but I saw that they did. So the creativity kicked in and I went to town on creating what I envision as a Warrengas station. I can only find one reference photo (click to zoom for better clarity) but I also found a couple other references that guided me to what I wanted to build.

Model build

There’s not much to say about the build other than that it was quick and fun. I had the entire thing built in about a single evening. The detail is crisp on the fuel tank rear section, and the build was clearly outlined in the instructions. Just what you’d expect from Tamiya, of course. The hardest part of the build was figuring out the way to mask the thing to paint it in three colors (more below).

Crank up the Fusion

The building was designed completely in Autodesk Fusion. It’s a simple design of two walls, a roof, and a driveway awning.

I also downloaded the gas pump STLs, grabbed the vertical iron support from the skeleton tank vignette build, added a concrete base and assembled the pump section as one printable object.

Laying out the design

I had originally made a 3D sketch with cardboard and foam to figure out the sizes and general layout. Once I had a basic idea of the size of the building, I had jumped into CAD to make and print the walls and the gas pump section. Here’s it’s laid out with the vehicle.

I liked how it was sized and angled, so I set to work on getting the building glued together. But one thing hung me up once everything was glued together… the ceiling inside was too flat. So I used my new Glowforge laser cutter (thanks, Facebook Marketplace!) to cut out a beam pattern to add to the ceiling. Just enough to have some “texture”.

I also added some masking tape to the roof to represent tar paper and give it something other than a completely smooth surface to work with.

Designing and printing the base

I was originally intending to use foam for the base, but realized I could design a base in Fusion in a matter of minutes and print it with the Bambu filament printer in no time flat. So that’s what I did! The top edge is rounded like the building corner and also includes two recessed lines like the building facade. It’s meant to be a relatively subtle visual connection between base and scene.

I printed the top of the base with a slight recess to allow me to lay down AK Concrete paste but still have the concrete meet the top of the base’s edge.

Concrete seam lines, cracks, and chips were all scribed/carved in once the AK Concrete was VERY cured. Give this stuff time to set… it gets really rubbery if you don’t and looks terrible when you try to carve on it. As you can see in two photos below, I scribed in some cracks in the concrete too.

To say I painted the concrete in layers is a radical understatement! I started with the white base coat that I primed the 3D printed base with. I layered on some gray and tan tones with the airbrush to get a nice base color to work from. I didn’t make any particular section radically different shades because I wanted the concrete to look pretty consistent. It’s a newish station that (in theory) wouldn’t have had time to have major concrete repairs. The goal was simply to bring out the texture and make it look dirty.

Once the general tones were right, I started layering in black and brown enamel washes. As you can see this was pretty harsh.

Some filters, both in acrylic and enamel paints helped to get things looking good.

I’ve continued to tweak the colors in smaller and smaller amount as I get more of the station built out and colored. What looked good against the harsh unpainted white building didn’t look quite right against the weathered building. In these kinds of dioramas, I always work hard to get all the elements to feel like they’re occupying one physical space.

Painting the base

To paint the base, with it’s green base color and white “stripes”, I first rattle can sprayed the entire base white. Then I masked off the green edges and painted them in stages: top/middle/bottom. The “stripes” are actually printed recesses, so this make it easier to paint than trying to freehand. I still had to go back and touch up spots where the masking had leaked or I had masked poorly.

I used a Scale Color tube acrylic (Sap Green, SART-34) straight out of the tube. It was a happy accident that the Sap Green was the perfect Warrengas color I wanted. This meant I never had to color match as I painted various green parts and if (well, when) I needed to do touch up on the base I kept whacking.

Building textures

Next up was the building. I wanted to represent stucco on the outside and plaster on the inside. I used AK Dry Ground for the stucco and AK Asphalt for the plaster. All three of the textures I used were given ample time to fully cure and then I sanded them pretty well to knock down the high points and make the texture more subtle.

Lighting

I added two lights, an outside lamp over the front door and a hanging light inside. Just enough to give some flair, not enough to truly light the scene. The outside lamp came from Evan Designs… I had bought their gooseneck lamp a while back and never used it since it was 1/48 scale. Perfect! I also printed a shade for the interior light from a design I found on Cults3D and used a piece of brass rod to extend it down from the ceiling.

Sometimes the “fly by the seat of your pants” approach I so often take in my builds just doesn’t work on my side. Trying to get the two lamps wired in properly was more than a small pain. I ran the wires for the interior lamp across the ceiling inside of a small diameter spring I had on hand to represent conduit. But no glue I had was actually creating a bond between metal spring and resin ceiling. It drove me batty. Once I primed the ceiling, it was easier for my go-to Gorilla Glue Gel super glue to stick. I soldered the wires from each lamp together and hid the joint in a junction box I also printed. Then I ran another straight stretch of spring down the side of the wall and into the base. The wires pop out and are powered by a watch battery style 3v fixture with on/off switch. I didn’t use the bigger USB battery because it seemed like overkill and those things are much heavier and more expensive. With only two small LEDs and a base that’s fairly easy to get at, I wasn’t worried about having to change out a watch battery every once in a while.

Window design

Here’s where it got really fun. I recently picked up a Glowforge Aura laser cutter and fume filter off of Facebook Marketplace. It was an absolutely smokin hot deal (probably not what I should say about something that requires you to have a fire extinguisher close at hand when using…). I was super excited to get this thing… I’ve been wanting one for a long while.

I knew I wanted to have big windows on this building to help show off all the detailing I wanted to do inside. But in this era, and certainly at a small rural gas station, large panes of glass wouldn’t have been easily accessible. So I designed some frames in Fusion, exported the SVG, and laser cut them out. The design is three parts:

Exterior frame
Clear sheet styrene
Interior frame (slightly smaller height/width than the exterior)

The window cutouts in the walls were designed with a small recessed lip on the exterior for the frames to lay down into and sit flush to the wall. I designed the frames to be slightly wide so they stick out beyond the hole in the wall. Meaning: if you look from inside, you can see a little window frame coming out over the window hole. Then I designed the interior frame to fit that hole and line up with that exterior overage. Hopefully this will create a great looking window when I get everything sandwiched together.

I also designed a window trim frame to go around the window on the interior. Gotta keep that interior design tight!

Funny story… at one point I was holding the building to paint the interior walls. I completely forgot that the window frames were fragile and put my finger right through part of one. No worries, cut a new one, replaced it, and all was good.

I intended to just keep the frames white, but ….

In all white the building lacked some pop. So on a lark, I started painting them green and the building looks much better.

Creating stencils

Coming soon

Painting the fuel truck

Coming soon

Painting the exterior

As with most projects, this one started with grey primer. The building was designed by me in CAD and 3D printed in resin. There was a fair amount of cleanup, and as always, I know better for next time how to make the next building easier to construct. When I was base coating the base with white via a rattle can, I gave the building the same treatment.

Then like the base, I masked and painted the green “stripes”.

The next task was to paint the curb gray, paint the window frames, and paint the awning edges green. Then came the weathering!

The building was weathered with a variety of AK enamel washes to add grimy dirt brown and some gross green muck tones. This was heavy around the curb and lighter up the walls. The goal was to give this a generally dirty, but still well maintained look.

Painting the interior walls

This was probably the most straightforward part of the build. I used a couple acrylic tan tones to wash the walls so they looked like they had once been painted bright white but had grunged up over time.

The Warrengas sign

One of the cool things I did with the fancy new laser cutter was to engrave a piece of wood and then cut out the letters. I tried to paint the one-piece 3D printed version of the sign I had handy and my painting was just not doing it for me. Must have been an off day. Who knows. But I realized pretty quickly I could just cut out the letters with the laser cutter and glue them in place once painted. The cool thing was that I also engraved the sign itself with a small recess that the letters just friction fit into. I did this when the rattle can white paint was still slightly tacky, so I am assuming they’re in place for life.