Crafting Rusty Walls and Transmission Towers for Retro Sci-Fi and Wars of Ozz Gaming Adventures

Imagine an industrial cityscape – an apocalyptic one. One that shows that “something really terrible happened here”. Now add 300 years to it and an arid desolate climate with a lot of rust. Lastly, add mystery – “what am I looking at?”, and you are here.

These were the thoughts that I had last month as I prepared to create and build components for such a wasteland ruin. As my 2026 “convention season” was nearing, I needed to build terrain for my tabletop games. For games of Wars of Ozz^TM, my goal was to build terrain pieces for Professor Nitpik’s Industrial City (aka the Robotic Sanctum). I also wanted to get back into some retro sci-fi games using Buck Surdu’s Combat Patrol:WWII^TM gaming system (with my modifications). One of the games I envisioned for that would be using Archive “Space Cowboys”, my converted “Space ‘Roos” defending against an invasion of blue-skinned “Retrovians”. Click those links to learn more about those forces – and more about them in a future post. For now, I needed more rust than just my rusty generators and my ruined chemical plant.

I’ve been retired now since 2019. I got laid off of my last job when the company I was working for pulled the product line off the market. Never found a replacement gig. Back to the product I was selling – it was a pharmaceutical autoinjector device. We had dozens of electronic trainer devices we handed out to potential customers. These trainers acted like the real thing except without any needles or drug inside. After the layoff happened, I had a bunch of them, and was told by my former employer to just throw them away. They had a unique shape, like a cross between a card deck and a tapered brick. The outer layer was plastic, with a label glued on to it. I was running retro sci-fi games, and thought these would be good for making walls. I saved them, and they waited to fulfill their destiny until December 2025!

To make sure what I wanted to do would work (and to learn from any errors), I went with a prototype. I used an Exacto blade to remove the outer label. Then, I sanded the exterior to make it rough. To attach multiple units together, green stuff was the solution. After that hardened, I coated the outside of the attached trainers with PVA – followed by a dusting of chinchilla dust on the glue. When that combination had hardened, I primed the combinations with black primer.

From this point, I used corrosion texture paint(let that harden), then used a number of rusting paints and pigments. I really liked the results and moved on to making two large batches of different combinations.

I ended up with 27 sections = a total of 17.8′ worth of rusty wall.

And here they are in total finished up mid-December.:

With the walls done, it was time to get some verticality for the tabletop. And get them done BEFORE Christmas.

I thought transmission towers – rusty ones – would be great in that role. I found a railroad terrain kit on eBay. It was HO scale. It would go well with the other pieces of rusty fun. These were “Walther’s Cornerstone Four Transmission Towers”.

Assembly was a bit fiddly but manageable. It was not immediately clear to me which sides were front or back – but by the fourth iteration I got it down. Luckily, plastic cement covers any mistakes in assemble. I did find using rubber-shoed alligator clips to hold sections together while the cement set to be VERY helpful.

Rusting them up was similar to the walls – basically minus the use of the corrosion texture paint. The lists of what I used for these and the walls will be listed at the end of this post.

As you can see these are just plastic models and vulnerable to damage in transport! Unlike the walls, which went into a cardboard wine bottle box with some foam padding between levels, these needed a sturdy solution. They required something strong. I decided to modify the original box to accommodate the greater height needed when the models were lying down. I used more foam padding on the box bottom, and foam board to extend and strengthen the box as you see below:

That’s about it for this rusty old post. I hope it inspired you to rust up some stuff yourself!

As I teased, I will be sharing how these fit into both of the tabletop set ups for 2026. I’ll also be sharing some of the new 2026 units of mechanical tin men that will find these structures as part of their apocalyptic homes. Until next time.

For all of my previous posts on terrain projects, please see this page. For all of my previous posts on sci-fi projects, please see this page…for any of my previous posts on Wars of Ozz, see this page.

PAINTS, INKS, GLAZES, SHADES, WASHES, PIGMENTS, FLOCKING, GLUES AND MORE THAT I USED ON THE RUSTY WALLS PIECES:

1. Old autoinjector trainers
2. Green stuff
3. Chinchilla dust
4. PVA Glue
5. Vallejo Surface Primer “Grey”
6. AK “Corrosion Texture”
7. Citadel “Typhus Corrosion” (Technical)
8. Citadel “Ryza Rust” (Dry)
9. Vallejo “Old Rust” (pigment)
10. Vallejo “Brown Iron Oxide” (pigment)
11. Vallejo “Natural Iron Oxide” (pigment)
12. Vallejo Model Air “Rust 73.117” (pigment)
13. Vallejo Model Air “New Rust 73.118” (pigment)
14. Vallejo Thinner
15. Vallejo Model Color “Dark Rust”
16. Vallejo “Natural Umber” (pigment)

PAINTS, INKS, GLAZES, SHADES, WASHES, PIGMENTS, FLOCKING, GLUES AND MORE THAT I USED ON THE RUSTY TRANSMISSION TOWER MODELS:

1. Walther’s Cornerstone Four Transmission Towers (HO Scale)
2. Tamiya “Extra Thin Cement”
3. Plastruct Bondene “Styrene & ABS Plastic Solvent Cement”
4. Alligator clips
5. Vallejo Thinner
6. Vallejo Surface Primer “Grey”
7. Citadel “Ryza Rust” (Dry)
8. Vallejo “Old Rust” (pigment)
9. Vallejo Mecha Weathering “Light Rust Wash” (wash)
10. Vallejo Mecha Weathering “Dark Rust Wash” (wash)
11. Vallejo Mecha Weathering “Rust Texture Matt”
12. Vallejo Model Color “Camouflage Black Brown”
13. Vallejo Model Air” Concrete”
14. Vallejo Mecha Varnish “Matte Varnish”