Back when I was working on my oil refinery build, I made some elevated walkways out of some cheap plastic fish tank filters (paid link). I mentioned that I thought they could be very versatile and that I was even considering buying another set to turn into terrain that could be suitable for an SF game or, for instance, a computer room floor in something modern.
Between some plans for the future of my Mighty Protectors campaign and the increased yearning to dabble in a bit of Traveller or something similar, I decided to pick up another set of the same filters and give them a simple, clean white look suitable for high-tech scenarios.
I ordered them while working from home during the Coronapocalypse shortly before dialing into a long and pointless conference call. As I ignored the call, hoping not to hear anyone say my name, my mind wandered to different ways to use these walkway pieces, both old and new. It occurred to me that I could probably come up with a way to make a generic insert that slid into place underneath each piece and could be decorated in a variety of ways to customize looks for many environments without having to compromise the relatively generic look of the walkway pieces to do so.
I was fairly excited about this idea and almost immediately (after the call ended) went down to the PC graveyard in my basement to pillage it for bits and pieces that could be cut up to make interesting high-tech shapes viewed through the open slits along the filters.
When the new filters arrived I set about using a knife to trim off some bits of what I assume were some kind of casting flash.
I had to step away from this process after only cleaning up two or three of them and, er, more or less forgot about it until after they were all painted.
I gave the pieces all a few coats of a white spray paint/primer combination, then some clear satin, and started to work on the inserts. Those began with some rough measurements of the size and depth of the undersides of the filters, traced onto a piece of cereal-box cardboard.
Each filter piece has some indents on the inside where the connectors clip into place, so I had to manually mark and cut tabs out of the cardboard to fit around them. After a little more manual adjustment, I scored the tabs on one side so they would fold in cleanly, and I had a suitable base for testing an insert. Before I did anything else to the prototype, I traced it onto some more cardboard for easy duplication.
I cut out a few copies and for testing and gave three of them quick spray coats of brown, gray, and white. I was anxious to preview what kind of results I could get, so I started off by just taping some items in place and plugging in the inserts…
… only to immediately discover that whatever I put in there was going to remain mostly invisible! The slits in the filters were just too narrow; especially with the side blocked by the cardboard tabs, not enough light got through to illuminate whatever was inside. Not even a fully white insert with dark items inside to create contrast really had much visual impact.
There was a possible option. I could cut out every other line from a filter to open it up a bit and see if the visibility inside was better. I decided to sacrifice one of my new painted white walkways to try it.
This worked, but there were trade-offs. Removing more of the already soft plastic from the unit made the remaining flat areas feel rather flimsy. Cutting the pieces out was tedious, a little tough to do cleanly, and tended to rip paint away with it. I couldn’t decide if it would be worth it or not to move forward, so I continued the experiment by making a few different inserts just to see what they would look like.
Sewers and Pipes and Wires and… Stuff
An insert with some flowing, greenish water seemed like a good match for my existing rusty metal units, so that’s where I started. I lined the sides of the brown-painted insert with some slivers of scrap foam to form the banks of my little green river and gave them a coat of sand-grout mixture for texture. I didn’t bother trying to smooth the levels of the banks together, but I did glue down a 3d printed skeleton just to add some interesting detail.
The blue tape around the edges was to hold in the water that would be added; that consisted of some Vallejo Still Water (paid link) mixed (deliberately unevenly) with a little green craft paint, applied in multiple not-too-thick layers with time to dry in between.
Next up was an insert containing some simple piping with a little rust, something which could be at home under either the rusty or clean walkway pieces. It was made with straws and metallic paints, with a little rust added similar to what I did in the refinery build linked above.
Finally, threw together another pair of inserts containing random bits like straws, wiring, an old heat sink, a bit of scrap sprue, and some corrugated paper. For the last two I didn’t bother to do any painting other than something shiny on the sprue to try make it look like some sort of energy spike, and some metallic blue and a little artificial denting on the corrugation.
The results definitely show some potential, especially assuming more effort would be put into the detail of the “real” versions.
So the big question became: Would it be worth it to go back and remove slats from all those other walkway segments? Should I weaken them, possibly damage them, and likely have to at least partly repaint them, for the ability to make more of these inserts visible inside them?
For me, the answer for now was no. They’re functional as is, and my concerns over their structural integrity drove the decision. I pictured them getting easily damaged by the support poles I made to elevate them in the refinery layout, for one thing.
The experiment itself was fun, though, and I’m convinced that the idea in general is a good one. There are other brands and models of this sort of filter available which might lend themselves better to it, and the concept of 3d printing something custom in the future – either the walkway pieces or some kind of open-sided snap-in for them – isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Finally, while I haven’t gotten into playing around with electronics in my crafting yet beyond a tea-light fire pit, there may still be enormous potential for this idea when combined with some diffused lighting inside the inserts themselves. Even the batteries for the lights would probably look right at home down there in many cases!