Various real-world considerations have slowed both my D&D and Mighty Protectors campaigns over the last few months, so I still haven’t gotten to put my big oil refinery build to use yet. On the up side, the delay has given me time to think about more items I could add to it! I knew I wanted more supports for the raised walkways, but it occurred to me that some industrial-style chain-link fences would be useful for this and other future modern-themed encounters.
My drawer full of wooden bits included a fair number of 6-inch-ish craft sticks, which I decided to use to make the long, narrow bases that would lend themselves to fence segments. The frame of the fence would likewise be made from wooden dowels.
I used a small miter box and saw to trim the rounded edges off the bases so they could more easily be set at right angles to one another. I left most of the bases the full length of the original sticks, but trimmed two of them shorter to serve as bases for gates. I recently ended up buying a set of neoprene road mat pieces (paid link) to replace my thick, warped home-made roads, and I sized the gate pieces so that a pair of them would span the width of the road.
For the vertical fence posts, I cut enough 2.5″ dowel pieces to evenly space four across each full size fence segment and two on the gate sections. I hot-glued them into place and set them aside.
The next step was to make the sheets of chain-link material. For this I used drywall repair tape – the mesh kind for filling large holes. I specifically chose one of the wider rolls of it so I would be able to cut large enough strips of it at an angle to cover the width of a fence segment. (If not cut at an angle, the fencing would appear as squared rather than a diamond-shaped pattern.)
On unrolling the tape I’d bought, I discovered that the segments on it weren’t as evenly spaced as I’d expected. Still, a little variation in the spacing seemed like a better compromise than switching to narrower tape that would force me to change the angle of the segments or resort to some sort of patchwork process to get the diamond shapes.
With a small pile of tape slices cut, I started running beads of super glue along the vertical supports and laying the tape across them. Once the glue set, I trimmed off the ends of the tape sections. I cut individual cross-pieces to glue on as horizontal bars at the top of the fence segments.
I melted some hot glue along the bases – except for the gate pieces – to give them a little more weight to keep them upright, as well as to strengthen the attachment points of the verticals. Lastly, I cut a small slit in one of the fences to simulate a break like the one which, as a child, I used to use to sneak into the private-property campground next to my neighborhood up until that time they called the police on me…
A while back I’d bought some “super matte” or some such spray paint in a very light grey, intending to use it as a primer. It turned out to be rather thick and satiny, so it went largely unused. I figured a coat of it would look like the grayish color often seen on new fencing, so I gave my fences a coat of it… and didn’t care for the results at all.
So I re-coated them, this time with the brushed metal Rustoleum spray (paid link) I’d used on many of the refinery items. I speckled them with some rust using the paint-and-baking-soda method from the refinery.
All the bases were coated with grout-and-soil mix for texture. I reasoned that the gate pieces would usually open across a road surface, so those were painted with a pavement color. The rest were sprinkled with grass flock.
I