The Fabricator General: Building on a Budget

Getting an entire board of terrain done, whether it’s a humble 3x3 for your latest skirmish obsession or a vision of the east that would make Lawrence of Arabia giddy, can be daunting. Especially so if you’re trying to get it done on a more limited budget. After Lenoon mentioned being put on to a cheap source of 1:48 scale planes on AliExpress, it set me to thinking about what else I could find. We’ve worked to pull together a list and take some gambles so that you don’t have to. Before I jump into listing off the hits and misses I wanted to go over a little bit of my method, so that if what we’ve found doesn’t line up with what you’re after you can try the same.

To help narrow down my searching, I tried to stick to the specific scales I was interested in, and for many of my searches included at least one of either “O scale” or “1 48”. O scale is a common scale for toy and model trains, and the associated diorama pieces. The downside with relying on search terms including references to railway modelling is that they’re usually not that much cheaper. You’ll have some luck with bulk items like trees or construction materials but more niche items, buildings, and vehicles tend to be a little more expensive. It’s worth keeping an open mind with the algorithmic recommendations, you’ll get some fuzzy matched search stuff that might be relevant, so be patient and have a browse. When you are looking at specific items, review each picture as there’s often clues for the dimensions. While the “buy x for extra discount” offers are obviously designed to get you spending more, they occasionally allow you to double up on limited items through different sellers.

Critical Hits

Desktop Mini Container Model

Cost: Around £8 for 4

This is the one that really put me on the path to begin with. Cheap, effective, line of sight blocking terrain that comes pre-painted to what I’d call a “good enough” standard. These little metal containers are made of stainless steel, and as an added bonus you can pop the top off to store smaller pieces of scatter or tokens. They measure 11.5 x 5.5 x 5 cm which means they’ll work for anything around the 28 to 32mm scale. They also happen to be the exact height of the Brotherhood of Steel stairs and platforms, available as STLs from Modiphius.

1:50 Model Excavating Machinery

Cost: £7

I wanted some construction equipment for a modern or near future board, and browsing after searching for excavators and Bobcats found this gem. Something a bit different and still ready to use out of the box. I do plan to spend some time weathering and working on it in the future, but for the time being it’ll do just fine.

1:36 Toy Cybertruck

Cost: £3.40

What better for some dangerous terrain than a Cybertruck. This one was a little more of a gamble, at 1:36 scale it should absolutely dwarf standard 28 and 32mm scale models but if anything it actually runs a little small. Still a pleasant surprise that it’s about the right scale and a rare win for Cybertrucks everywhere.

1:48 Planes

Me109-ish Credit: Lenoon

Cost: £4.46

There's a lot of planes available on Temu and Aliexpress, and these ones crop up a lot. They're simple model kits with a limited number of parts and cover a range of WW2 planes - Me109, Spitfire, Corsair, Hurricane and Mustang. They wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of the scale modeller, but for wargaming terrain they're absolutely perfect. Nicely scaled, robust enough to stand up to gaming and cheap enough to model as wrecks, picking up a few of these will give you an airfield board in no time. If there were Zero and MiG options you'd have the entire war covered, and they're usually on some kind of bundle deal too.

WW2 Trucks

WW2 Vehicles. Credit: Lenoon

Cost: literally pennies if you buy 20+

This is a very generic "truck" kit that's almost an Opel Blitz and almost any number of trucks, almost certainly based on a late to post war Soviet and Chinese knock off of American lend-lease. The cast is incredibly cheap vacuum formed plastic, with no pieces, movement or, infact, anything beyond the basic exterior shell. Whatever they are, they look right, scale nicely, and you can buy hundreds for the cost of a much better, nicer, truck kit. Painting this one took all of a minute.

On Target

Palm Trees

Tree lined avenues! Credit: Lenoon

Cost: Variable by size

While these aren’t the biggest examples of their kind, it’s a decent value option for a fistful of palms. It’s another example of something that could work straight out of the bag, and would look even better with a little extra work. There are tons of options out there and mixing and matching is a good bet to add a little variety. I've not painted any of mine and they work perfectly well as clump terrain. The detail on trunks is perhaps not deep enough for a drybrush, but some weathering powder would work wonders.

Making Medieval Terrain Credit: Lenoon

The taller palms are quite spindly, with a small point of connection to the base, so I would recommend magnetising them to whatever base you're using for your forests/woods, otherwise they're likely to break off. The trees themselves are flexible and can withstand a lot of punishment.

Plastic Trees

Trees in the middle of 50x50 and 50x60 bases means I can fit a good couple of models between them

Cost: Varies by size

Picking up scale model trees is always a bit of a gamble (see below!), but picking up entirely plastic ones is a much safer bet. They might not look particularly realistic, but they match a lot of trees you can buy from major wargaming companies in that they're plastic, chunky and have large plates of leaves. They do the job well, take paint, washes and weathering like models do and leave you with a solid block of tree cover for very little outlay.

Hard plastic/rubbery trees

Barbed Wire

Cost: £1.80

Simulated barbed wire is often a simple twisted pair of stainless steel wire, and you could make this pretty cheap yourself with a drill and some patience. If life’s too short for that, then grabbing 35m of this stuff probably means you’ll never have to worry about buying or making your own again. To make your own coils you’ll just need a cylinder of the right diameter to wrap and then cut your desired lengths.

Credit: Mike Bettle-Shaffer. Backdrop: John Hodgson

Corrugated Metal

Cost: £1.51

Another scratch building staple, I wanted to see what this was like to work with. I’ve used corrugated card and craft paper in the past, which is another cost effective option. I’m hoping this is a little sturdier, and it should be easier to manipulate and hold to various shapes.

Credit: Mike Bettle-Shaffer. Backdrop: John Hodgson

Miniature Metal Mesh

Cost: £2.21

I wanted to try building my own wire fences, and the plastic options always looked a little too thick to me. Pre-assembled sections of fence from railway modelling suppliers also suffer from being on the expensive end of things, so while this takes a little extra effort the trade off should be worth it. I should be able to cut this in half, giving me around four feet of wire fencing.

Credit: Mike Bettle-Shaffer. Backdrop: John Hodgson

Misses

Railroad Diorama Trees - What Are These, Trees for Hobbits?

Cost: £1.59

I’ve listed these as a miss mostly because I expected them to be a little bigger (looking back at the title now I can see 4cm in it clear, I'm an idiot). It’s one of the gambles I mentioned you might need to take on this stuff, and while it isn’t a total disaster I’m still a little disappointed. I’ll probably repurpose the armatures for dead trees on my 12mm scale board, where they’ll fit in a little better. The foliage looks pretty rough, and a bit of extra flock and paint would do a lot to transform these.

Credit: Mike Bettle-Shaffer. Backdrop: John Hodgson

Model Camo Netting - It Smells So Bad and the Pattern Is Too Large

Cost: £2.60

While this was fairly cheap, and should look decent with a little extra work, it smells absolutely vile. The bag it arrived in has done an excellent job of keeping the smell of burnt plastic fresh. It’ll take a little extra work to get this looking good on the board due to the size of the camo pattern, which I think is too large even for the advertised 1:35 scale.

Credit: Mike Bettle-Shaffer. Backdrop: John Hodgson

Thanks for joining us on this voyage of discovery! If you’ve found your own Temu treasures or AliExpress gems let us know in the comments section.

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don't forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.

Tags: fabricator general | Hobby Supplies | aliexpress