I saw an old and tired looking wall-mount shelf unit in a charity shop that immediately caught my attention. I don’t have a photo of the actual one, but it looked like this – except it was damaged, and had been painted a yucky yellow/cream colour :

So I removed the glass door, its frame and hinges, repaired and cleaned it up, then undercoated it :

My idea was to convert it into a wall mounted or free-standing display unit for Sci-Fi miniatures – of the type typically used in tabletop games such as Warhammer 40K, Stargrave, Deadzone, Necromunda etc.

One problem was the very “Moorish/Moroccan” looking finials at the top and bottom (visible in the image above), that had been employed on the original to cap the four steel rods that pass through the unit and hold it together.

So I removed them, identified the thread on the rod ends and substituted simple steel nuts. These would later be covered by 3D-printed “exhaust” venting fan units :

For the floors, walls and ceilings, I customised and 2D printed a number of sheets of graphics based on the Spaceport Tiles kits by Dave Graffam. I can’t recommend his kits highly enough – they are inexpensive and they come as layered PDFs – meaning each kit has many options and variations you can use to customise your designs :

I also 3-D printed sets of 28mm Space Hulk Greebles by Vontragg on Thingiverse to add some 3D interest , along with some custom-designed ramps.

Then it was only necessary to go through the (very slow, very painstaking) process of measuring up every flat surface very precisely, scaling each panel to size, then printing on archival matte paper, and finally laminating. A craft knife is then used to cut out the sized panels with which to decoupage the whole thing with laminated panels. Many hours of work, but worth it, I think.

The tiled “floor” is based on one-inch squares. In this photo I have overlaid some images of 25mm base sci-fi miniatures, so you can get a sense of scale…

And finally, a photo gallery of the “interior” of the Spaceport: