Weekend Watch: Post-Apocalyptic Kit-Bashing with Nick Weston

I have been over the moon recently for the tabletop wargame, Gaslands. In this post-apocalyptic car combat game, you modify Matchbox and Hot Wheels toy cars to turn them into combat-worthy vehicles suitable for auto-dueling. Buying lots of not-gently-used toy cars on eBay and then going through your trash and old model kits, looking for bits to weaponize and armor-up your vehicles, is just ridiculously-good fun — at least for this aging cyberpunk.

This hobby obsession has me on YouTube a lot, scouring the modeling and miniature painting channels, looking for inspiration. One of my favorite channels to mine for Gaslands modeling ideas is Nick Weston’s channel. Nick is not a Gaslander. He’s a kit-bash modeler who just enjoys creating his own scale models in a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max style.

While the scale in which Nick works is different than what’s used in Gaslands, all of the techniques he uses still apply. Watching these videos, you will learn some wonderful advanced techniques, like sprue-shaping (where you heat, stretch, bend, and shape the plastic frame material that model parts come on to create your own parts), salt weathering (applying a base coat, covering it in salt, painting over the salt, and then scrubbing the salt off), and various rusting techniques (e.g. putting steel wool in vinegar to create a genuine rust wash).

Here is a sampling of Nick’s videos:

Another modeling channel I really like where Gaslands-worthy vehicles are built is JH Miniatures’ Wasteland Workshop. Here’s a sample of his channel’s content: