Our first cardboard scratchbuild vehicle: a Land Raider

I have already post pictures of a few of our cardboard creations for Warhammer 40000 and you can see them in the Cardboard Meks section of this blog. But the vehicle that I'm going to show you in this post is a special one, es the very first vehicle that we made. Doing it we learned a lot as it has lots of things that could be improved. The year 2008 was about to end and we decided to make a Land Raider.

We really put all we have in this project trying to give the vehicle lots of details. At the end we never got to paint it as it had plenty of defects, among which was its size that wasn't the real one.

To build it we used corrugated cardboard (brown and red parts), cardboard from a box of cereals (grey parts) and poster board (blue parts). We also used some big toothpicks, some matches, emptied pen cartridges and putty.

The biggest mistake that we made was to use the corrugated cardboard for almost everything. Because of that lots of holes were left to the open and we end up trying to cover them with PVA Glue unsuccessfully. There was also the problem that the typical undulations of the cardboard could be seen even in the parts that should be flat. If you look to the rest of the vehicles that we have made most of them have cereal box cardboard in the visible parts and we only use the corrugated cardboard to give some strength to the bigger parts in the inside almost always covering the exposed parts of the corrugated cardboard with more cereal box cardboard, we learned to do that after this first vehicle.

Below you can see lots of pics showing different stages of the scratchbuild process.