**Building a Weathered Prop from Scratch**

I'm excited to share with you my latest DIY project, a weathered prop that I've been working on for some time now. The goal was to create something that looked like it belonged on a spaceship, and after several iterations, I think I've finally nailed it.

The first step in building this prop was to gather all the necessary metal pieces. Since I wanted the metal parts to look as authentic as possible, I decided not to replace them with new ones. Instead, I opted for painting and gluing them down to create a more weathered look. The process involved taking each piece apart, cleaning it, and then applying paint and glue to secure it in place.

Now that everything is glued in, it's time to start working on the weathering process. There are many fantastic videos available online that show various techniques for weathering props, and I only do a little bit of it here and there, so I've developed a pretty simple approach. The first thing I do is take a wash, which is basically a super watered-down acrylic paint in black or gray. I spread it all over the surface, making sure to get into all the cracks and details, and then dab it away, taking most of it with me but leaving some behind in the texture of the surface.

This gives my prop a nice base coat that will help create the illusion of wear and tear. Next, I start dry brushing, which involves loading up a brush with metallic paint (I often use silver, but you can use whatever color you prefer) and wiping almost all of it off on a paper towel or similar material. Once I've got just a little bit of paint left on the end of the brush, I run over the high spots, edges, and parts that would take wear – it looks like the paint has gotten worn off, revealing the metal beneath.

This is where the magic happens, as dry brushing creates an amazing texture and helps to build fake decades on the piece. By applying different colors and techniques repeatedly, you can create a rich history for your prop, making it look more authentic with each passing moment. I've been experimenting with this process, adding layers of washes, dry brushing, and even using rub and buff wax with metal dust infused into it to achieve a range of effects.

**The Good, the Bad, and the Weathered**

One of the great things about weathering is that you can keep going – there's no limit to how much you can do. However, this also means that it can be overwhelming at times. I've found myself getting lost in the process, spending hours on a single piece, trying to get it just right. To avoid burnout, I try to set boundaries and remind myself when to stop.

In my case, I decided to stop while the prop was still looking fresh and weathered – there's nothing wrong with leaving some things undone! Now that it's complete, I'm excited to see how it will look in its final setting. Before putting the laptop inside, I wanted to address a couple of practical considerations.

Firstly, the power plug is conveniently located on the side, allowing me to keep the prop plugged in while it's inside. This was a thoughtful design choice by HP, as it ensures that my laptop will stay charged and ready to go whenever I need it. Secondly, the airflow around the fans is crucial for keeping the device cool, especially when used in a confined space like this container.

To address this issue, I made sure to position the prop in a way that allows for adequate airflow behind it. This should prevent any overheating or damage to the laptop inside. With these practical concerns taken care of, I'm confident that my weathered prop will bring a touch of personality and whimsy to its surroundings.

**Conclusion**

Overall, building this weathered prop was an incredible experience that taught me so much about creativity, experimentation, and patience. I hope it's inspired you to take a closer look at your own household items – maybe there's something that could use a little TLC or some creative repurposing? Share your own ideas and projects in the comments below, as I'd love to hear them!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff if you're like me at all you've probably had some smart home devices for a really long time I'm just now dipping my toes in whole home automation and some of the stuff you can do is really cool but I think it could be cooler what if you could control your entire smart home from a wall-mounted computer interface that looks like it came from a spaceship let's do it a little bit of backstory on this project this video is sponsored by HP support and they sent me this really nice laptop and they wanted me to show you how easy it is to take this apart and upgrade it and we're going to do that but also it's a really cool laptop it's futuristic it's thin and it got me thinking wouldn't it be cool if you mounted this thing on the wall so it could be a smart home dashboard and if you're going to go that far you may as well just wrap it in some really cool stuff to make it look like it's on a spaceship so that's what we're going to do like usual I don't really have a plan but I do have a rough idea so here's what I'm thinking I want to mount this thing on the wall like this so that you can see the screen and you can access the trackpad and then we'll cover the rest of it up with cool sci-fi stuff and just make it look pretty awesome and then on the screen we can actually show a dashboard from home assistant which is a thing I've been playing with lately to run my smart home devices inside the house this thing will be mounted in the wall on this orientation but of course I don't want it to be permanent so I want to be able to take it out of this contraption to still use it as a laptop so I'm thinking of this more as like a docking station where this thing slides in and charges and you can view it and then when you actually want to use it you can pull it out now eventually it'd be really cool to replace this with a touchscreen maybe running in a Raspberry Pi but that's a future video I don't have those things I have this so I've got to figure out actually how to mount this thing it's not flat on the back when it's open it's about an inch thick at the thickest part but I've got to figure out a way to support all of the different sections and really I was looking for inspiration about what the outside of this thing could look like I was looking around my shop and I actually found this plastic container top there's something mildly sci-fi about this chamford Edge and kind of utilitarian and it turns out that this laptop actually fits almost perfectly on the inside of this Edge so because I don't currently have a better idea we're actually going to start with this plastic top as the frame for this whole thing cut out the center and then figure out a way to mount the laptop behind it or inside of it or something but use that frame as the basis for building the rest of the structure so the basic wall tray to hold the laptop is pretty much done but I got to let the glue dry luckily the ram that I just ordered showed up so let's go upgrade the computer like I mentioned before this video is sponsored by HP support now they've made it super easy to upgrade and repair select HP laptops through their YouTube channel HP support they've got a bunch of videos about different computers I found the one about this particular model and I'm going to go through it so that I can upgrade the RAM in this machine so the cool thing is that every one of these videos has chapter markers so you don't have to watch the entire thing you just jump to the part that you need so I need to know how to take the bottom off take the ram out and put new Ram in luckily it's right here so it should be pretty easy I figured that would be pretty easy to do and it turns out it was super easy to do and very quick now my laptop has 32 gigs of RAM that's pretty awesome big thanks to HP support for sponsoring the video be sure to check them out on YouTube the link is down in the description let's take this thing back to the shop I've got it back in here and now I've got to actually figure out a way to keep it in place because the space that the laptop is going in is bigger than the laptop so I've got to add some spacers down here to hold it on this plane I've got to put some stuff behind it so it doesn't Rock Back in Forth when you're using the touchpad then we get to do the fun part which is making it look like it belongs in space so I took a picture of that as flat as I could from above that way I can take it into Fusion then I can start designing shapes on top of this that I can cut out on the laser and actually start putting this thing together I've had to cut all these pieces multiple times and make lots of adjustments mainly because this plastic thing has a lot of Bend to it it doesn't have a lot of structure so I'm kind of having to work around that but I think this is starting to actually look really cool I want this thing to look like it's on a spaceship so everything's going to be different gray tones I'm going to go ahead and spray all these panels and get it glued up so we can start adding the details and the weathering cuz that's what's really going to make it look cool I just realized that I haven't really explained explain the smart home aspect of this project because it's kind of secondary and I'm kind of new to it not new to Smart Home stuff but I'm new to home assistant which is what I'm using to run my smart home locally here in my house not out in the cloud that's one thing I like about it but the other thing is that it provides you dashboards that you can customize to control all your smart home devices from one place through a browser so the idea here is that we have this dashboard on the laptop that we can see and control from this cool panel on the wall but all of that is running on Raspberry Pi somewhere else I'm just barely dipping my toes in home assistant it seems pretty cool so far but I'm really just getting started so I can't offer a whole lot of advice about it you can Google it and find everything you need to know wood glue and CA glue were perfect for getting all of these pieces attached but I'm not going to be able to use that for the outer surround this plastic piece has a lot of flex to it and it has bends on the side that I need to kind of compress so I'm going to have to use something different to hold this in place I use this stuff all the time but I always like to point it out because a lot of people don't know about it there's an adhesive called E6000 which is one of my favorites it's good for attaching pretty much anything to anything else which means it'll be good for plastic to Wood the only downside here is that it takes I don't know about 20 hours to cure so you have to clamp the pieces and pretty much leave them overnight but the bond is kind of flexible it works on any material to any material this is fantastic stuff another cool thing about this stuff it does come in clear but I like the black and in this case it's actually really good to have squeeze out because it just looks like Grime in these little Ed eventually I'm going to weather all this stuff so that's just going to add to the effect our container is ready the next part is my favorite part because we get to add grebles and if you're not familiar GBL are the little bits and Bobs you get to add to a project to make it look like it's something else it's junk that you can make look cool basically what I do is I keep all these old electronics parts and things that just have a cool shape to them because you can always paint these things and make them look like something else I mean in this box I've got like snack containers I've got old parts of flashes I've got pieces of printers pieces of hard drives I've got all sorts of stuff that by itself looks like junk but if you put all these pieces together and kind of stack them up you can make them look like they're something else and that's a lot of fun basically any time I take something apart if I'm going to throw things away I'll pull off all the parts that I think look cool and put them in these containers and yes it is trash but it gives me an opportunity to reuse things from computers and printers even Lids from bottles that look kind of cool all of this stuff can be transformed into sci-fi magic so the fun part for me is taking all of these individual pieces and putting them together to make them look like something else and then you add some paint and it will really sell the illusion check this out this is a juice bottle an old bearing and some sort of a fitting off something that broke but then you take these things and you start to stack them together and you realize that they can look like some sort of a robot socket or something a little bit of weathering on this and it'll look awesome so I got the pieces roughly in place where they're going to go and I'll have to like straighten them all up and everything before I glue them down but also before I glue them down some of the pieces need a base coat of painting so these green and orange and really brightly colored things that would stick out I'm just going to paint them different shades of gray and black so that I can then weather on top of them and they'll look more realistic but one of the things about the metal pieces is I want to leave them metal because it's more authentic so I'm going to get those things painted and glued down and then we get to weather them everything is glued in place now it's time for one of my favorite Parts weathering now there's lots of fantastic videos on the internet that show all sorts of processes for weathering your props I only do a little bit of it here and there so I've got a pretty simple approach the first thing I do is I take a wash and this is basically like a super watered down acrylic paint in black or gray and I'll just spread it all over the surface and it gets down in all the cracks and all the details and then you kind of dab it away taking most of it with you but then you leave some of that color some of that black or gray down in the texture of the surface then after letting that dry for a few minutes I'll start dry brushing and this is basically where you take a metallic I often use silver but it really depends on the project you load it up on a brush then you wipe almost all of it off on a paper towel or something like that once you've got just a little bit of paint on the ends of the brush you run over the high spots over the edges over the parts that would take wear and it looks like the paint has gotten worn off and it's showing the metal below then of course you can add whatever paint you think makes it look Rusty or old whatever treatment you want to add to it but one of the things that really sells weathering is trying to build fake decades on the piece and by that I mean do the processes over and over with different colors so you do a black wash and then some dry brushing then you do a gray wash and dry brushing with a slightly different color the more you do that the more experience the more age the more life you're putting on the prop and it just makes it look awesome now another great option for weathering is rub and buff this is basically like a wax with metal dust or something infused into it and so you just need a little bit of it on the end of a piece of paper towel and you can wipe it all over the corners and get basically the same dry brushing effect but you have a bunch of different types of metallics to work with this stuff is great you got to let it dry though otherwise it'll come off on your hands now the good and bad thing about weathering is that you can just keep going you can do it forever and ever and ever and eventually you just have to decide when to stop I'm going to stop right now because it's time to get this thing hung on the wall and try it out now before I put this laptop in there I did want to address a couple of things one the power plug is right here and so I actually can keep this plug plugged in while it's in this container and that's good because then I don't have to take it out to charge it the other thing is airflow any computer needs a lot of air flow and on this one all of the fans are here on the bottom so if you use this on a table this is up against the table there's enough space built into the thing here that it gets the air flow it needs in this setting there's actually more space behind it than there would be if it were sitting on a table so I think I'm good to go it's done check it out like I said before I'm pretty new to home assistant so I've got a long way to go to customize this dashboard to actually make the most of this but as a container to hold the laptop I think this thing turned out awesome I definitely feel like it belongs on a spaceship and that's totally what I was going for plus it's super cool that I can actually use the touchpad here and turn lights on and off arm my alarm and all of that type of stuff right from here I hope this project gave you an idea maybe there's something in your house that's kind of boring kind of utilitarian now hopefully you have an idea a way to wrap it in something that looks cool something that you enjoy if it did give you an idea for something and let me know about it down in the comments because I would love to hear it and it may give other people ideas as well huge thanks to HP support for sponsoring this video be sure to go check out their YouTube channel I'll put the link down in the description that's it for this one thanks for watching now it's time for bloopers came from a spaceship let's do it it turned off turd I'm just now dipping my to to to TOS my TOS I'm just now dipping my toll my I'm trying to say hole and Toes at the same time my whole toes oh boyhey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff if you're like me at all you've probably had some smart home devices for a really long time I'm just now dipping my toes in whole home automation and some of the stuff you can do is really cool but I think it could be cooler what if you could control your entire smart home from a wall-mounted computer interface that looks like it came from a spaceship let's do it a little bit of backstory on this project this video is sponsored by HP support and they sent me this really nice laptop and they wanted me to show you how easy it is to take this apart and upgrade it and we're going to do that but also it's a really cool laptop it's futuristic it's thin and it got me thinking wouldn't it be cool if you mounted this thing on the wall so it could be a smart home dashboard and if you're going to go that far you may as well just wrap it in some really cool stuff to make it look like it's on a spaceship so that's what we're going to do like usual I don't really have a plan but I do have a rough idea so here's what I'm thinking I want to mount this thing on the wall like this so that you can see the screen and you can access the trackpad and then we'll cover the rest of it up with cool sci-fi stuff and just make it look pretty awesome and then on the screen we can actually show a dashboard from home assistant which is a thing I've been playing with lately to run my smart home devices inside the house this thing will be mounted in the wall on this orientation but of course I don't want it to be permanent so I want to be able to take it out of this contraption to still use it as a laptop so I'm thinking of this more as like a docking station where this thing slides in and charges and you can view it and then when you actually want to use it you can pull it out now eventually it'd be really cool to replace this with a touchscreen maybe running in a Raspberry Pi but that's a future video I don't have those things I have this so I've got to figure out actually how to mount this thing it's not flat on the back when it's open it's about an inch thick at the thickest part but I've got to figure out a way to support all of the different sections and really I was looking for inspiration about what the outside of this thing could look like I was looking around my shop and I actually found this plastic container top there's something mildly sci-fi about this chamford Edge and kind of utilitarian and it turns out that this laptop actually fits almost perfectly on the inside of this Edge so because I don't currently have a better idea we're actually going to start with this plastic top as the frame for this whole thing cut out the center and then figure out a way to mount the laptop behind it or inside of it or something but use that frame as the basis for building the rest of the structure so the basic wall tray to hold the laptop is pretty much done but I got to let the glue dry luckily the ram that I just ordered showed up so let's go upgrade the computer like I mentioned before this video is sponsored by HP support now they've made it super easy to upgrade and repair select HP laptops through their YouTube channel HP support they've got a bunch of videos about different computers I found the one about this particular model and I'm going to go through it so that I can upgrade the RAM in this machine so the cool thing is that every one of these videos has chapter markers so you don't have to watch the entire thing you just jump to the part that you need so I need to know how to take the bottom off take the ram out and put new Ram in luckily it's right here so it should be pretty easy I figured that would be pretty easy to do and it turns out it was super easy to do and very quick now my laptop has 32 gigs of RAM that's pretty awesome big thanks to HP support for sponsoring the video be sure to check them out on YouTube the link is down in the description let's take this thing back to the shop I've got it back in here and now I've got to actually figure out a way to keep it in place because the space that the laptop is going in is bigger than the laptop so I've got to add some spacers down here to hold it on this plane I've got to put some stuff behind it so it doesn't Rock Back in Forth when you're using the touchpad then we get to do the fun part which is making it look like it belongs in space so I took a picture of that as flat as I could from above that way I can take it into Fusion then I can start designing shapes on top of this that I can cut out on the laser and actually start putting this thing together I've had to cut all these pieces multiple times and make lots of adjustments mainly because this plastic thing has a lot of Bend to it it doesn't have a lot of structure so I'm kind of having to work around that but I think this is starting to actually look really cool I want this thing to look like it's on a spaceship so everything's going to be different gray tones I'm going to go ahead and spray all these panels and get it glued up so we can start adding the details and the weathering cuz that's what's really going to make it look cool I just realized that I haven't really explained explain the smart home aspect of this project because it's kind of secondary and I'm kind of new to it not new to Smart Home stuff but I'm new to home assistant which is what I'm using to run my smart home locally here in my house not out in the cloud that's one thing I like about it but the other thing is that it provides you dashboards that you can customize to control all your smart home devices from one place through a browser so the idea here is that we have this dashboard on the laptop that we can see and control from this cool panel on the wall but all of that is running on Raspberry Pi somewhere else I'm just barely dipping my toes in home assistant it seems pretty cool so far but I'm really just getting started so I can't offer a whole lot of advice about it you can Google it and find everything you need to know wood glue and CA glue were perfect for getting all of these pieces attached but I'm not going to be able to use that for the outer surround this plastic piece has a lot of flex to it and it has bends on the side that I need to kind of compress so I'm going to have to use something different to hold this in place I use this stuff all the time but I always like to point it out because a lot of people don't know about it there's an adhesive called E6000 which is one of my favorites it's good for attaching pretty much anything to anything else which means it'll be good for plastic to Wood the only downside here is that it takes I don't know about 20 hours to cure so you have to clamp the pieces and pretty much leave them overnight but the bond is kind of flexible it works on any material to any material this is fantastic stuff another cool thing about this stuff it does come in clear but I like the black and in this case it's actually really good to have squeeze out because it just looks like Grime in these little Ed eventually I'm going to weather all this stuff so that's just going to add to the effect our container is ready the next part is my favorite part because we get to add grebles and if you're not familiar GBL are the little bits and Bobs you get to add to a project to make it look like it's something else it's junk that you can make look cool basically what I do is I keep all these old electronics parts and things that just have a cool shape to them because you can always paint these things and make them look like something else I mean in this box I've got like snack containers I've got old parts of flashes I've got pieces of printers pieces of hard drives I've got all sorts of stuff that by itself looks like junk but if you put all these pieces together and kind of stack them up you can make them look like they're something else and that's a lot of fun basically any time I take something apart if I'm going to throw things away I'll pull off all the parts that I think look cool and put them in these containers and yes it is trash but it gives me an opportunity to reuse things from computers and printers even Lids from bottles that look kind of cool all of this stuff can be transformed into sci-fi magic so the fun part for me is taking all of these individual pieces and putting them together to make them look like something else and then you add some paint and it will really sell the illusion check this out this is a juice bottle an old bearing and some sort of a fitting off something that broke but then you take these things and you start to stack them together and you realize that they can look like some sort of a robot socket or something a little bit of weathering on this and it'll look awesome so I got the pieces roughly in place where they're going to go and I'll have to like straighten them all up and everything before I glue them down but also before I glue them down some of the pieces need a base coat of painting so these green and orange and really brightly colored things that would stick out I'm just going to paint them different shades of gray and black so that I can then weather on top of them and they'll look more realistic but one of the things about the metal pieces is I want to leave them metal because it's more authentic so I'm going to get those things painted and glued down and then we get to weather them everything is glued in place now it's time for one of my favorite Parts weathering now there's lots of fantastic videos on the internet that show all sorts of processes for weathering your props I only do a little bit of it here and there so I've got a pretty simple approach the first thing I do is I take a wash and this is basically like a super watered down acrylic paint in black or gray and I'll just spread it all over the surface and it gets down in all the cracks and all the details and then you kind of dab it away taking most of it with you but then you leave some of that color some of that black or gray down in the texture of the surface then after letting that dry for a few minutes I'll start dry brushing and this is basically where you take a metallic I often use silver but it really depends on the project you load it up on a brush then you wipe almost all of it off on a paper towel or something like that once you've got just a little bit of paint on the ends of the brush you run over the high spots over the edges over the parts that would take wear and it looks like the paint has gotten worn off and it's showing the metal below then of course you can add whatever paint you think makes it look Rusty or old whatever treatment you want to add to it but one of the things that really sells weathering is trying to build fake decades on the piece and by that I mean do the processes over and over with different colors so you do a black wash and then some dry brushing then you do a gray wash and dry brushing with a slightly different color the more you do that the more experience the more age the more life you're putting on the prop and it just makes it look awesome now another great option for weathering is rub and buff this is basically like a wax with metal dust or something infused into it and so you just need a little bit of it on the end of a piece of paper towel and you can wipe it all over the corners and get basically the same dry brushing effect but you have a bunch of different types of metallics to work with this stuff is great you got to let it dry though otherwise it'll come off on your hands now the good and bad thing about weathering is that you can just keep going you can do it forever and ever and ever and eventually you just have to decide when to stop I'm going to stop right now because it's time to get this thing hung on the wall and try it out now before I put this laptop in there I did want to address a couple of things one the power plug is right here and so I actually can keep this plug plugged in while it's in this container and that's good because then I don't have to take it out to charge it the other thing is airflow any computer needs a lot of air flow and on this one all of the fans are here on the bottom so if you use this on a table this is up against the table there's enough space built into the thing here that it gets the air flow it needs in this setting there's actually more space behind it than there would be if it were sitting on a table so I think I'm good to go it's done check it out like I said before I'm pretty new to home assistant so I've got a long way to go to customize this dashboard to actually make the most of this but as a container to hold the laptop I think this thing turned out awesome I definitely feel like it belongs on a spaceship and that's totally what I was going for plus it's super cool that I can actually use the touchpad here and turn lights on and off arm my alarm and all of that type of stuff right from here I hope this project gave you an idea maybe there's something in your house that's kind of boring kind of utilitarian now hopefully you have an idea a way to wrap it in something that looks cool something that you enjoy if it did give you an idea for something and let me know about it down in the comments because I would love to hear it and it may give other people ideas as well huge thanks to HP support for sponsoring this video be sure to go check out their YouTube channel I'll put the link down in the description that's it for this one thanks for watching now it's time for bloopers came from a spaceship let's do it it turned off turd I'm just now dipping my to to to TOS my TOS I'm just now dipping my toll my I'm trying to say hole and Toes at the same time my whole toes oh boy\n"