Big Balls...

Big Balls

Once the skirt had bent to my will (quite literally in this case), it was time for the hemispheres (the bumpy bits that stick out of the skirt). Dalek Trivia – there are 56 of the blighters. Once I worked out what people on Ebay actually call 4" Christmas decorations, this turned out to be one of the simplest parts of the build. Adopting a production line method, a dab of epoxy managed to affix a 2 ½ inch bolt inside each half of the decoration. Until one half of the epoxy runs out, and after a week the glue hasn't set! Looks like one half of the 50/50 epoxy mixture ran out prematurely, and so I had slathered uncured glue on my bolts. Then Tegan ran them through the spray paint stage, primer and top-coat (champagne mist, to be precise). My interweb plans advised that the NSD hemispheres had a rubber seal at the base, a 4” oil seal apparently. As the cost of these looked to be rather prohibitive, I settled for using some high density automotive trim seals – while they don't quite have the same profile, it was quite good enough for government work! Then I re-glued the bolts that didn't set properly, or the ones that ended up an inch off center! I must have had a spot of 3:30-itis for that one!

 

 

The seat of power

One of the bits that don't rate a mention in the dimensional plans is the seat. Pretty useful if you want a person inside it. Or a mutant (but they are hard to find these days). Note to self, work out the dimensions of the seat before cutting out the base, even if it does provide you with the frame for the top of the skirt. What I found was that, between the hole and the sides of the skirt, there wasn't much room to fit a seat that was supported by anything more than hope and good wishes. After an afternoon trimming and grinding the seat sides away, I finally got it to fit – on the upside, the skirt isn't going anywhere once it is wrapped around that seat! Reports that I spent an hour sitting Davros-like on said seat beeping around the garage are completely unfounded. Disregard any worried reports from the citizens of Lompoc who may have watched me through the open garage door...

The cold shoulder

The shoulders (the section where the gun and sucker arm come out of) started out as a simple build – as one of the software engineers I worked with in Alice Springs once described just such a situation, it was 'conceptually simple' – code for 'great idea, as long as someone else does it for you'. So the shoulders are a transition between the 11 sided angular shape of the fender/skirt to a continually rounded shape. While the gun box provides some welcome symmetry and angles, the rest of the form are all sweeping bends and swooping transitional lines. I can now understand why the builders of the Sydney Opera House decided to short-cut Mr Utzon's original design for a constantly changing curve on the sails, and make it segmented. They didn't want to end up terminally insane!

At this point I also realized why the smart money was on moulding with fiberglass. At least with fiberglass you can build up a shape gradually, and merge the curves into the lines of the box out front. 'If not fiberglass, use bendy MDF' said the interweb. Riiight...1/8” ply didn't quite bend enough, and so I quickly ended up with two lengths of MDF, with a jagged edge separating them. So next came the sheet of bathroom waterproof cladding – a great find, bendy and easy to cut. But a bugger to keep in the right shape. As you can see below it gives the right basic shape. Although thanks to the redesign my bathroom plastic now has to mold into a crease through the middle of the shoulders. Now a constant curve in two dimensions I can handle. A constant curve in three dimensions - not so much.

 

After an afternoon wrestling with the material, and using up all my clamps, I resolved to set this task aside. Perhaps until the next millenium. I'll update in a later post how I solved the problem. Or I'll post some nice pics of a flaming dalek sitting in the middle of my street, a middle-aged man prancing around it in celebration...

In the meantime, I found some busy work in patching and painting the remainder of the creation. With the skirt just primed in white, it started to look like a 'Remembrance' Imperial dalek (OK, OK, the hemispheres were all flat and squished on them, but you get the general idea). If I don't get the top done for Halloween, I can maybe switch it into a Davros chair for the night!

You know...Short skirts are back

So now with an odd-shaped surfboard-on-wheels cluttering up the garage (it was at this point we realized that the fender was now too large to wheel through the side gate to the house, let along through a normal sized door), it was onto the skirt - that's the bit with the bubbles coming out of it! The design called for a 1” thick internal frame top and bottom to locate the skirt sides, with internal bracing to establish the right dimensions. I calculated that if I were careful (!), we could cut out the frame for the top of the skirt from the top sheet of the fender, and use off-cuts for the bracing. That just left the frame for the base of the skirt - rather than choosing the logical options of just going out and buying an entire fresh piece of ply for that, I chose to frame together individual lengths of wood in an effort that the Grand Duke of Mitre would be proud of (the picture below shows my final effort sitting on top of the fender base), before we cut out the top frame.

 

While ecologically sound, (much of a new sheet would have ended up as scrap), this victory of economics over structural strength lasted as far as the first sides of the skirt were secured to it, before ripping apart under the torsional strain. As you can see from the pictures below, while the read and side panels of the skirt are relatively flat, the forward panels undergo a quite significant transition from bottom to top. The coffee mug is holding down our plans, as we try to see (once more) what seems to have gone wrong...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After threatening to set fire to the blasted thing (not the only time the thought has crossed my mind so far), I set to work with braces, tacks and more lashings of construction adhesive. Once we had reinforced our handiwork, next was the problem of the twist in the side panels, particularly the front two pieces. Particularly as I had chosen 1/4" ply, vice the 1/8" suggested in some of the build material. While this allowed the skirt to support its own weight (which is what I will tell people who don't read this when they ask why the sides are so thick), it really didn't want to bend! Hey – guess what, the torsional strain broke my reinforcing again! At this point of the build, though, it was make or break time. So clamps, tacks, glue and swearing were employed in equal measure to achieve the fit. Who cares that some of the sides didn't quite match up, and were at odd angles...that's what jigsaws and circular saws are for (by this stage the Harrison's relationship with Mr Ryobi had moved to Platinum status). The photo below shows the skirt framed and attached, and the exotic angles of some of the joins...

 

At this point Tegan became more that intimate with applying spackle (and large quantities of it, as you can see from the panel gaps). And the joys of sanding. And spackling. And sanding...

 

Scarily enough (for something that a Harrison is building), after about a month and a half, the Dalek was actually starting to resemble the picture in the plan. Which normally means we have left something vital out, or it is about to fall in a heap again. Anyhow, onwards and upwards.