The temple of dome...

So, the crowning achievement. More or less. My plans spoke of building an internal neck bin to support the dome. In hopefully the only smart thing I did with this build, I talked to Mr Ebay and found a lazy susan bearing that was the diameter of the top of the neck, that will serve as the base for the dome. Plus, with a bearing of that diameter, the dome should be able to support 1000 lbs! Pity the plywood will probably fail after 10lbs!

So with the bearing underneath, and using a 1/2" circle as the base (which I had conveniently cut our during my previous attempts on the rings), I built up the shape of the dome in 1/8” ply. Why use such a thin piece of wood, do you ask? Well, because I had 4' x 8' worth of the stuff for cladding the shoulders. The stuff that didn't bend enough. Good move? Time will tell...But as you can see from the picture below, it generally held its shape, with a little help from Mr Construction Adhesive.

Should I have used the 32 or 16 braces other people have used - probably. But hey, it's October, and this mutant needs to get rolling for Halloween. As Plan A was to clad in the same bathroom plastic as the shoulders, I built up supports for the dome lights, and the pivot for the eyestalk.

That same Plan A was to roll the dome (inverted) across the sheet of plastic, and trace out the required arcs. In the picture above you can see that didn't quite work (perhaps with 32 braces, but not 8!). So back to Mr Internet, and the helpful apps that allow you to calculate conic sections... Once I had those calculations, it was a (relatively) simple afternoon's work to scribe out the arcs using the rotary cutter. Interesting fact - rotary cutter against plywood - instant lightsaber-ish cutting. Against an eighth of an inch of plastic, less impressive. I guess if the Empire had clad their clones in plastic armour, they'd be a lot more alive now...

 Anyhow, with arcs cut, the rest of the afternoon was spend fixing them down with the last of the adhesive. For those of you who know how this story goes, obviously at this point I wished I had used 1/4" braces, to give the glue more surface area to stick to... But eventually it was all in place and generally indicated a sort of dome-like profile. Once again 'conceptually simple' came to the fore - no sooner had the thought 'I'll just fill in all the gaps and inconsistently with spackle' formed, that the shape below lay before me, looking like a first attempt at an igloo cake by a pre-schooler. As much as I sanded, it refused to come into shape. To make matters worse, spackle isn't the world's more flexible substance (and I don't think even Bondo would have hacked the flexing of the cladding).

  

 But never fear - at least spackle is water soluble. After stripping it back, I bit the bullet and fiberglassed the whole thing. I know I had discarded this material at the very beginning, but as my 'burn the dalek counter' was incrementing towards 1000, it was make or break time. Below is the first coat (which for the moment is the only one, now 1 week to Halloween), prior to filling and painting...

Sloped shoulders...

OK, the dome is shaping up, now its time to bite the bullet and get the shoulders done. I guess looking back I spent an awfully long time trying to work out how to cut all the cladding in graceful and accurate curves. When all I needed to do is think 'spackle was fix it!' Below are two shots of the rough work I did on the base cladding, with the help of two bags of clamps and another tube of adhesive.

 

 

Tegan then came to the rescue, as to how to bridge the gap between the sheets (for the now-infamous 45 degree rebates. Inside the shoulders I laid drywall tape, and fixed each edge of it down with duct tape. Then I spackled to my heart's content...

OK - sort of. If in doubt, paint it, and hope that hides the bad bits...