Monday, April 8, 2013

TARDIS Build Update - Part 4

After this update, I will indeed be all current with my build photos. Whoohoo!!!

In an amazing stroke of good luck, the guy who is leasing me the Batcave (NOT Lucius Fox, mind you) also happens to be a carpenter (No, he's not Jesus either) and cabinet maker. There are some parts of the tardis build that is simply beyond my skill level, despite my constant desire to take on bigger and more difficult challenges. One such detail is the base. The border of it is a very odd shape, requiring some skilled and precise cuts. I turned to Larry (the guy who is neither Lucius nor Jesus) to cut these.

And he did an amazing job!

Here I'm assembling the base. The pieces are held together with biscuits and glue. The straps are keeping the entire thing together while it dries.

But alas, hard work makes me tired! With the weather getting better and better with each passing day, it was time to hit the pool and soak up some rays.

Here I've installed the floor on the tardis. This is actually two pieces of wood. The best part was how I got that giant sheet of plywood home. Home Depot does not deliver. BUT, as luck would have it, there is one under a mile away from my house. When I purchased the two sheets of plywood, along with some douglas fir 2X6's, I used one of them nifty lumber carts. And after I paid, I rolled it out the door... and all the way home!! Since I'm not a jerk, I then pushed the cart all the way back. It was actually a lot of fun, and many of my neighbors got a good laugh out of it.

And speaking of douglas fir, here you can see the support beams I put into the body of the base. These not only serve to hold the posts upright, but also add structural support to the floor and edges.

With the base starting to come together, I wanted to put everything I've made so far together, just to get that enthusiasm boost. The next pic shows the base, all four posts in place, and the roof sitting on top. Looks pretty awesome, even at this point of completion. I was pretty stoked!

Here at the BBC Woodshop, we work together. With Ewan only being available to work on his build on weekends, and me not wanting him to fall fatally behind, I help out on his build where I can. I like to chose operations that require a lot of down time. For example, the inner square on the roof. Ewan had already cut these pieces, but it needs to sit overnight while glued in order to dry. This strikes me as the perfect opportunity to help ewan out. This way, he won't have to wait for the thing to dry, but can jump right in on finishing up the roof when he gets here next.

Revisiting the roof, after correcting for the mistakes I had made on the POC, I devised a method for cutting the roof plates that would be essentially error free, and highly repeatable. These four pieces were cut in under 15 minutes, and are dimensionally identical. I accmplished this by cutting out an MDF jig that is used to guide the saw. I just clamp the jig into a piece of ply wood, then saw around the edges. Done. The first set I did took over three hours. Each one had to be measured individually, and then I employed my archaic methods of sawing to get a straight line. Pain in the rear, fo' sho'.

Here I'm assembling Ewans floor border. BBC Woodshop in action!

This is a good progress shot of the internal structure of the my base nearing completion. Looks pretty darn sturdy to me!

There's a lot going on in this picture. On the floor in front is of course my base. I'm puttying over the screws that I drilled in. These attached the plywood to the infrastructure I built using douglas fir. Off to the right is Ewan's roof. Off to the left is my completed roof.

One day I wanted to switch gears, and decided to pretty much finish building Ewan's roof. The only thing remaining is the corner cubes.

Speaking of switching gears, it was time to start assembling the walls. Actually, the slat parts of the walls. Having learned the power of jigs and spacers from parts of the build earlier on, I wanted to cut a set of identical length spacers that could be used in the construction of the walls. This would ensure that all of the slats were the proper distance from each other, and aligned perfectly.

I came up with a crazy method for getting all these things to be the same size.

Here I'm making the final cuts.

Unbeknownst to me, upon showing pictures of my kitchen being used for tardis building, A LARGE number of women contacted me demanding to allow them to cook for me. Apparently, "wasting" a nice kitchen on things like tardis building is a cardinal sin. One which can only be undone by cooking actual food. Definitely a side benefit of tardis building, for sure.

But enough about that side detail. Here I'm using the spacers I cut earlier to set up the wall facade. All made on my beautiful, precision ground granite counter top. I love my kitchen! So does R2.

Here's how it looks all finished, with the glue dried. This is also a good example of making due with what you have. I don't have a huge woodshop, and frankly the room in my garage is running out. The counter top is LITERALLY the flattest surface in my house, and proved to be perfect for this operation. Don't you judge me, internet!!

And this brings us to where I started today. My goal for today was to get the sign boxes attached to the posts. This actually turned out to be much more difficult than I expected, as things have shifted, rotated, and gone wonky on me while I wasn't looking. I had to fall back on some of my techniques and tools from other projects, including the use of super glue, popsicle sticks, and two sided tape. What can I say? I'm versatile.

Here's my first picture, with one box in place.

Next picture, with two boxes in place...

And finally, at long last, this brings us to the current state of this build. As I write this, THIS is what the Tardis looks like in my garage. All four posts in place, all four sign boxes in place, and the roof sitting on top of it all. Despite some parts that don't fit together exactly as I had envisioned, I'm extremely thrilled with the progress, and how bad ass the thing looks as of right now.

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