the tardis main doors

[Teletran]

I've always been interested in the large almost vault like doors of the tardis, recently I made some observations about their design which I feel may be useful to discuss.



The roundels are at the very heart of the design each is 24" in diameter and separated by 2". Imagine that each of the roundels in door is surrounded by a hexagon, the sides of which are 1" from the edges of the roundel. The outer corners of the hexagons define the scalloped edge of the doors where they fit into the wall and the inner corners define the flat edge where the two doors meet. Next you need to add an extra inch to the bottom of the doors allowing them to touch the floor while to keeping them in sink with the roundels on the walls.



Well that all sounds good but I came up with that weeks ago now and looking at the pictures I'm not at all sure how much of it is correct so if anyone has any comments or corrections I'd love to hear them, also if anyone who's better than me at photo extrapolation would like to have a go at this picture we might be able to work out the thickness of the doors and the length of the hinges.


The lowest highlighted segment should be 12" vertically or 15" measured along the angle.

[Teletran]

I think I was right about the tapes warping over time, I was just running the 'War Games' DVD at 8x speed to check for any good referance and there's a distinct wobble like a heat haze.

[Scarfwearer]

Interesting... I'd never noticed before but in the first picture above, there's quite clearly several inches of door below the roundels, which is apparently not there by "The War Games" at the end of the Troughton era. They must have rebuilt them or cut the doors down...

EDIT: I should also mention that it looks like there's a half-inch gap between the doors. This is not enough to allow them to open if they're 7-8" thick as it would appear. In building my doors I actually made them non-rectangular in cross section. See the page on my website about this: Relative Dimensions. I've yet to find out whether the set doors were also designed like this.

Crispin

[Teletran]

That's why I'm measuring the depth from the doorframe rather than from the facing edge of the open door just to make sure.

[mechanoid]

Interesting... I'd never noticed before but in the first picture above, there's quite clearly several inches of door below the roundels, which is apparently not there by "The War Games" at the end of the Troughton era. They must have rebuilt them or cut the doors down...

Crispin

I've just been watching the very first Dalek story. The TARDIS Doors in these episodes quite clearly stand proud of the floor by several inches. I can do you a scren shot if you would like?

[Scarfwearer]

Interesting... A picture would be great. I have the story on video, but no way to view it since I moved.

Crispin

[purpleblancmange]

If you look closely at the bottom edge of the doors and the walls, you'll see that this extension is purely there because of the mechanism used to open the doors - they seem to be just an edging fascia to hide the huge gap.  This soon gets removed to reveal the gap, there's loads of colour stories around the early Pertwee era that really highlight this.

And here are three images to illustrate this:


Piece removed from the doors.


Piece removed from the wall section.


Piece removed from the doors, but not the wall... look at the bottom left of this image, behind, um - Jo's behind.

[cyberleader1991]

Piece removed from the doors, but not the wall... look at the bottom left of this image, behind, um - Jo's behind.

Holy Cow! Check out the top section of the console in the middle pic - looks like it was put on in a hurry!

Incidentally the run of Jon Pertwee stories recently wrapped up on BBCKids here in the Great White North and I think he was an excellent Doctor. And Troughton was brilliant in The Three Doctors... well, I guess I can say I think they were/are all equally good! (actually no, I'm still not a McCoy fan...)

T  8-)

[mechanoid]

I've always been interested in the large almost vault like doors of the tardis, recently I made some observations about their design which I feel may be useful to discuss.



The roundels are at the very heart of the design each is 24" in diameter and separated by 2". Imagine that each of the roundels in door is surrounded by a hexagon, the sides of which are 1" from the edges of the roundel. The outer corners of the hexagons define the scalloped edge of the doors where they fit into the wall and the inner corners define the flat edge where the two doors meet. Next you need to add an extra inch to the bottom of the doors allowing them to touch the floor while to keeping them in sink with the roundels on the walls.



Well that all sounds good but I came up with that weeks ago now and looking at the pictures I'm not at all sure how much of it is correct so if anyone has any comments or corrections I'd love to hear them, also if anyone who's better than me at photo extrapolation would like to have a go at this picture we might be able to work out the thickness of the doors and the length of the hinges.


The lowest highlighted segment should be 12" vertically or 15" measured along the angle.

For those who are interested here are a selection of DVD capture pics of various parts of the TARDIS as shown in the pilot and the transmitted version. It shows different set ups where the walls and doors don't  have the gap filled and other various fanwanky details!

http://www.grahamgough.com/TardisDoorETCDVDCapture/

[Teletran]

I've had a lot more experience at this in the last 3 years so reaching back in time to answer my own question I get 2" for the hinges and a 6" depth for the door. These measurements could be out by up to half an inch but they make more sense than any of the alternatives as they fit the established geometry. Also young me seems to have made a mistake about the length of one of the sides but I've fixed that in the updated diagram.

[Scarfwearer]

I straightened the earlier image up with GIMP (the free GNU imaging tool), and produced this:



This image is scaled to exactly 5 pixels per inch (assuming the roundels are 24" in diameter), so you can measure sizes off it directly. MS Paint tells you the dimension of a shape you draw between any two points, which is an easy way to do this.

BTW - I think the door is more like 9" thick...

Crispin

[Teletran]

The details on this are a bit sketchy.

I measured this image to confirm the diameter of the old roundels compared to the new (S14) ones the diameter of which is known. Note that I've measured from top to bottom to reduce the effect of perspective distortion.



The old roundels came out at approximately 23 11/16" which is a proportionally insignificant difference and set designers like whole numbers as much as anyone so I think we can safely settle on a 24" diameter barring further evidence to the contrary.

I'm not sure if this is the same prop door redressed or a different one, it could be the same and I'd imagine they'd avoid having to remake such a piece if possible but something about it strikes me as different, maybe it's just that a decade and a half of repair and refurbishment has altered it's vital stats?

[Scarfwearer]

Here's a diagram I've put together by measuring from the straightened up photo. All figures are of course arguable, but these are my best guesses so far. I think there may be some spherical distortion on the photo, as the roundels are not all exactly the same size... 


(the picture is clickable for a larger versison)

Let me know what you think.

Crispin

[Scarfwearer]

Just to follow this up, I've just spotted an interesting clue:

.

Notice that the left door has a much larger extension beyond the roundel than the right door. When the doors are closed, it's the right door that has the larger extension. The doors are not mirror images of one another: the gap between them is at an angle:


For my own TARDIS, I built my doors like this (the picture is upside down, when compared with the previous one):


This may seem obvious, but it puzzled me for a while.
Amazingly, it was still like this in Tom Baker's era, and I never noticed. More amazingly, the difference is gone by Colin Baker's era, so they must have remade the doors at some point - probably for the fifth doctor's new sets. More research is clearly indicated...

Crispin

[Teletran]

Looking at the uncorrected still I can say that the image definitely has lens distortion, or maybe the tape has warped in storage (as happened to the Hitchhikers Guide radio plays) I think we can safely assume that the roundels are A. round and B. all the same diameter. Good work on figuring out the asymmetrical slice pattern of the door closure, I've been using an inverse wedge arrangement based on your design but have never been really happy with it as it didn't seem like secure arrangement for a space ship (and yes I know it's just a set.)  By the way the pilot and raw studio footage (included on the unearthly child DVD) shows the doors from the back which may be something to look into. Now that we know the angle of the door jamb would it be possible to extrapolate the depth of the doors, I know I've already tried but multiple sources make for a more definitive answer.