Tony's Console Room Measurements

[expendable]

Woot! Tony! Great drawings! Thank you for sharing these!

Dino, have you thought of making a console that you can disassemble for storage and traveling, then put it together when you have guests or for a show? You could even get one of those 10' x 10' pop-up shelters and make a new Tardis cover for it.

[galacticprobe]

Bill and expendable, I have been considering those possibilities. The travelling bit... not so sure. Timegate was one heck of a haul for my back so travelling to many Cons isn't top on the list. However, getting something in the back yard to store bits and pieces is because not only do I have small rooms in this house, but I also have no work space or storage.

And with life always getting in the way, if it isn't one thing, it's another. At least this time when life handed me a bushel of lemons, I can at least make some lemonade. We just had one of the upper cupboard rows in the kitchen come crashing down (luckily after the wife had just emptied everything so she could give it a good wiping out), taking a good section of the drywall with it. Insurance called it "Structural failure" (like they did when our son's room's ceiling came crashing down a year or so ago), and are giving us enough to redo the whole kitchen... which means loads of heavy-duty cardboard shipping boxes from the new cabinets! If nothing else, I'll have enough to experiment with to see just how large I'm able to go with a console, and shift it around to find the best spot for it.

Temporary, I hope, and maybe I can use the cardboard bits as patterns for a plywood frame for the "permanent" console. (Still need money for that, though, and the V. A. is still dragging its feet. They owe me enough retroactive pay that I could build a complete 2005 console and room - if I had the space!)

Dino.

[tony farrell]

Hi Temporal Engineer - yes, your figures are correct, so, the program you're using obviously works! (The 22.92 refers to the diameter of the central column - later known as the time rotor - so, I guess, the guidelines/measurement for that bit just slipped slightly when you re-drew it.)

I would just add that at 1:13 scale, you probably don't need to work to two decimal places as - effectively - the width of your knife blade would cancel-out the second decimal place.

I hope my drawings will come in handy and look forward to seeing your model console!

Tony

[tony farrell]

Temporary, I hope, and maybe I can use the cardboard bits as patterns for a plywood frame for the "permanent" console. (Still need money for that, though, and the V. A. is still dragging its feet. They owe me enough retroactive pay that I could build a complete 2005 console and room - if I had the space!)

Dino.

Using cardboard as a template was exactly how I built my Dalek (especially the shoulders with all those curves and recesses) - great minds Dino, great minds!

Hardboard (I think it's called Masonite in your part of the world) would make a suitable - cheaper - alternative to plywood and could be used for the non-load bearing parts of the console i.e., the wedge-shaped fins on the console's plinth and top section.
Tony

[tony farrell]

I'd certainly like to see this drawn as a hexagon - but, looking good!

A couple of small points: 22.92" is the diameter of the column, the hole in which it moves is nearer 24.5" (24.38") in diameter. The second maybe how I'm interpreting your drawing but, you seem to have a 'dog leg' where I've circled.

Tony

[tony farrell]

Well, I'm impressed! I had thought that I'd have to print-out my drawings and then use a protractor for the angles, but you've saved me a job!
Tony

[tony farrell]

I seem to be having problems posting pictures. This is just a test but here's something I 'knocked up'. Hopefully, you might like it!
Tony

[galacticprobe]

Ditto, and it looks great!

Dino.

[Rassilons Rod]

Likewise

[tony farrell]

Hi Temporal Engineer.

Great drawing - thank you. I'm entirely happy with your figures.

When I did mine, they were tested at 1/6th scale in cardboard but I rounded to one decimal place only (your program seems to use three decimal places). So, mathematically, your figures would be better than mine across the 'narrow width' of the hexagonal plinth (i.e., seeing it from two rather than three sides). I have stated somewhere that my figures are accurate to only to +/- one sixteenth of an inch. So, some slight differences are to be expected. I reasoned that 1/16th inch wouldn't make any difference as you'd lose more than this due to the width of a saw blade.

I envisaged this current thread as more of a 'discussion' and I'm glad that you - like others - feel able to contribute. However, at 29 pages, it's too big to act as a reference thread. A "summary thread" is being written but, for some reason, I can't post pictures on it. Marc (Rassilonsrod) is looking into this but I don't know how long it will take to resolve (I seem to be able to post pictures everywhere else, just not where I need to  .) I had hoped to have this ready for next week as that would be exactly 50 years since the original plans were drawn! Best laid plans - hey ho! 

As regards crediting other peoples' work, I firmly believe that this should be done. For instance, Tom (Kert Gantry) has sent me some brilliant renders of the photo blow-up walls and I'm not going to steal his work. Similarly, Marc is doing the renders of my blueprints. So, yes, anything that I use in the summary thread will be properly credited and reference made back to the discussions written here. That way, a) I don't offend anyone and b) people can see the basis for the summary (i.e., how we got there). (I did exactly the same thing for my history of the altered Brachaki Police Box prop!)

So, don't be 'backwards at coming forwards' - all contributions are gratefully received.

Tony

[tony farrell]

Why not start your own model build diary? I'm sure plenty of people would find it interesting. 

Tony

[tony farrell]

Well, hasn't it been an informative couple of weeks!

First of all Rob posted these:


And then he posted this over on Celation's thread!


It is clear that, in reality, the column's top ended up with a chamfered edge rather than the curved edge shown in the second drawing (presumably for reasons of economy), there is no reason to believe that the overall proportions of the console as built differed from those planned.

Assuming that the BBC plans are correctly drawn to scale, it is possible to extrapolate the 'missing' dimensions:

A couple of things have been puzzling me about Rob's drawings and the diameter of the central column which I extrapolated from them:

I used to work for a pharmaceutical manufacturer making fast-dissolve pills such as Claritin and Imodium. A liquid is dosed into a pre-formed/cold-pressed aluminium pocket which is dish-shaped and the product is then freeze-dried. When viewed from above, every engineering drawing expresses the curved edge of the product's pocket as a series of concentric broken lines.

Here I've combined Rob's drawings to show you how I interpreted the plans and arrived at a column radius of 11.46".



However, a solid structure is usually represented by a rectangle which has a cross inside it running from opposite corner to corner. If we look carefully at the column's rim there are two of these crossed rectangles at the points circled. This means that what I interpreted as a concentric series of circular broken lines (representing the column's curve) is actually only one broken line (and something has gone slightly wrong when the plans were copied i.e., a crease in the paper).

If this new interpretation is correct, then the column's radius isn't the solid circular line I originally thought but is actually represented by the broken circular line. So, the column's radius is slightly smaller than I stated (11.46") and looks to be almost exactly 11". If correct, that would make the column 22" in diameter and the hole through which it rises and falls 24".

Hopefully I've explained this clearly.

Any thoughts?

Tony

[jamiebate]

Hi folks, I'm new here, but I've been visiting for a while and have found a lot of photos and things to be a great help in creating scale models for the action figures and stuff. I've got a couple of questions, firstly, what colour were the roundel walls really? I've gathered they were the sort of mint green colour that we know the console to be but they seem like a beige/cream colour in a lot of photos from The Power of the Daleks and Colony in Space. Also in other photos they just seem white, could it be that they were repainted a couple of times? (between 63-71 before anything major was done to them).
Thanks

[tony farrell]

Welcome Jamie!

Have a look at http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=4825.0

The walls started life out as being green. This is from The Keys to Marinus DVD:



They were repainted at the end of the first season's recording when minor repairs were carried out on the set (roundel mouldings were replaced and the front lintel sign box on the Police Box prop was also repaired) but, at this stage they remained green.

The next major changes to the walls seems to have taken place about a year later when two of the walls (the doors and one of the others but not both) were refitted with plain-backed roundels.  Have a look at The Meddling Monk's Tardis - one wall retains the original moulding -backed roundels whilst the other two had plain roundels. It is unclear whether at this stage the walls were still green - in this photo the console looks almost white (the same as the walls) but it was still very definitely green:



By the time Patrick Troughton started, the walls had been cut down by approximately five inches and were an off-white colour:


Tony