Ha! - Happy to.  Going to be taking it on a little photo tour before it finally comes home...

My friend who's going to be doing the fiberglass build in April isn't familiar with Doctor Who, so I made this walkthrough video for him to familiarize him with the pieces and how they'll be assembled.

This model is made from my CAD files, which were built using a new set of dimensions I've derived over months of forensic photogrammetric analysis.  The dimensions actually have nothing in common with Tony Farrell's - they're very, very different. Sort of suprising, really!   There'll be a video on that coming very soon.

Fascinating little video to watch! It was interesting to see how the different sections come together. Watching them actually move into each other is sort of mesmerizing.

I also like the interior with the cosmetic grooves, which I'm assuming is meant to be reminiscent of the columns in the classic interior. One question though - What's with the gap in the back left column?

That cut out is where the control panel is going to go for all the various audio and lighting controls.

During my last year on the boards, I have been continually in awe of, and grateful for, Tony Farrell's exhaustive research on and encyclopedic knowledge of all things TARDIS, (Who hasn't?) so it was a source of great dismay and more than a little skepticism when I found myself ultimately unable to make his great TY-J plans line up with original S18 references, and was forced to reexamine them. I hoped it would amount to a few push-and-pulls; some small adjustments here and there.  It was not to be so, and I ended up going down a 6-month rabbit hole of obsession to discover why.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, so I put together this piece documenting my findings, process and results. Presented here with the utmost humility and respect, I hope you enjoy hearing of my quest for new dimensions for the TY-J.




_Mike

You really are Sherlock Holmes.

Hopefully a set of these plans will land in my in box one day

And I definitely need to come see her when she's finished and installed.

Bx

Quote from: bjones on Jan 16, 2019, 05:04 am
You really are Sherlock Holmes.

Hopefully a set of these plans will land in my in box one day

Once the build is complete I will happily post the full set of S18 Yardley-Jones plans - that's what the site is for!

And I really should take a moment to thank Scarfwearer who was an amazing and patient sounding board, happily enduring months of videos and photos and theories and experiments, and lent my research a unique perspective.

6 solid months of work to pin down the dimensions?!  That's... dedication.

The ever-present annoyance/caveat with a Tardis (particularly the TYJ) is that, once the props folks assembled it with left/right walls swapped (or repaired/replaced bits), your hyper-accurate box doesn't match!  You'd think they'd have some consideration for fans decades later wanting a constant, exact box to copy! LOL

I began with the Hammersmith series because it's the same box from multiple angles, and my first passes mimicked every contour and imperfection specifically. It was important to me to have at least one day/configuration of the box which satisfied the sun God, so to speak.  Of course, to your point, by that point sidewall tops had sagged and other things had worn and changed over time. But with that locked, it was infinitely easier to detect the differences in other configurations of assembly, and ultimately I derived an average for the dimensions.  Even still, as can be seen in the Leisure Hive and State of Decay overlays, which have mine on one half the original on the other, the barely noticeable seam is where there are non-level angles or warps on the original, and I've averaged.  Even with the averaging it's nearly dead-on - and this despite the fact that Leisure was fresh-from-the-factory, while Hammersmith was a full season later.




There weren't that many shows in s18 - I have a supercut of every frame from the series, and there ultimately weren't that many configurations.  I could easily tell by the end which doors and walls were which - they are very distinctive.

Of course, the little things/assembly variances weren't where the revelations were, it was the larger scale proportion differences that merited the work. And it takes time because it's really, really, really, really, hard. And I'd say on average the folks here spend a great deal longer than 6 months on one of these projects.

Every set of dimensions produced on this board comes with the caveat that they capture a moment in the life of a moving target; we seem to insist on publishing them, anyway.

I can echo that (about it being really⁴ hard). I think I spent about 6 months researching the dims for my Brachacki build, and I'm sure it's nowhere near as accurate as Mike has managed with this prop. Watching this one come together has been fascinating...

This is fascinating stuff.  I'd love to see what Mike's analysis - accompanied by some informed speculation - could add to the narrative of the subsequent iterations of the box (s19)s20-s26.  Where the proportions change most significantly and when, and perhaps even helping to solve the 'mystery newcomer' / Planet-of-Fire TYJ2 origins conundrum. And even whether the box we take to be TYJ-1 (currently in private hands and most recently seen in bonus material specially recorded for the recent s19 blu ray set) is the very same prop from season 18, or whether that original was scrapped after season 19, and an entirely new box introduced for s20.

We may never know the answers for sure, but Mike's astonishingly advanced geometric analysis would surely represent a huge contribution to our understandings and speculated likelihoods.

TF.

Despite my well-intentioned teasing before, I have to say that the ever-changing nature of the props is part of the charm. OK, so it may cause us to wince a little when we see just how worn-out the props were getting towards the end, but it also means that for the vast majority of builders 'near-as-dammit' or even 'near enough' can produce beautiful builds.
That said, I do admire the precision we're seeing here - partly for the pure love and dedication partly for the addition the the archives of even-more-accurate measurements, and partly because it allows us to appreciate a pristine/new* TYJ in such detail!
And it reminds me of all the things I like about the TYJ version(s) 

*I would have described it as 'flawless' but Mike's excellent lessons in photo-real rendering have shown us how important the 'flaws' are!

Quote from: typeforte on Jan 16, 2019, 06:52 pm
This is fascinating stuff.  I'd love to see what Mike's analysis - accompanied by some informed speculation - could add to the narrative of the subsequent iterations of the box (s19)s20-s26.  Where the proportions change most significantly and when, and perhaps even helping to solve the 'mystery newcomer' / Planet-of-Fire TYJ2 origins conundrum. And even whether the box we take to be TYJ-1 (currently in private hands and most recently seen in bonus material specially recorded for the recent s19 blu ray set) is the very same prop from season 18, or whether that original was scrapped after season 19, and an entirely new box introduced for s20.

We may never know the answers for sure, but Mike's astonishingly advanced geometric analysis would surely represent a huge contribution to our understandings and speculated likelihoods.

TF.

The sheer density of information I had to process just for the s18 was borderline unhealthy.  That said, once the old girl is safely here, I may be persuaded to wade into the water once again. Not included in the video is a laundry list of identifying features of Mark I, such as one set of doors being hung further inset than the others; that the box is narrower from the front than from the sides; that one of the post quarter rounds changes radius dramatically over the length of the strip; that the draft angle of the inset panels is different left and right than top-bottom; that the front/rear sign boxes are narrower than the sides.  There is also a way to identify differences in the front/rear sign boxes as one has further slop/generational loss than the other - it's most obvious in the "chattered" edge on the 3rd step.  One is quite sharp, the other markedly softer and missing some of the tinier details.  It goes on and on.  

During the research, one interesting mystery arose - which is only tangentially related to my dimensions research - that there isn't an answer for, regarding the composition of the box's material.  It is reportedly fiberglass, but according to several fabrication experts, and a senior formulist at Dow Chemical, fiberglass can't do this:



This is the same wall, and this appear(ed) to have happened during the Warrior's Gate shoot, but I swear I caught this sag in an exterior shot in Full Circle. I mean, they're all sagged just a little bit, but in this case you can actually see the dramatic change within the space of a single episode - it's a before/after either hours or days apart.

Regardless, the properties of fiberglass, which doesn't melt below 2000 degrees, is that it simply can't sag and deform to such a significant degree like this - it would fracture and crack well before this, no matter how thin or sparse the underlying matt or chop is, nor which resin is used to bond it. Very low grade fiberglass and certain resin combinations can yield small amounts of warping, but nothing like this (so I'm told). Further, it didn't just sag, it pulled the post caps up like taffy.  Everyone I asked came to the same conclusion - that it's fibrous thermoplastic of some sort.  This was relevant to me, simply because I've learned that structurally my box will not deform over time - the fiberglass once cured is like concrete, plus it's being reinforced with steel.  I'm just still... curious what this is all about.  It sure looks like fiberglass; it says "fiberglass" on the plans, but... anyway....  it just made my life harder that's all.

I've always wondered if the sagging panel top was simply just a badly repaired section...

Actually as I was looking into this, I was able to recreate the distortion using soft-body dynamics to test that exact idea.  But in fact, it didn't break, and it didn't just sag in the middle, it actually pulled the post caps slightly up and inward like taffy.  It did that in my simulation as well, and it was that behavior which led us to suspect it was thermoplastic. Thermoplastic materials cure by heat, and can be warped by heat.  Fiberglass resins are chemical cures, not heat cures; it's part of why our cars and boats don't warp in the sun.  I did spend a couple rounds trying to get to the staffers who originally built her, but to no avail.  It was a long shot, but that's the gig.