Hello, everyone. I should have posted this a while ago (especially when I was actually building it   ) but... oh well.

A couple of months ago, I messaged Jamie Bate (who has an account on here - jamiebate) and asked him if he could do a TARDIS kit for me. I'd always loved the Tom Yardley-Jones box, and seeing the multiple builds that people have done on this site inspired me greatly.

Since my friend, and fellow TARDIS builder, Brenk9carter, was creating a Season 18 box for me (which you can see here - http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=9214), I wanted to go for a different look. I'd always been a fan of the TARDIS as it appeared in Season 21 - dirty, battered, and with about 10 different colors on it. So, I decided to go for that.

Jamie worked his magic for me, and two weeks later, the kit arrived.



It was like Christmas morning opening up that box!  

Before I glued anything, I just wanted to do a "stack-up" shot, to make sure that everything fit together reasonably well, as well as just to see the piece of art that I was about to assemble.  



(Ignore the mess in the background, that's the paper that the kit was wrapped up in.)

Satisfied that everything fit together nicely, I began to glue it together. Since the kit was made of MDF, I just used standard wood glue.

I started by gluing the interior wall panels to the exterior.



(Note: the signbox and central dividing strip were not glued, only put on there to see how it looked.)

The walls fit together a bit like a jigsaw puzzle - one side of the wall has a male plug, the other has a female plug. When assembled correctly, the male plug should go on the right side.

So, of course I had to glue it together facing left.



(This is after slicing and regluing.)

After a (minor) meltdown, I decided the best thing to do was slice off the exterior wall from the interior and glue it again. Luckily, I was able to wiggle my box cutter into the corner, and sliced the wall apart. Unfortunately, this left the wood stained (this was not a problem) and, in some places, a bit stripped (this was a problem). The texture was very rough, and as I said, in one or two spots, the top layer had stuck to the interior wall. I managed to sand it down as best as I could, but the texture was still noticeably different.





(I was worried about using sandpaper, as the only type I had at my house was 80 grit, which I thought might have been too rough on the MDF.)

Another important thing to note is that, on the door, the distance between the edge of the panels and the wall is narrower than the distance between the panels and the opposite door. This is to allow space for the central divider, and give the doors an even appearance.

Of course I had to cock that up as well.



You can see in this photo how the distances I mentioned above were opposite to how I glued it. So, once again, I had to slice and reglue. This was EXTREMELY frustrating. The front was the side that would be seen the most! I wanted it to be perfect! But no...

After doing that, I slotted the walls into the base (the fit was tight enough that it didn't need to be glued. This saved my ass later on...) and glued the walls together. I then glued the two sections of the roof together, as well as gluing the lamp base on the top. I then placed the interior roof section on the top of the walls, and glued everything into place.





Next time - the "blue paint" moment and more idiotic mistakes!

Nice looking kit, sorry things didn't go smoothly for you putting it together,   hope it works out in the end. Best of luck.  

Chris.

Please don't turn this into a solicitation thread.    I have removed one post in regards to pricing and sales.  Please keep it on topic. 

If I may add, for some who don't know all the lore of this site, we don't remove these kinds of things to be dicks or because we don't want anyone to make money, we do it because the BBC is very diligent about protecting their Intellectual Property (IP) (While the London Metropolitan Police were not, which is kind of why the BBC owns the rights to the police box and the Met does not, but that's another story.)  The BBC is very much aware of this site and lets us talk about our hobby so long as it stays strictly a hobby.  As soon as anyone starts talking about how to buy unlicensed merchandise, it creates a risk of getting this site shut down and possibly even financial damages for the site's owners. 

The good news is that things have actually relaxed a bit.  Back around 2005, when the the series was relaunched, people weren't even allowed to post plans or dimensions for the new series TARDIS.  The BBC was OK with plans for the classic series', but IIRC, they explicitly told someone here that we couldn't post plans for the current box.  Now that the show's been on for almost 15 years, they've relaxed that quite a bit, and I'm pretty sure they borrow some ideas from us even, but we like to err on the side of caution. 

Would it be wiser for me to just remove this topic? To err on the side of caution, as you say.

I think it's fine.  You're talking about someone else on the board helping you build a TARDIS model by putting together a kit for you. That's kind of what the board is about--members helping each other with builds.  Along with helping figure out dimensions, weatherproof an outdoor box, or find a place to buy pebbled glass or signal lamps, etc, sometimes someone will offer to ship something like English door handles to the states--or texturizing paint to the UK (although shipping costs can interfere).  It's an interesting build, so unless scarfwearer or karsthotep thinks we should pull the whole thread, I'd leave it up.  I just wanted to point out that if we pull a post we don't do it just to be difficult--there's actually a good reason for it. 

And explaining makes moderating easier in the future, because now posters that may not have been around the last time we had this conversation know a bit about the history of the board.