A nice large image, I'm sure it isn't elsewhere...



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Definitely the opening of Resurrection of the Daleks as the panels are in the correct order.
Bill "the Doctor" Rudloff

Look at the state of the column innards!  :/

I just found this on Facebook

And another....

Nice publicity shot of Colin Baker. (The Davison outfit is clean; at the end of "The Caves of Androzani" and at the start of "The Twin Dilemma" both coat and trousers were trashed with mud - or what was supposed to be mud - so it can't be a screen grab.)

The storehouse photo of that menacing robot with the "Five Doctors" console panels just lying about is interesting: looks like they've got the bot tied to that pillar. (I guess it was no good standing on its own.)

Dino.

The casing on the time rotor is magnificent.  No visible seams or screws.  I'd love to know how they did it (and what it cost). 

They probably had it extruded (the usual way), or they had access to a really great vacu-former! (My money's on the extruding, and that can get expensive.) You need a sheet of perspex/plexi that's thick enough to handle the extruding. Something that size? On a guess, I'd say it started out as a sheet about 2.5 feet square or so, and probably close to a half-inch thick. Once extruded to the size of the column cover the thickness would be about 1/8th of an inch.

Dino.

Unless they just manage to shoot it with the seam behind the innards everytime.

Yeah, that was my first thought, but I don't see a seam on the top either.  I suppose you could epoxy the top on and polish it to do a good job of hiding a seam, but I don't see one at all.  And I wasn't seeing a seam in any of the detail photos of the time rotor.  Again, maybe you could do some kind of heat/chemical weld and then polish it to the point that it wasn't noticeable, but if that's what they did, they did a very good job at it. 

Well, if there was a seam, and they did keep it on the "far" side of the camera so the innards hid it, then they must have turned the cover for this shot from "Attach of the Cybermen": http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=976.msg13076#msg13076. The image in woodenconsole's post shows the "back side" of the console, including the dummy monitor housing. And even from this angle - which is normally the side facing the console room walls, there is no seam visible on the cover (even on the top).

As for some sort of welding/bonding to get the top on or the sides closed, even doing that and polishing things will still leave a visible seam. You wouldn't be able to feel it if you ran your fingers over it (even the old "fingernail" test, where you see if your fingernail can catch an indent in the seam), but you'll still see it (unless it's painted over - then the seam will be hidden). But on something clear? Unless the thing is made from a single piece - whether vacu-formed or extruded - if the seam goes all the way through the material it will show. Even injection moulding will show a seam, though that would be one case where the seam wouldn't go all the way through the plastic/ perspex; it could be polished away because the seam is only on the outer edges, where the two halves of the mould come together.

Dino.

Would another possibility be that they cast it as a single piece?

When looking at large diameter cylinders on websites the choices seem to be between extruded and cast.

Maybe they cast the cylinder and stuck it to the top, or maybe they cast the whole thing, top and all, in an inverted cast?

The Five Doctors Console prop at the Experience has a seam running the height of the Rotor cover (it took a while to find a good shot because in some fan photos I think they had rotated the cover to put the seam near the back of the Console display):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/85243409@N04/9800081786/sizes/o/

Assuming this is the same cover that was on the prop back in the 1980s, it suggests they simply rotated it between shots to hide the seam (I recall seeing someone specifically mention that here before).

I've been considering transparent fiberglass. Although for a novice, even non-transparent fiberglass would likely be tricky, so jumping right into fabricating something with such a tricky shape is probably out of the question.  However they did it, they did a wonderful job on the 1983 time rotor casing. 

OK.  In addition to trying to figure out a decent center column/time rotor, I'm trying to figure out where I'd have space to put a console.  In that quest, I came across this:  http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=2544.msg52044#msg52044 .  Right about at the top of the Doctor's coat is something that looks suspiciously like a seam.  They did a very good job of polishing it out, but that looks definitely like it has a seam.