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Scarfwearer's Second TARDIS

Started by Scarfwearer, Nov 19, 2016, 02:32 pm

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ropie

Excellent. Can't wait to see it painted.

Scarfwearer

Jan 24, 2017, 10:27 am #76 Last Edit: Jan 24, 2017, 11:08 am by Scarfwearer
[float-right]TARDIS Colors.jpg[/float-right]While there's an update coming on the last major part of the transformation between Brachacki original and the later refit (concerning the doors), here's a brief interlude on paint.

During its history, the prop had at least four different paint schemes, and I think some differences in texturing as well. While I can make the box reconfigurable with bolts and wingnuts, the paint job is not something that can be easily changed.

So my current plan is to actually paint the box multiple times (which, after all, is what originally happened to it). At each stage I'll configure it appropriately for the era of that paint scheme and take a gallery of photos. I'll then probably live with it for a while before the next repaint.

Colour matching is difficult enough even when you actually have an artifact in front of you. In this case we're relying on photos, which are notoriously variable, depending on lighting and printing.

So I took Bill Rudloff's photoshop-averaged paint chips from this thread:
http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=3860.msg44901#msg44901 (thanks Bill!), printed it out, and headed down to the paint shop.
I looked at a wall-full of paint chips and found nothing that really matched any of them.
Fortunately the shop has a computer colour-matcher, so I came home with three tester pots:
tester-pots.jpg
The guy labeled them "1964", "1969" and "1972" on the tins. :)

Here's the same picture with the flash on.
tester-pots-flash.jpg
I haven't tried these yet, and they'll look different when they're dried on wood.

I'll also want to do some texture tests before I paint them on the box, so that'll probably happen in parallel with some other work on the assembly.

As people have pointed out, the colours look different in almost every picture, so I'm not assuming that I'll end up using these exact shades. Some judgement is going to be needed. But this seems like a good place to start...

ionsith

I'd love to see it with the '64 shade of blue...

fivefingeredstyre

I'd plump for a lovely shade of 69 Blue myself... ;)

Scarfwearer

Hopefully over time you'll see both. :)

Volpone

I've found your next challenge: 
dr-who-transformer-MAIN.jpg
"My dear Litefoot, I've got a lantern and a pair of waders, and possibly the most fearsome piece of hand artillery in all England. What could possibly go wrong?"
-The Doctor.

Scarfwearer

LOL! That's *my* TARDIS - come back from the future through a timewarp! :D (well, okay, maybe not....)

But TARDIS Transformer was definitely a phrase that came to mind a while back.

Cheers for that! I give up - everything imaginable has been thought of by someone somewhere!
All you have to do is find it. :D

lofiscifi

Jan 24, 2017, 07:47 pm #82 Last Edit: Jan 24, 2017, 07:48 pm by lofiscifi
For the sake of completism.  ;)

swatches.png

Scarfwearer


Scarfwearer

Jan 24, 2017, 08:06 pm #84 Last Edit: Jan 24, 2017, 10:15 pm by Scarfwearer
The remaining major piece of the transformer tardis story concerns the doors.

The doors on the original Brachacki box were different from the later ones: quite apart from the windows, the lock was on the left side, there was no handle, there was a St John's Ambulance badge that was largely painted over.

I couldn't think of a way to make these features come and go reasonably, so I thought of several options:

  • I could have early doors on the back and later doors on the front and just turn the whole box around, or swap the doors over.
    I didn't like this option because it seems somehow incomplete if you can't even walk around the box without seeing something that doesn't look right.
[float-right]fathers-day.jpg[/float-right]

  • I could make a second set of doors (actually two sets of extra doors, because the back ones are also different).
    I didn't like this option because I'm trying to minimise the extra parts and keep all the extra bits in the TARDIS itself.
    Possibly I would live with this, but having avoided building two bases by having different skirts, and avoided building two roofs by building the smaller one outward, did I really want four extra doors cluttering up the place? Hell no! :D

When I built my first box, I paneled the inside of the walls and doors because it's also a passageway to a TARDIS interior and I wanted something that looked appropriate. And this gave me an idea.

  • So what I've done is to build the Brachacki doors on the insides of the Brachacki Altered doors. Or vice versa:

double-doors.jpg
So when you're looking at the Brachacki mode front doors, you're looking at the inside of the Altered back doors. And vice versa.
The doors are swapped, but they are not turned around. And in both arrangements, the rear doors open outwards.
Walking through it is weird because it feels like you're going through two tardises... :)

There are a number of complications with this approach:

Hiding the screw heads

I built the walls by screwing through the plywood into the backs of the rails and stiles to hide the many screw-heads. Although I can do that for one side of the doors, I obviously can't do that on the other side as well. I didn't want to use glue and lost-head nails because I want to be able to take the doors apart (as I have done several times already).

So I made one side of the doors the same way as the walls, but made the other side by joining the stiles to the rails separately.
This makes a door with open panels.
.door-sandwich.jpg
To do this I drilled sideways through the stiles with the drill press, and used very long screws.
door-edge-drilling.jpg
This is then screwed to the back of the other half by putting screws diagonally into the door edges across the two halves.
door-edge-drill.jpg
It's a plywood sandwich.

The result is that the doors have no exposed screw heads on either side - only along the edges, and yet they can still be dismantled.

I mounted two pairs of hinges on the edge of each door: one conventionally for the outward opening side, and one next to it with the hinge pivot central across the door edge. This allows the door to open with only an inch or so of door thickness visible, matching the way the front doors appear as they open on the props. My doors are clearly double thickness, and the other half disappears behind the door frame when they open. The fact that the back door double thickness is visible when they open seems like an acceptable compromise.

The lock(s)
Another challenge with this is the lock: a night-latch is designed to be mounted on the inside of a door, but the inside of one door will also be the outside of another door, so the keyhole can't have a night latch behind it, as one of them would always be stuck on the outside of the box. I haven't fitted the keyholes yet, so they will either have some alternative mechanism or just be decorative. I haven't quite figured out how to do this yet.

This Tardis will have two locks, so more keys to lose...

Needless to say, I can't put surface-mounted bolts at the top and bottom of the doors either, though I can use recessed bolts in the door edge as I did with my first build.

Door dividers
The door dividers are also a problem, because they should both end up on the same door in this arrangement. This is awkward because of course with a divider on both sides and the other door between them, the other door would not then open!

I experimented in drawings with having the door divider pivot across the door edge on hinges (which seemed over-complicated), but for the moment I've just mounted the divider to the wrong door on the back. It looks okay when they're closed. I have a better idea now that I will post if I can get it to work.

Windows
There are similar issues with the windows because they are Brachacki on one side and Frankentardis on the other. But I'll get to this in a separate update about the windows

There will be diary updates for these other things before long.

All in all it's a bit complicated, but it's fun to see what's possible.

superrichi1a

Out of interest, what's your favourite shade? :D I'm quite a fan of the darker boxes, love how it originally looked, McGann's almost purple quality and the, at times, jet-black of the 2010 box in the right lighting. The lighter Pertwee colour has always befuddled me a little, it's surprisingly light! I feel that in many ways, if The Doctor hadn't been stranded on Earth, the TARDIS would have looked very different. They probably could have made an entirely new prop to display in colour if it received enough attention, which it didn't in the back of UNIT, but I imagine they'd want to keep the light blue to show off that colour.
Isn't it how ironic that we have to think of solutions out of the box, in order to build our boxes a lot of the time?

Scarfwearer

There are some shots of it on location from the Time Warrior where it has a purplish tinge which seems pretty appealing, but that may just be the print.
While I have a great fondness for the UNIT era, I'm not fond of the light blue.
I wonder if they lightened it up to disguise the white scuff marks when the prop got knocked about. Or it may have just been the transition to colour broadcasting: star trek TOS was also intensely colourful from nearly the same era.

ionsith

Most likely the BBC props Dept had a surplus of sky blue paint to use up! ;)

Scarfwearer

You're probably right - one can over-think these things. :)

tony farrell

I think the colour change is more to do with the use of CSO (chromakey).

The Tardis retained its Troughton colour scheme in JP's first season but was given a grey 'wash' for his second season (except for the front sign-box) during the September 1970 refit. If you look at Claws of Axos, the front sign-box is the same brighter blue as it was in Spearhead from Space.

For Curse of Peladon onwards, we move to the lighter blue but, it's not as light-a-blue as people seem to think; it's just a more vivid mid-blue (fairly close to Prussian Blue). I think this was done to provide a greater contrast with the yellow background which - at that time - was the favoured colour for the colour separation overlay process.

As you rightly say Crispin, so much depends on the colour balance/grading of the film, how brightly the scene was lit and the fact that on video, colour definition is lost and colours appear 'washed out' when compared to real life and, indeed, how they compare to film.

I think your reversible doors and reversible corner-posts are a stroke of genius!  :)

T