Violet's Pseudo-Newbery Box

[Audrey]

After the completion of my door sign http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=9990.0, my dad was pushing pretty hard for a full Tardis.
So, I got to work on a design.
Turning to aesthetics, my favorite box overall is the Newbery. Lovely, chunky thing. So I roughly converted Tony Farrell's measurements to imperial units (just one of the drawbacks of being American).
I started to customize it a little bit, with square post caps, thicker quarter rounds, etc.

Once the door sign had been completed, it was pretty clear that our efforts should be given a higher "place of honor", aka situated on the box. Unfortunately, the board the sign is on is only 15 inches tall, as opposed to 15.75 for the Altered Brachacki and roughly 16 for the Newbery. But, it's perfect for the Yardley-Jones.

Further customization came soon after, and the model looked like this:

Today we bought and cut some of the wood. It was much much more expensive than I was anticipating, but exciting nonetheless.


And, after a lot of cutting and nail-gunning:

Given that it's currently bordering on 11 PM at the time of writing, we've stopped for the day. But the measurements work (Thank you and sorry Tony), its all working out great, and I could not begin to describe the excitement of seeing a full scale Tardis wall in person.

More tomorrow hopefully!

[russellsuthern]

It is super exciting, isn't it?!
You have gotten off to a great start!

Regards,


Russell

[Audrey]

Today we didn't get as much work done, but we still made good progress.
First step as soon as we were heading to the shop was making sure the door sign fits. Which it does, very very well!


We tried the windows which took a bit of trial and error. We got a test one done, with individually cut-out panels that didn't work out (too wonky) so we're shaping it out of 3-quarter inch parts.


After that we checked out how the glass looks and how it is to cut, which worked out very well! This photo has the wonky test window framing instead of the final thing which we're going to need to redo.


Turning our attention to the corner posts, we began making the first one. Ultimately we only got the supporting structure done which we'll bolster out and add quarter rounds to, but it's still lovely and tall. Mostly tall.


Before we left I just had to get an elevated shot of the wall so far. Super in love with this already.


More tomorrow hopefully!

[Audrey]

Finally got the chance to work on this today - admittedly not nearly as long as I would've liked. School starting back and people having jobs is making time difficult.
About 2-3 hours' progress was made - so not much to show. But what we did get done:
The door sign was slightly sanded down to fit into the panel without much issue.

We tried out the router for the base window (which will not be visible, it's just something to be nailed onto) which is a lot speedier than the manual cuts, though just as wonky. Again, will be covered. We've decided the current wall will be the back, or discarded entirely depending on final results. Our experimentation period, if you will.


We got a chunk of a corner post done, but need to get more wood to cut to size for it. It's currently a bit of a plywood sandwich, with some chunks being temporary, but it's chunky as hell and makes the box even more imposing. Just two of these at full size will do wonders for the silhouette.


A lot of it honestly looks messy, but considering it has rounds of sanding and filing and puttying and wood filling and all manner of stuff to go through, I'm fine with it for now.



Here she is with the post and wall propped up, starting to look proper! The handle is also temporary (lots of temporaries for the moment) just to get a feel for how it'll look. Gotta order the proper one.

A small footnote, I'm wanting something akin to the Newbery lamp housing for this, but with the Altered Brachacki styled lamp "glass", searching around was a bit difficult until I went by a family member's house and:

.. Bear with me, here. The mid section is about 5 and a half inches tall by 6 wide and can be lit from within, so once cut down and sanded I think it'll be perfect.
I'm sure I'll come up with a catchy phrase about recycling later.
Anyways, the next step is to hopefully buy some more wood for the posts and then to clean them up.

More soon!

[Volpone]

I've actually contemplated 1 gallon jugs for the lamp.  The good thing about the lamp is, you can easily do "good enough" and if you later decide you don't like it, it is easy to swap out.  In case you haven't seen it yet, I will recommend the Vermont Lantern company:  https://www.vermontlanterns.com/catalog/lamp-chimney  They aren't true lenses, but they have a profile close to a Fresnel lens for a very affordable price.  And I found the packaging to be very good.  The glass came to me in fine shape.  And it even blew off my roof at least once and didn't crack or break.  (Knock on wood.) 

[Audrey]

I'd actually not seen the Lantern Company before, thank you so much!! Me and my dad are talking over swappable door signs and lamps, so a fresnel/fresnel-esque would be a perfect secondary option. Checking through, they had a lamp that was very close (without double checking, admittedly) to the Whittaker lamp, but at nearly 250 dollars. Anyways, thank you very much!

[karsthotep]

for the windows have you looked on some of the other builds here and looked at how other members constructed theirs? You might have some better luck and less "wonk" than router or hand cutting each pane.   Regardless you are doing awesome keep up the work, it will pay off. 

Karst

[Audrey]

for the windows have you looked on some of the other builds here and looked at how other members constructed theirs? You might have some better luck and less "wonk" than router or hand cutting each pane.   Regardless you are doing awesome keep up the work, it will pay off. 

Karst

I heavily appreciate both the suggestion and compliment,
I did work out a design made out of pre-cut parts (which other users have done) that is much much cleaner that we'll be using, our first test of it would've been flush with the wall due to the thickness of the glass so we'll be using thinner parts next go (as well as editing the design a bit so we don't have to manually "heighten" the central parts), but from what my dad says the wonky under-part is just so that the proper cut parts have something to bolt onto. Though, since we're both wanting the windows to open they might be cut entirely.
Anyways, here's how the window made out of pre-cut parts looked.

Thanks again!

[karsthotep]

ah yes, makes sense and that is looking excellent, good job.

Karst

[Audrey]

With a long weekend just having happened, I was very excited for the progress we'd make with some free time finally presenting itself.
Coming off of having nearly exhausted our initial wood supply, we bought some more, and got to work. I'm gonna gloss over a bit, as it was kind of monotonous at times (hard to avoid that when you're essentially doing everything 4 times).

First off, some accessories. I finally got the handles ordered, two vintage hotbed handles, one 6 inch, one 4. We'll be using the 6 inch on the main door, and the 4 inch on one of our phone door options.
Which we will have! Since all the panels will be a rigid 12 by 15, we have space to make various phone doors. We're talking over lots of options for this. Magnets to get St. John's stickers on or off, open-able windows, etc.
Of course, that's all a ways off and for now we've just got the one.

Moving onto the now, my grandparents passed their love of antiquing onto me, which over the years has led to me acquiring some admittedly odd but useful items. One of which that I am glad finally paid off was a vintage brass lock, which is now happily situated on our doors. It's a bit small, about 7/8ths of an inch, but we'll be making a ring to get it up to 1.5 inches in diameter.


Paint wise, I'm wanting it to have a few layers of different box colors. I'm currently wanting a base layer of Pantone 654C, used for the "Capaldi Box" miniature in Flatline, then a secondary layer of something closer to the Hartnell box. It's slowly becoming a real box mishmash.
Speaking of which..

After a lot of fiddling around, experimenting, thinking and rethinking, I'm set on what I want for the lamp. I stumbled on a very close (and expensive) analogue to the Whittaker box lamp, about 100 bucks. We're going to be ordering that soon and it will be situated up top.
Before that, I did buy two "jelly jar" lights from Lowe's, but they were much smaller than I anticipated, about 3 inches in diameter as opposed to the 4.5 I was expecting. Not a big loss, however, as they only run about 6 dollars each before tax, and make pretty stylish pseudo-paperweights.


We got the side panels all prepped for the most part, aside from a center board needing to be attached.
And we finally know what to do for the windows, we'd have had one of them done today if we hadn't accidentally made it backwards. It happens. But, we know what to do now!


Once we had most of the walls readied up, we propped them up with a temporary "holder" to keep them in position. Even with this temporary sizing it's pretty spacious on the inside, nearly enough for me to extend my arms out fully.


A very, very exciting view! It's really getting there.

Either tomorrow or Wednesday we'll be buying more wood to make the base and at least two posts, so the true shape will really become evident.

More soon hopefully!

[Volpone]

I'm sure there've been 3 or 4, but this is the first build I can remember that had walls and cornerposts before the base. 

[Audrey]

It shouldn't impact anything (I hope not!) but that isn't something I had realized. Weird!

[Volpone]

Although now that I think about it, on mine the base--and the cornerposts--are part of the walls.  I don't know that anyone else has done that. Did 4 sides and screwed them all together and then screwed together a framework to lay a plywood floor on top of. 

[Audrey]

I wanted to wait until tomorrow for a larger update but this is too exciting for me not to share,
we finally have our window! It looks great and is all glued together, tight as. Just need 7 more!
Tomorrow we're gonna have the base and two posts done hopefully. Starting to come together!

[Volpone]

"Just need 7 more..."  The windows were the bane of purchasing for my build.  They were pretty simple to build, since I initially didn't have actual windows, I just painted the plywood behind them grey, slapped the fluorescent light diffuser in place, and then cut the trim.  I found these moulding strips made out of a dense foam that was similar to pine--only without any grain.  I was able to just cut the pieces to size with a utility knife.  Then they got glued and brad-nailed in place.  But the thing is, I calculated out how much I needed.  And somehow forgot I needed to multiply it 8 times.  Or something.  And even after going back for more I still ran out.  I can't remember how many trips I made for material for the windows.