wayouteast
Sr Member
I finally got around to building that most iconic of movie vehicles, the Blade Runner Police Spinner. I've wanted to build this for years but have always held off as I really wanted to do it justice; Blade Runner is my favourite film, and the Spinner is such an amazing piece of design. I knew I wanted to light it and to add Gaff and Deckard, and the incredible builds that have been posted here and elsewhere over the years have always slightly terrified me if I was honest!
Anyway, I finally acquired the 1/24 Fujimi kit and conquered my trepidation. Whether I did it justice I'll leave up to other people, but I had a great time building this, though not without some scary and frustrating moments! As well as the Fujimi base kit I also used the wonderful Paragrafix photoetch detailing set.
I started by working out how I was going to do the lighting, which for me was definitely going to be the hardest and most complicated part of the build, given the small scale and the sheer number of lights. The roofracks were a particular worry as they are so tiny and contain so many individual lights. I was planning on approximating the pattern of flashes the real vehicle had rather than imitating it exactly, but even so it would need each lamp to be wired individually to three separate flasher units (it would probably have been easier to have used a programmable unit like an Arduino, but I'm afraid my skills weren't up to that! Instead I bought a couple of standard variable-speed 'zig-zag' circuit boards off eBay and another small 5-channel circuit board from a company in Germany which simulated emergency vehicle patterns with 2x single flash outputs, 2x double flash and a single 'turn signal' blink. I thought the combination of those three boards would give me all the timings that I'd need to get the effect I was after, not just for the roofroacks but also the under-car flashers and the other beacons on the vehicle.
Then I started drilling and carefully wiring in the required white, blue, red and amber nano-SMDs before adding the various coloured lenses. I decided to use the kit's red lenses, even though I think one or more of the actual lights are amber. There's one white lamp, though, which I made a lens for from clear styrene sheet. For the roofrack lights, after I'd carefully labelled all the wires so that I knew which ones needed to connect to which output on the circuit boards, I twisted them together into a single strand, one on each side. This was intended to eventually travel along the underside of each roof bar and down into the back of the car through a small hole drilled into the roof on each side. I elected to keep the kit's roofracks rather than the more accurate Paragrafix ones, as this would make hiding the wires much easier.
After a considerable amount of swearing and eye-strain, and the addition of the 'dome' lights, which had to have their own 'stalks' made out of thin styrene tube, a a quick 'twist-test' (no solder yet!) reassured me that the effect I wanted was possible (the dome lights in this video haven't got their final, more random pattern).
Anyway, I finally acquired the 1/24 Fujimi kit and conquered my trepidation. Whether I did it justice I'll leave up to other people, but I had a great time building this, though not without some scary and frustrating moments! As well as the Fujimi base kit I also used the wonderful Paragrafix photoetch detailing set.
I started by working out how I was going to do the lighting, which for me was definitely going to be the hardest and most complicated part of the build, given the small scale and the sheer number of lights. The roofracks were a particular worry as they are so tiny and contain so many individual lights. I was planning on approximating the pattern of flashes the real vehicle had rather than imitating it exactly, but even so it would need each lamp to be wired individually to three separate flasher units (it would probably have been easier to have used a programmable unit like an Arduino, but I'm afraid my skills weren't up to that! Instead I bought a couple of standard variable-speed 'zig-zag' circuit boards off eBay and another small 5-channel circuit board from a company in Germany which simulated emergency vehicle patterns with 2x single flash outputs, 2x double flash and a single 'turn signal' blink. I thought the combination of those three boards would give me all the timings that I'd need to get the effect I was after, not just for the roofroacks but also the under-car flashers and the other beacons on the vehicle.
Then I started drilling and carefully wiring in the required white, blue, red and amber nano-SMDs before adding the various coloured lenses. I decided to use the kit's red lenses, even though I think one or more of the actual lights are amber. There's one white lamp, though, which I made a lens for from clear styrene sheet. For the roofrack lights, after I'd carefully labelled all the wires so that I knew which ones needed to connect to which output on the circuit boards, I twisted them together into a single strand, one on each side. This was intended to eventually travel along the underside of each roof bar and down into the back of the car through a small hole drilled into the roof on each side. I elected to keep the kit's roofracks rather than the more accurate Paragrafix ones, as this would make hiding the wires much easier.
After a considerable amount of swearing and eye-strain, and the addition of the 'dome' lights, which had to have their own 'stalks' made out of thin styrene tube, a a quick 'twist-test' (no solder yet!) reassured me that the effect I wanted was possible (the dome lights in this video haven't got their final, more random pattern).