Lowbudget Sonic Screwdriver help
- Thread starter IronCostumer
- Start date
Straker
Sr Member
You know, you don't have to be confined to the look of the show. I made one using brass plumbing hardware and I'm pretty happy with it.
It's a nice piece, small enough and light enough for your pocket but tough enough to be dropped on carpet(obviously), wood, concrete, asphalt, dirt and stone and not break or stop functioning.
It's a nice piece, small enough and light enough for your pocket but tough enough to be dropped on carpet(obviously), wood, concrete, asphalt, dirt and stone and not break or stop functioning.
AnubisGuard
Master Member
Very nice. Care to provide a parts breakdown?
Straker
Sr Member
I can actually yeah. I don't have any pictures of the parts individually though. I planned to sell these online but my resources to sort of manufacture them is a bit nil at the moment. Basically the head piece is the guts to a faucet. I just picked an interesting one and then mounted it on a screw and turned it in a drill press with a file to remove the threads from the end. I then took a 1/2 inch reducer and blow torched and soldered the head and neck into that piece lining up the hex nuts so they would be even. I used a half inch pipe for the main body and then used another half inch adapter for the butt end to which I soldered the, what they call "nipple" piece to the end. I had to make several parts from scratch on lathe though and that's hard to explain. If you look at the butt end of the thing there is a plug soldered into the very end that I had to make from scratch and then solder into the end cap. The lens is actually from a toy sonic screwdriver, but I put it on an expansion bit and into a dremel and reduced it a lot with a file and sandpaper and then polished it out. You can see in my first picture the full size lens there takes up the entire diameter of the head piece practically but with that it meant that you couldn't twist the collar on the head piece there and pretend that you're adjusting the sonic field or something, so I made it smaller. The button and the retaining trim piece were custom made from scratch again. The button from a stainless steel screw and the trim piece from some lamp reducer. I just worked them till they were the right diameter internally and externally and line up and hit the switch inside with a minimum of effort. The guts were from a cheap LED flashlight keychain I got at Lowes. i used the entire end cap and spring from their flashlight to make the battery compartment and just soldered it in the end permanently. as for the electronics themselves I just had to fiddle them in there, remove their LED, add a set of wires and solder on a super bright white LED to the end that had a maximum 30 amp rating. The batteries there only pushed 12 or so amps so it was fine. I recently found a single 25 amp 9 volt battery that fits perfectly. Lastly, the grip is just rubber o-rings.
Thing is this is actually a bit of a pain since you'd be putting electronics from a specific device into something that wasn't meant for electronics at all, so remember that you need to isolate the batteries from making contact with the inner wall and make sure the circuit can't make contact where it shouldn't. also, shrink tubing is your friend!
IronCostumer
Well-Known Member
Well midterms are in a week so I probably wont get much done on mine for awhile. I also fear that there will be no room for electronics, but I think having just the light would be fine. Right now I have most of the essential parts, I just need to put them together.
ZeroRoom
Member
BIIIG internet rumour I am afraid, never happened.
Thanks for these shots! Tremendously helpful regarding scale.
Which make is the smaller of all the sonics here?
Looking at the MFX here next to the CO is interesting. Convential wisdom seems to be that the CO is off by one whole inch but by looking at these pics that is clearly not true. To me that looks less than a half inch. Also bearing in mind that the MFX is the Eccleston Sonic and it often looks to me like Tennants Sonic was slightly longer - but that might be my imagination, especially given in it's last screen appearance with Matt Smith it looked to be back to the smaller Eccleston size again. Maybe Tennant just had small hands!
This issue with scale is extremely confusing as no-one seems to have exact measurements. I think we need to measure up the MFX and take that scale as true accuracy. Perhaps the idea that the CO was an inch too long came from the measurements supplied on the Department 6 Concept art for the screwdriver (which details the length as 150mm) but as we can see with the bending head on this design things changed about this design by the time it was manufactured (it also included the intersection seam that the CO uses to connect the pen nib for example while the final prop did not) and perhaps the length was one of these changes.
The best I have been able to do so far is compare screen shots using Tennants hand relative to the SS and look at my own hand relative to the CO SS. From this highly questionable measurement system the CO looks damn close with the main inaccuracy being the head which looks about 5-7mm longer in the toy.
Although trimming the CO down by say 1.5cm would be possible it seems to me to be way to time consuming a task for such a tiny difference, especially if you consider the scale width wise is probably increased to match the length.
My main bugbear with the CO toy (and off all the mods I've seen done to it I have yet to see this one tackled) is the ridiculously oversized slider button compared to the elegant flat one on the prop.
I'm going to attempt to do this mod on my own screwdriver so I'll post pics as progress occurs. While I'm at it I'm going to attempt to shift the FX button into the slider so the Sonic can make it's fx in any extension rather just completely in and completely out.
Has anyone else attempted to fix this oversize button issue?
Also has anyone else attempted to sand the mold lines off the head of the sonic without distorting the circular shape?
Risu
Master Member
The MFX was not based on the Eccleston sonic, it was based on a series 4 Tennant one. The CO toy IS roughly an inch longer than the MFX/real prop. The smallest of the three is the Tesco (or CO? I can't remember which maker) pen light. When I repainted and reworked my CO sonic I shaved a millimeter off the top of the slider, but I couldn't do any better than that without going all the way through the plastic cap.
elvisgump
Active Member
Here's a variation of a NO-budget version I've been working on. No wiring, sound, lights or anything yet. This is simply 1/2" PVC pipe, turned using a hand drill that the the PVC was fitted on with a very big bit down the middle and milling using files, a Leatherman knife and file and a grinding stone on a Dremel tool.
The head is a single piece of the same diameter tubing with very thin wooden pop-sicle like sticks I bought a long time ago for something else that were cut and beveled with the Dremel stone grinder and then a bit of Loctite bondo stuff to back them shaped carefully by hand with a left over Dremel chainsaw sharpening grinder stone bit. The blue emitter crystal thingy is just an old aquarium stone culled from a left over bag never used for the goldfish. (RIP Nemo)
The black part of the tail end is just another turned bit with a large electric wire nut inserted inside it all painted black. The silvery part is the spindle post from a CD/DVD packaging. There's some sort of hard washer nut for the extender which is a temp thing and the clear tubing is a left over tube from Radio Shack for solder.
The reason it's too big is it contains a pen in the butt end. A cheaply refillable pen.
So, PVC; zero dollars.
Left over wooden craft sticks; zero dollars.
One gel ink pen fished out of the drawer; zero dollars.
Nerd factor; priceless.
The head is a single piece of the same diameter tubing with very thin wooden pop-sicle like sticks I bought a long time ago for something else that were cut and beveled with the Dremel stone grinder and then a bit of Loctite bondo stuff to back them shaped carefully by hand with a left over Dremel chainsaw sharpening grinder stone bit. The blue emitter crystal thingy is just an old aquarium stone culled from a left over bag never used for the goldfish. (RIP Nemo)
The black part of the tail end is just another turned bit with a large electric wire nut inserted inside it all painted black. The silvery part is the spindle post from a CD/DVD packaging. There's some sort of hard washer nut for the extender which is a temp thing and the clear tubing is a left over tube from Radio Shack for solder.
The reason it's too big is it contains a pen in the butt end. A cheaply refillable pen.
So, PVC; zero dollars.
Left over wooden craft sticks; zero dollars.
One gel ink pen fished out of the drawer; zero dollars.
Nerd factor; priceless.
elvisgump
Active Member
Previous posters mentioned the Elmer's glue pen and the metal Sharpie marker pen have remarkably similar sizes to the barrel of the CO toy sonic. I found a slightly oversize clear acrylic ink pen in one of the bins at Book-A-Million that could be the extending neck.
Since there's no one 'accurate' size for the CE/DT era sonics I say just satisfy yourself and don't go for accurate - go for cool and custom. Besides if you don't like how the first effort comes out, then it's a sketch for the next one and the next one.
Lather, rinse, repeat!
ZeroRoom
Member
Yeah I had one of those pen lights but very quickly moved it on...
Perhaps Primrodo (or anyone else!) could post a few small dimension measurements for the MFX screwdriver for those of us keen on building or customising for accuracy?
ZeroRoom
Member
Risu
Master Member
This is an old discussion, I'll sum it up for you. There were multiple props made for the production, all of which were approximately the same but none of which were exactly identical. After series 2 they were stripped down and revamped for the newer version. Others could add more to that, but I don't care to elaborate any further as it's become a bit of an annoying subject.
elvisgump
Active Member
Nope, I'm as clueless a fellow you'll ever meet on that subject. I suspect on the people that have handled the prop or the MFX or whatever they are called that made the $300 replica know for sure. And I don't know if they'll tell. In my experience most people love knowing something that everyone else doesn't and selfishly ain't telling.
Personally, having my low paying tech support job for a major satellite tv company (a55holes who bring satellite tv Direct to you) here in the states where because it's Mississippi they pay us like we work in a sweatshop in Asia... well I don't have the money to worry about accurate.
And you know what? The nerd that's going to go "Oh, nice build, pity it's not screen accurate for size." probably is just, well, an a55hole.
That's my opinion though. If anyone doesn't like that opinion, I have others.
elvisgump
Active Member
BTW, this is the sum total of tools and my little work area out on my carport that I used to make my sonics.
Everything you see in that picture is the sum total of what I have to work with tool wise and resource wise. I made the one posted here for the custom sonic contest but thought, well it's not original enough so I made a different one. And I don't think I have anywhere near the skills to compete in that now that I've seen the fantastic work that was done, but so it goes.
Everything you see in that picture is the sum total of what I have to work with tool wise and resource wise. I made the one posted here for the custom sonic contest but thought, well it's not original enough so I made a different one. And I don't think I have anywhere near the skills to compete in that now that I've seen the fantastic work that was done, but so it goes.
Xxblackbird
Sr Member
My life story! I worked customer service for DirectTV for a while, too. And Gevalia *coughscamcough* coffee. I feel your pain. Now I work for the government doing the same thing and making the same money. "Oh my baby's dying," they say. "Oh my house is on fire," they say. "Oh my baby's on fire." Cry me a river, people.
I love any thread that has "budget," "hardware," "found objects," or "cheap" in the title. If it's not 100% accurate but it's affordable, I'm usually all for it. Especially if it's a prop that apparently has no definitive measurements.
elvisgump
Active Member
Directv has this hideous multi-room viewing system coming out next month and we had 6 hours of hopelessly poorly written training on it yesterday, but it was at least being away from the phone where people who seem to be glued to their sofas profanely scream about any interruption in their vegetative state to you for 8hrs. The work is marvelous when you talk to some old people who aren't complainers like this at least old enough to remember when one had to get off their pimply a55 to turn a knob or adjust the rabbit ears.
My childhood was most times standing there holding on to the aerial watch Tom Baker through a haze of UHF static and snow hoping I wouldn't loose the signal entirely. I can remember I watched Tom in "Pirate Planet" go off the plank and then lost the signal and Tom was inexplicably back after some twiddlng and someone had to tell me later the Tom that went over the side had been a hologram. There's no suspense anymore that you might lose the signal, and now when they do because the dog gnawed a wire outside they want someone to scream invectives at like it's my fault.
And I put up with this because I have a little farm house that I can go back to and put the telly up loud as I like at 3am and not be like I was in my Los Angeles days were there was a couple cooking dog in garlic or something on one side and two homosexual screeching over the drapes in the other apt. There's upsides to being lowly paid and abused.
I have friends on the East and Left Coasts who have these fantastical jobs where they are paid $80.000 yr or something and they are deploying servers with distributed whatsits and they babble about it like Data in Star Trek and it makes no sense to me it all, and they drive 45 minutes to work and 80 hours a week while back here in the middle of nowhere I'm telling someone in the Bronx or Detroit or Hawaii how to get his tv on ch 3 so he can see Directv because they're too thick to work this out for themselves and being rude about it the whole time and I think - well - are there any openings in ditch digging anymore?
And it's all even more fantastical this idiotic job I took for the health benefits, you see at 47 I was having hideous cataracts which was $6k an eye and the health insurance paid for nicely. But I must lie every call and say "Well I know how frustrating that must be, but I'd be more than happy to help you" when the conversation began with "YOU F&CKERS AT DIRECTV!" and I have to remember to say "Have I met all your Directv needs" which is the YES question "designed" some pinhead thinks to make the customers they have nothing but contempt for really say yes so you can get them off the phone in the required 12 minutes or less. It's like working in a sausage factory and these people take it all so deadly earnestly.
I used to things that actually paid such as a photographer and do tv editing and direct the odd commercial and do a smattering of animation too which is why I'm not very good with power tools outside the chainsaw or other farmboy specific things.
But I digress...
So I come home from that, pet the dogs, fiddle about with the odd hobby and the LAST thing I care about is if my totty little sonic I made just to see if I could is screen accurate. The one in the picture is like the second attempt!
Similar threads
