Nostromo Emergency Destruction System. The big build

Cleaning up the lid.

I started out by filling the open inside corners with off-cuts of high density polyurethane foam, fixing them with in position with cynoacrylate.
I then carved and sanded them to shape before giving them a thin coat of car filler and all the visible joints.
Sanded everything flush and it’s beginning to look a bit like a finished panel!

The rear section is still not attached as I’m still not sure how much access I’m going to need for fitting lights and diffusers etc.

However, before tackling the large outside corners I decided to temporarily screw it down so that nothing moved out of position.

Once again foam for the corners and roughly sanded them to shape before gluing them in position.

At this stage I got distracted and decided to have a look at the handle section.

Apart from a couple of photographs I was lucky enough to receive from Skin Job 66 there wasn’t a lot to go on - like a lot of this project!

I noticed that the two large plates that support the handle looked about the same distance apart as the word DANGER, so this was my starting point.

After marking it out I cut an opening with a razor saw and cleaned up the edges.

I used 18mm Mdf for the handle plates and 6mm for the infill piece which has a step in it.
The handle is a piece of 25mm Perspex tube.

You’ll probably notice that the first set of plates I made were too short, forgetting that they go to the front edge of the lid.

Hopefully during the week I’ll be able to finish of the corners and start looking at the hinge blocks.

Starwarsdoc very happy to build you one when I've worked everything out!

Vortexrunner I doubt you'd get much sleep!!:lol
 
AAH!
After reviewing the work I’d done on the hatch, I decided that part of the handle area was wrong!:facepalm
Looking more closely at the photographs I decided that I’d misread the shadows.
Instead of the raised structure beneath the handle I now think that it should be a concave structure, and not the angled and raised section I built.
I suppose I could have left it as it was, but I’d sooner have it correct!

After fixing the handle I finished off the large external corners.

The hinge box structures at the base of the unit were constructed from 9mm Mdf for a bit more strength than the 6mm I’d built everything else from.
None of this structure is properly assembled yet as I’m not exactly sure how the hatch will hinge in relation to the main unit.
Looking closely at the photograph of the rear of the original unit you can make out a pair of regular door hinges – not very high tech.
I’m going to have come up with something better than that!

The last thing I managed to do was the boxing in of the upper light structure in the front of the box.
At the moment I’ve made the sides flush (which is the way I think it should be), but looking at the photograph of the original you can’t actually see any side wall.
Either it’s set back quite far the edge or it hadn’t been fitted when the photograph was taken?

Next time I’m hoping to mock-up the interior lighting.
 
Thanks for the comments guys.
Captain April, it's not quite as heavy as it looks, but eventually I do intend to mould it from fibreglass. At the moment I'm trying to work out where the split lines should be and how to get back into it should the lighting fail.
Fuzzual, looking at your site I think you got plenty of skills of your own. You're doing an amazing on that room!
 
Pro Mod said:
Thanks for the comments guys.
Captain April, it's not quite as heavy as it looks, but eventually I do intend to mould it from fibreglass. At the moment I'm trying to work out where the split lines should be and how to get back into it should the lighting fail.
Fuzzual, looking at your site I think you got plenty of skills of your own. You're doing an amazing on that room!
Click to expand...

Thank yous sir, i am humbled.
 
Hi guys,

Sorry for the delay in progress, but once again I've had a really busy time at work over the last couple of months (mustn’t complain) - real modelmaking work has to take preference over hobby stuff!

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to meet Dennis Lowe (great guy) at an exhibition, and he's helped me out with some reference for the key pad.
This has been tremendously helpful for the upper key pad and has allowed me to update my drawings.
Due to Dennis's help I hope to have the keys at least 95% accurate.
So although I haven’t had time in the workshop, I've at least managed to get a few bits done at home.

Hopefully in a couple of week’s time I'll have the hatch in primer and will be working my way towards taking a mould from it!
 
Take all the time you need! :) This is becoming more awesome with every new picture I see. Following this one for sure!
 
It’s taken rather longer than I expected, but at last I’ve been able to devote some time to this neglected project.

As I mentioned previously I’ve been working on the keypads and have now been able to complete them with the exception of printing the keys.

The original ones were made from acrylic and framed with EMA channel.
I bought the channel and then decided it was going to be a lot of hard work to cut all the mitred joins perfectly. Also the channels are full of ejection pin marks from the moulding process and frankly it would have taken quite a lot of effort to clean it all up.
So I decided to machine the bases from 1mm acrylic and used 1mm x 1mm strip to apply the channel detail.
It took a while but I think the end result is superior to the original.

As everything is illuminated I sprayed the finished frames with silver to act as a light block before priming and finishing in a dark grey which matched the EMA channel.

At the same time I'd machined the frames I produced the keys from 3mm opal acrylic.

When I came to assemble everything I realised I’d been working to too tight a tolerance and as a consequence, none of the keys fitted in the holes – aah!

To get around this I scraped the paint from all the holes - that’s a total of 416 edges.
Guess what. Some of the keys still didn’t fit so I scrapped all of their edges as well.

Anyway, three hours later I had three nice looking keypads.

My patience had worn quite thin at this stage, so rather than go back to working on the graphics I decided instead to paint the panel into which everything is mounted.

This also gave me quite a confidence boost as I could actually see some major progress for not much effort.

The original panel was finished using a silver paint called Hammerite and it’s still available today.
The panel was prepared with an MDF primer before being sprayed with the hammer finish paint.

The paint is a peculiar product in that you can only add more coats up three hours from applying the first one. As a result if you mess it up you have to wait three weeks before being able to add another coat!

Fortunately it came out okay - but it did help that I was spraying it horizontally.

So, panel sprayed and key pads ready I did a mock assembly this afternoon, and if I say so my self it looks pretty good!

The key graphics for the test were printed on overhead projection acetate and just placed on top of the keys.

After I cut them they started to curl and that’s the edge you can see in the photograph.

The final touch was to rig some Led’s underneath to illuminate everything. Oh, and I mocked up the antistatic and arrow graphics on the board.

Hopefully I'll be able to do some more work to the hatch during the Christmas holiday.
 
Just continues to amaze, incredible recreation.
You probably know this already but the lighting used on the inside of the lid for the instructions on the original was neon, I used flouro tubes but yours deserves the real thing.
 
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