T-47 Snowspeeder 1:1 full scale prop build

[KramStaar]

RALLYING CRY !!! Sound the Trumpets !!!! Shout from the roof tops !!!!

Have you contacted Mary Franklin at Lucasfilm about this?

I would be surprised if they have cut back on big-scale pieces because this year is a massive event. That said, it might be that they allocated the space a long time ago and all of the available space has already been taken - after all its not long to go and events have a massive task wrangling everything.

Good luck and hope you're successful..

Regards
MARK

 

[Johnny Darko]

this is just gonna be so damn awesome!!:thumbsupcan't wait to see more on this!.............. and thanks guys....ive just shown the wife the pics,...never will she
moan at me again for the small amount of room i take up with my builds

 

[LrdSatyr8]

I've been working on some blueprints for building one of these myself and the length according to Wookiepedia states it's 5.3 meters long which works out to about 17.3885 feet. I was thinking of actually building the full scale one to see just how big it would end up being. Trying to find some good blueprints on it. Any ideas?

 

[TXarmory]

I've been working on some blueprints for building one of these myself and the length according to Wookiepedia states it's 5.3 meters long which works out to about 17.3885 feet. I was thinking of actually building the full scale one to see just how big it would end up being. Trying to find some good blueprints on it. Any ideas?

Yes, 17 feet long is what we are going with. Some of the best blueprints of the original filming props are found in the Star Wars: The Blueprints by J. W. Rinzler. A copy of which I need to sell in the Junkyard. I ended up with 2 copies from Christmas. Cool Star Wars items are always an easy pic for my Christmas presents, and 2 people thought of the same thing. Rather than return it, I'll sell it in the Junkyard.

 

[bbmchl]

RALLYING CRY !!! Sound the Trumpets !!!! Shout from the roof tops !!!!

***** RPF members, we need your help. ******

Star Wars Celebration 2015 in Anaheim, April 16 - 19. The Falcon Cockpit was supposed to be there on display. Chris and Greg were just told that there is no room for them and that they were dropped from the event. We at Real Movie Toys were also going to display the Landspeeder, and the Snowspeeder - that we are building especially for SWC. As of today, I have not yet heard anything from the organizers about if we are still on or are also being dropped. I have an email and phone messages left for the staff to let me know our current status.

I'm afraid if they won't make room for something as truly awesome as the Falcon Cockpit, then they won't give up the square footage for my two land hogs either. And our three vehicles are just the only ones I personally know about. What if other cool things that are fantastic, but too inconvenient, are being dismissed. We want more from our Celebration than just isle after isle of comic books and T-shirt booths. (no offense guys.) We want the incredible. We want to celebrate Star Wars!

We as a community of the most devoted fans in the world should CRY OUT over this injustice. We should join together and let the promoters know just how much we want to see in person, to touch, to sit in, to photograph, and to talk face to face about how it was made, these most wonderful of fan built reproductions of movie magic history. I'm no rabble rouser, but if we don't act together now, we will all sorely miss out in April.

How about a petition drive. An email campaign. A phone brigade. A march on Washington. A huger strike. Burning and pillaging. What shall do??? What will we do for our Celebration?


RPF moderators, if this is innapropriate and you want me to simmer down and knock it off, then please let me know and I will. I don't want to miss use this site, and I beg your forgiveness.

well that sucks. I will sign a petition if it is organized.

Mike

 

[Halliwax]

very nice build! whats under the red cover?!

 

[TXarmory]

We picked up a trailer load of various thicknesses of plywood, MDF and 1/8" door skin for the deck plating. Also a 12' x 5' MDF 3/4" slab to set up the vacuum flat table for the large panels. We'll be building the flat table first and then showing some pics of the wing panels as we build them up and vac bag them.

 

[TXarmory]

very nice build! whats under the red cover?!

It's just one of the cars we have cluttering up the shop floor. We have to move em around sometimes to free up floor space.

 

[Halliwax]

It's just one of the cars we have cluttering up the shop floor. We have to move em around sometimes to free up floor space.

yeah! lol what kind of car

 

[TXarmory]

The T-47's been on hold the last week while we spruce up the landspeeder for this weekends Dallas Fan Days ComicCon in Irving. Anyone in the area come out and say howdy. We're now letting people sit in it for pictures. Took quite a bit of modifications to open it up, so people who don't have a body like Gumby's, can get in and out without breaking something. If you don't know who Gumby was, then you're too young.

"Move along kid, you bother me." ~ W.C Fields.

 

[TXarmory]

We had a great weekend letting people see the X-34 Landspeeder up close and from behind the windshield. Dallas Comic Con in Irving TX. The next local exhibition will probably not be until the May 29 Dallas Fan Days show at the Dallas Convention Center. Here's a few pictures showing our new 20' backdrop.




Now it's time to get back to work on the T-47 so it'll be ready to premier in May.

 

[TXarmory]

Update about Star Wars Celebration in April.

I have been swapping emails with a few folks at LFL and at ReedPopExpo (who are organizing the show) and it looks less and less likely that will be at the show. There's still a bit of hope, but not much, as it is now less than a month away and this is a big project to move half way across the continent. Sorry that I won't get to meet all of you guys that are going to be there. I really hope there is outstanding stuff to see there. Take pictures and post them here when you can.

MTFBWY

 

[usajdm]

^^^^
Thats really too bad.
I really wanted to see this bad boy.

 

[SofaKing01]

I'm really sorry to hear that! As much as we had wanted to go, there will be a def sigh of relief as you wont have to kill yourselves getting everything finished.

 

[LrdSatyr8]

Any new pics of the snowspeeder build?

 

[TXarmory]

Howdy guys. It's been a while since I've sat down to update the build report of the T-47. We've been sinking a bunch of time around the shop building the large 12'x5' vacuum table, cleaning up and improving the cross ventilation flow pattern in the paint booth, installing air conditioning and better lights in the paint booth. We've run a few test panels for new windshields for the X-34 Landspeeder in both polycarbonate and acrylic, to get a more easily managed windshield for getting in and out of the seats. And performed a bunch of other house cleaning items in the main ware house while the weather was still cold and dreary outside. But now it's time to get back to reporting on the T-47 build.

Let me remember. We last left off with still working on the cardboard mock-up. We removed the wood framing that established the 22.5 degree wing angle and laid the panels flat on the ground again so we could lay out the dimensions of the gun and engine pods (in white paper), as well as the gun barrels. I grabbed a pair of 4" diameter PVC pipes from the storage racks as test dummies. Still looking correct so far. The window cutouts in the canopy were quick cutouts and not meant to be accurate.

 

[TXarmory]

Day 1 of the actual build. Saturday April 4, 2015.

We convinced ourselves that the dimensions are right and the geometry angles work for the wings, as well as the cockpit and canopy. The back to back seating tests confirm that we have good leg and shoulder room and will be seated low enough to put our shoulder height right at the wing joint. Still plenty of head room for a proper helmet. By the way, if anyone can recommend a good Snowspeeder / X-wing helmet kit, we need to get a couple made.

So then we committed the patterns to full size 3/4" expensive furniture grade, double faced plywood. A single 4'x8' foot sheet weighs in at 60 pounds. It's a lot to wrestle around, but we need the rigidity for the wings to support people walking on the wing to enter the cockpit. There will be a few undergrid support ribs in a few spots, but for the most part it will be the 3/4" thickness that supports most of the load. 4'x8' sheets were the largest size we could get, so it was necessary to scarf together 3 sheets to layout the single piece structure for the nearly 15' long wing. We set up a 4:1 ratio scarf cutter on our 10" table saw. For two of the joints on each wing, it required us to run the sheets vertically through the saw jig with the 8' long section precariously waving in the air high above our heads. Fortunately no one lost any fingers and all went well. We were all too concerned with the job to take any action photos of the big panels on the saw. But, here is a smaller panel going through the angled saw blade jig that cuts a 4:1 ratio angle. 3" long for a 3/4" wide board. On thinner boards we prefer to cut up to an 8:1 scarf angle for more epoxy wetted surface contact area.

 

[Pwrsrce]

Well crap...I guess you guys are going to keep posting pics until I cave and actually stop by to see this project in person!

Great job...I can't wait to see how this turns out.

Jason

 

[TXarmory]

Tuesday April 7, 2015. Day 4.

The 4'x8' panels and the 2'x8' panels are epoxied together along the 4:1, 3" long scarf. This makes a panel 6' wide for the rear part of the wing. We use West System epoxy in the shop for just about all laminating, so it's our first choice of bonding agent when we want to make sure it's not going to fail. When working with raw wood edges of plywood or other porous surfaces, apply a sloppy coat of straight wet resin to the wood and watch it soak into the wood grain. If you don't do this first, then most of your resin that you expected to be the gluing force for your joint, will wick into the wood and leave you with a resin starved, weak joint. After waiting about 5 minutes for the resin to saturate the thirsty wood grain, apply a second layer of wet resin. this is the resin that will be bonding the joint together. Be sure to lay down a sheet of polypropylene plastic under your wet working area to catch the resin that will squish out. Resin does not stick to Polyprop. You want to see some squish out, to ensure you have a fully wetted joint. But not too much to be wasteful. Good resin is expensive. Once both halves of the 4:1 taper is wetted, we flip the two pieces together and with a couple of hundred pounds of pressure along the 8' long joint, we left it to fully cure overnight.



Wednesday April 8. Day 5.
The next day, the front nose end of the wing was added on by joining another 4'x8' sheet. We rough cut it 2" oversized to then be scarfed onto the larger main panels.





Applying the West System 3 epoxy resin to both halves of the 4:1 tapered joints. A roll of poly plastic to catch the drips.



The finished pairs of raw wings drying in the paint booth. R2 is sitting in a pile, waiting his turn to be built, so he can take a ride with his best buddy, 3PO, on the back of the Landspeeder. Just not enough time in the day...


We left a couple of inches oversized around the edges of the front nose panel to make sure we had enough wood to get the angles right. Both panels finished out within an 1/8" off the target patterns. So it was just about perfect, without hardly any wasted material. You can see the dark stain area down the middle of the panels where resin squished out of the bottom of the scarf joints. This will be sanded off when we prep the wings.

The T-47 is committed to being at the Dallas Comic Con / Fan Expo on May 29 -31 at the Dallas Convention Center. But we are also talking with the directors of Houston's ComicPalooza about being on display the weekend before that, May 22 - 25 for Memorial Day weekend. We have a count down calendar on the main drawing board in the lunch room to remind us we have a very tight build schedule in front of us.

 

[TXarmory]

Saturday, April 11, 2015. 40 days till deadline to load both speeders on the trailer and drive to Houston for ComicPalooza May 22 -25. You south Texas fans, let me know if we will see you there. It would be helpful to have a couple of pairs of extra hands on call for setting everything up.

So far we have about 8 working afternoons on the project. Planning and drawing the scale blueprints. Building the full scale cardboard wings and canopy mock-ups. Buying the first few rounds of plywood and support framing. We are able to put in about 3 to 4 hours each evening after work, so it's coming along nicely. Saturday was the first long day available, but we still only racked up about 6 hours of actual build time. The combined large panels for the wings were laid back to back on the saw horses and air nailed together so they wouldn't slip out of position. After paranoialy measuring three times and checking against the cardboard templates, we set the saw guide fence and air nailed it in place. With the rotary saw, we cut both panels at one time to ensure they were mirror images of each other. 5 sides later and we were pleased that the wings now look like speeder wings. We left the back edge flap cutout detail flat for handling issues. We'll cut it out later when we have the wings ready to mount.









After a quick dinner break we grabbed some more cardboard and mocked up the front gun support boxes. Digital angle finds and level meters sure are a nice toy to have these days. Much better than working with protractors. A couple of trial and error efforts produced all the perfect miter angles. Tomorrow we'll cut and build a pair out of 12mm plywood.



We put a 4" PVC pipe on 2" standoff blocks to represent the gun barrel.

The sunset was putting on a real show, so we took a minute to enjoy it.



This is the view looking out of the front hangar main doors, looking West over the center of the runway. Just West, over the tops of the buildings is the grandstands of Texas Motor Speedway. The Duck Commander 500 is going on and we can hear the roar of thundering horses turning left.