It's Bigger on the Inside - New TARDIS Build

Around the beginning of September, I decided that I was going to build a TARDIS, and try and have it done in the middle of October. Since my time was limited to evenings and weekends minus every imaginable life event that competes with my time, well, that didn't happen! Here it is in December, and I have only gotten as far as making the panels. I still have a roof, and detail work to complete, finishing, painting, hardware,... and making it bigger on the inside...(haven't quite figured that part out yet, but I am working on it.)

Hopefully, my experience will help someone else.

Special thanks to:

Rebelscum (Philip Wise) http://www.therpf.com/f9/my-new-series-doctor-who-tardis-build-image-heavy-99629/
MattMunson http://www.therpf.com/f9/tardis-builds-two-them-same-time-180746/
GeneralFROSTY http://www.therpf.com/f9/blue-box-tardis-has-landed-143380/

I decided early on that if I were going to build a TARDIS, I was going to build it "right". In other words, I was not going to sacrifice quality craftsmanship for shortcuts, cheap lumber, and poor planning. Every "good" build that I have seen, needs a "good" plan. After searching for plans...

Has anyone ever discovered that everyone that makes plans, they are all different? Generally they are all the same, but the TARDIS has evolved over the years since 1963... it's always been a "blue box" except when it was "gray" in the days of black and white, but there is not an "official" standard, except for each Doctor, and the "version" of build from the Props department. The question is... which one do you build?

... The long and short of it is that I ended up drawing up my own plans, but relied on the work of other TARDIS builders to understand their deviations from each other. I came across a post with plans from the BBC props department drawn up in millimeters of the Richmond-Thomas 2005 prop which is where my TARDIS plans heavily rely as well as Bill "the Doctor" Rudloff's plans.

BBC: http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=4234.0
Rudloff: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65215981/2005TARDISPlans.pdf

At this point, I am far enough in my project that deviations between the BBC plans and the actual prop used on the show were not discovered in time that I made some design decisions. Other design differences that I made were on "purpose" due to the purposeful design decisions I made. These differences, I will discuss along the way, but they aren't noticeable unless you absolutely know the exact dimensions of the specific prop that I am duplicating. Basically, I am building a full scale Matt Smith TARDIS, but I am building it in such a way that it can be transported in the confines of one or two cars. (I don't own a truck). This means that the base has to be in two halves, and there are six wall panels, two doors, four posts, four top signs, and a two-part roof, and top light. That pretty much covers the outside.

The inside... I haven't figured that out yet.

I think the "why" I am building this TARDIS is more important than the actual build. From a Time Lord's perspective, BBC's idea for the TARDIS was "inspired" by a TRUTH that is far more real that is yet known. TRUTH is the only thing that travels faster than light, and therefore time is bent around it. In other words, TRUTH precedes events revealed in time. Does that make sense? The "why" is to educate. If I go much deeper than that, I will lose you.

Ultimately, I am here to get you to think outside the "blue box"... pun intended.... or perhaps in this case inside the "blue box"!

Let's build a TARDIS!

Wade Balzer
wbalzer (at) newjerusalem.org

Here is a sample of the front face of my plans. They are pretty detailed. When I finish, I don't mind sharing, but for now, the plans are intentionally too small to read details since there is still some possiblity of change. I will keep you posted.

Wade

Here I have glued up the posts, and they are drying in clamps. I used biscuits to join the wood. The first one, I tried gluing all four sides together at once, and I didn't have enough clamps, and it was a pain to keep the sides together.

After buying more clamps, I found it much easier to glue two sides together at a time, let them dry, and finally assemble and glue the two halves.

This is plane fun. The object here is to make two sides as flat as possible so I can run the posts through a planer.

Who's com-planing? Pun is intended. <-- Got to throw in a "dad joke" to see if my kids roll their eyes. :facepalm

So here I have planed down the posts to be 5.0 inches. Being precise here helps later on when you are assembling. My first post, I had a little trouble. Even at 5.0 inches, there is a slight lip on the board edge that I will have to sand down later, but I am going to wait until I am ready to do the detail work.

Looking very nice , your joinery looks top notch ! As a carpenter by trade a Tardis is on my short list to build also .

I have some tips for the inside (something you can work on in your down time, maybe).
I built light boxes for each window. I lined some plastic totes with reflective tape and screwed a fluorescent light into them (two lights for the front windows). I velcro'd one box to inside of each panel so each window has its own light source. (this is also handy for some events where you need to have pictures made. I had mine against a green screen once but light from one of the side windows was reflecting off and causing problems. Since that window isn't visible in the pictures anyway, I was able to shut it off easily and everything turned out fine).
This also makes it possible to decorate the interior. I stopped working on mine due to the weather, but I plan to paint the interior to match the roundel pattern from the series.
Lastly, you can have a 4x8 banner printed for cheap online and hang it inside. It fit perfectly for me. All I had to do was backlight it with a single light and it looks great for photo ops.

A friend of mine is helping me cut down the 4 x 6 treated lumber that I would be using for the base. He did a great job. Unfortunately, I didn't discover that 80mm + 35mm does NOT equal 105mm until after I glued everything up. Converting to inches, my base was 4 1/8 inches in height rather than the 4 1/2 inches.

Here I am working on gluing up the base. After gluing everything up, and the discovery that my base was too short, due to the difficulty of working with the treated lumber causing the pieces to warp, and be out of square, gaps, not sitting flat on a surface, and every other problem imaginable, I abandoned all that work, and had to rethink my base design.

I needed perfectly flat lumber that if it were to warp, it could do so without changing the integrity of the frame. I will come back to this later.

Trimming up the bottom of the posts. My miter saw doesn't cut all the way through, so I had to cut half-way, flip it, and cut the other half. Due to the imprecision, I had to go and use a belt sander to sand down to a line. It was a little bit of a pain. I am not trimming down the top yet until I plug it. That will be trimmed to size when I do.

I decided for "simplicity" to use a pine 4 x 4 cut into 10 inch plug for the bottom, and a 6 inch plug for the top. Because there is a very high probability that I will want to run my wiring through the post, I drilled out about an 1 1/4 inch hole all the way to within 4 inches from the bottom. Since the plugs extend 4 inches beyond the base of the posts, as long as I aim to the very center when I have to drill out for the wiring, I should reach the cavity in the middle even if I am just an inch or two from the platform.

I used my largest Forstner bit as far as it would reach to hollow out the top of the bottom plug. This is also to help when I am wiring.

I made A LOT of sawdust.

You MUST clamp down the wood because the drill press is working very hard to get through the end grain of the wood. Because the drill press was working so hard, I ended up separating the quill assembly from the drive shaft, and had to take the whole assembly apart just so I could reattach it.

Adding the plugs to the bottom and top of the posts, and using Gorilla Glue to secure them. The plugs received a 45 degree beveled edge before inserting them. A few of the plugs also had to be belt sanded slightly so they could fit BEFORE gluing them in.



The Gorilla glue is really easy to clean up with a chisel. Here are the tops after they were trimmed off about 3 inches. It looks really nice.

Back to working on my NEW Base. I bought 4 x 6 unfinished cedar, and here I am using bench, adjustable height platform on my Shopsmith to hold the planer so that the feed is level with my workbench, and using my saw table for the out feed. It was a real pain especially once I had to tear it down and set it up again.

My workbench is using a solid wood door for the top, but it was never trimmed down to the size of the workbench. I decided to cut off the end of the workbench, and make an adjustable height platform that could be easily set up.

TARDIS got put on hold for this side project.



Here is what I came up with, and it works very well. It will sit a few inches below the top of my bench when it is all the way down, and it will extend all the way up to 48 inch high platform that can be used as an extension table to my drill-press or band saw.

New plans for my base. Unfortunately I neglected to take pictures as I was building it until I was almost finished. What you are seeing is 1 x frame assembly that is pieced together in sections. Since, I am building this TARDIS in two halves, I thought it would be nice to be able to set it up as a half-TARDIS so that it could set next to a wall as a piece of furniture or entertainment center of some sort.

Basically, at the mid-point, I have a small assembly that can attach the back posts midway so that I am only using half the depth. The top is going to be tricky when I get to it.

Each half has three sections. There is a frame assembly that holds the posts. There is an inner assembly that holds the 1/2 inch platform at the exact height of the outer assembly, and finally the cedar trim that surrounds the frame. Each assembly is glued, but is not glued to each other, which allows for some configuration changes in the future. Because the cedar trim is merely screwed on from the inside to the frame, I eliminated all the problems I experienced with the treated lumber frame I previously built.

Oh... and this time, 80mm + 35mm is EQUAL to 115mm.

There are three back pieces that need 1 1/4 inch dowel holes drilled in them at the EXACT same spot for perfect alignment. You just cannot trust a good measurement because as hard as you try, you just cannot perfectly align dowel holes by hand.

Here I have screwed the THREE back pieces together (2 back pieces for the full-sized halves + the 1 back piece for other configuration I am trying to achieve.)

You can see on my workbench the frame assembly with the trim attached without the inner assembly. The inner assembly is being built.

Here is the basic platform with the two halves attached by dowel plugs. Due to the perspective distortion the posts appear to bend outward. They are okay, and are very straight.

You can see the inner assembly is sitting 1/4 inch higher than the outer assembly. This is on purpose since the outer assembly will get 3/4 inch trim glued in. The center is 1/2 Baltic birch plywood.

There was one "small" mishap when the cedar trim fell off my workbench, and caused a bigger gap at the seam between the two halves. I will fix it later with wood putty.

Now we are seeing the smaller assembly how it attaches to the front base assembly.

The dowels are glued and screwed to the 3 x 3 boards which have a 1 1/4 inch hole drilled with a Forstner bit about halfway through the board. The dowel assembly is then screwed (not glued) to the back assembly. Unfortunately, I should have screwed it closer to the bottom rather than the top because once I put on the 3/4 inch top, I can no longer get to the screw heads if I needed to for any reason.

In retrospect, I would make two of the dowels in longer sizes so that it is easier to align during assembly. The first dowel will go into the first hole, and then the second would go in another hole causing the whole assembly to be aligned BEFORE the final two dowels enter into the alignment holes. Oh well.... I will do it on the larger back half because that one WILL be a lot harder to align perfectly.

Wow, 15 posts? Really?

Ooooh! looking good!

Here is the base platform trimmed out with the 3/4 inch pine on top with the smaller back assembly. I used a trim router to trim the inside post holes.



Here is the base with the 1/2 inch Baltic Birch platform, and a close up of the right front corner.



This is from the back, with the back assembly removed.

The key here is that this platform must fit in the trunk of my car with the seats down, and that is the main reason it was built this way.