Jenster97
New Member
Hello everyone! My name is Jen and greetings from Malaysia! This thread is about the building process of my Fallout Radiation King radio. The inspiration came recently when I suddenly got hooked on to the old vintage music akin to that from the Fallout series and I happened to stumble upon some papercraft builds of the radio and I thought, why not go ahead with making a (not exactly fully) functional vintage radio ala Fallout style. A little bit of myself before i go ahead with the build, I am currently a Year 3 Electrical and Electronics Engineering student and was heavily into prop making back in 2012 to about 2015 then college came and I slowly grew out of it and slowly lost passion to continue. I have an inactive facebook page which has pictures of a few of my props that I have built over the years as well as a Halo Spartan build thread on the 405th. Currently I found a bit of time to try to get back to what I used to enjoy doing, as I am on a break before I am heading over to the UK to further my studies. Most of my time now has been allocated to the Formula Student team in my current university. Well, that's enough of that, time to get on with the build!
If you are interested, here are the links to my page and thread
FB Page
-->https://www.facebook.com/VistaProps/
405th link
--> https://www.405th.com/forums/thread...built-by-me-wip-and-might-be-pic-heavy.34921/
Woodworking and Dimensioning
The first step that was done was to select the wood that i would be using. I am not very familiar with the type of wood that i have used, but it was from a 50-year-old cupboard that I a recently disposed off but have kept some of the wooden planks from it. Unfortunately, pictures of measuring and the cutting of wood was somehow not saved in my phone after going into the camera app from the lock screen, what a bummer. Anyway, the dimensions of the radio are as follows with wooden planks of 11mm thickness
To sum it up, the general size of the radio is 300mm X 200mm X 140mm
CAD Modelling and 3D Printing
The next part comes the most interesting process, at least for me, is the 3D modelling of the front face of the radio. Since the radio builds out there are little to none, and I am only able to resort to pictures from Google images, I made do with what i had. Credits to user reedfranklin, replicaprops and fenruul for having good reference pictures that I can used to model the face. All of the modelling was done in Solidworks, as that's what I have picked up from my Mechanical Engineering friends. I am by no means very good at CAD but I tried my best and got a little from my friends as well. The next thing that I modeled was the knobs for the radio, which I assume is to adjust the volume and to tune the radio specific frequencies. Even for the knobs themselves the reference images were scarce and I had to do a lot of eyeball work and 'guesstimations' based on the dimensions of the radio that I am working with and then scaled accordingly.
The 'radio' part or the inner electronics are from a cheap Bluetooth speaker. The electronic components have been soldered onto PCB and it was damn near impossible to trace the connections for the volume control for the chip they used, plus the volume controls are all digital with micro switches, not analogue with a potentiometer. In order to to keep the radio as authentic as possible with the rotating knob, I just designed the knob to fit the common potentiometer which would then be attached onto the radio without any functions other than to make it feel like you are actually doing something.
The reason that I have chosen the route of CAD is that I will be 3D printing the radio face, as I have access to 3D printers in my university. The printer that I used to print it is the Raise 3D N2+ and the print volume of the printers are pretty dang large, specifically 305mm x 305mm x 610mm.
Being 3D printed in nature, the actual surface finish of the piece would not be smooth, as 3D printed parts were printed by melting plastic, commonly PLA or ABS, and gradually building up layers. To make it as smooth as I could, I used superglue to fill in and level out the slight uneven surfaces and high filler primer to fill in even more. From then on out, it is mainly sanding, filling, priming and more sanding. The quality of the knobs were lower than that of the radio face as they were printed on my own cheap printer hahaha XD. The results of the prints are as shown below.
Clamping down the wooden planks while the glue is drying with the printed face in place helps to make sure everything is as straight as possible relative to the printed face.
After many hours of sanding and smoothing and filling, and then painting, the parts were test fitted together to make sure that my measurements are good.
If you are interested, here are the links to my page and thread
FB Page
-->https://www.facebook.com/VistaProps/
405th link
--> https://www.405th.com/forums/thread...built-by-me-wip-and-might-be-pic-heavy.34921/
Woodworking and Dimensioning
The first step that was done was to select the wood that i would be using. I am not very familiar with the type of wood that i have used, but it was from a 50-year-old cupboard that I a recently disposed off but have kept some of the wooden planks from it. Unfortunately, pictures of measuring and the cutting of wood was somehow not saved in my phone after going into the camera app from the lock screen, what a bummer. Anyway, the dimensions of the radio are as follows with wooden planks of 11mm thickness
To sum it up, the general size of the radio is 300mm X 200mm X 140mm
CAD Modelling and 3D Printing
The next part comes the most interesting process, at least for me, is the 3D modelling of the front face of the radio. Since the radio builds out there are little to none, and I am only able to resort to pictures from Google images, I made do with what i had. Credits to user reedfranklin, replicaprops and fenruul for having good reference pictures that I can used to model the face. All of the modelling was done in Solidworks, as that's what I have picked up from my Mechanical Engineering friends. I am by no means very good at CAD but I tried my best and got a little from my friends as well. The next thing that I modeled was the knobs for the radio, which I assume is to adjust the volume and to tune the radio specific frequencies. Even for the knobs themselves the reference images were scarce and I had to do a lot of eyeball work and 'guesstimations' based on the dimensions of the radio that I am working with and then scaled accordingly.
The 'radio' part or the inner electronics are from a cheap Bluetooth speaker. The electronic components have been soldered onto PCB and it was damn near impossible to trace the connections for the volume control for the chip they used, plus the volume controls are all digital with micro switches, not analogue with a potentiometer. In order to to keep the radio as authentic as possible with the rotating knob, I just designed the knob to fit the common potentiometer which would then be attached onto the radio without any functions other than to make it feel like you are actually doing something.
The reason that I have chosen the route of CAD is that I will be 3D printing the radio face, as I have access to 3D printers in my university. The printer that I used to print it is the Raise 3D N2+ and the print volume of the printers are pretty dang large, specifically 305mm x 305mm x 610mm.
Being 3D printed in nature, the actual surface finish of the piece would not be smooth, as 3D printed parts were printed by melting plastic, commonly PLA or ABS, and gradually building up layers. To make it as smooth as I could, I used superglue to fill in and level out the slight uneven surfaces and high filler primer to fill in even more. From then on out, it is mainly sanding, filling, priming and more sanding. The quality of the knobs were lower than that of the radio face as they were printed on my own cheap printer hahaha XD. The results of the prints are as shown below.
Clamping down the wooden planks while the glue is drying with the printed face in place helps to make sure everything is as straight as possible relative to the printed face.
After many hours of sanding and smoothing and filling, and then painting, the parts were test fitted together to make sure that my measurements are good.
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