Sunday, 22 February 2015

All New Daleks

You may recall that I've been planning to make a small Dr. Who scene on the model railway involving Daleks.

So now I've got a large Dalek Death Squad ready for my model trains. You may remember this old post about our first shot at 3D printing small Daleks. Well things have moved on a lot since then!

Franc's mastered his 3D printing skills and found a way to make finer steps in the printing process to make an new and improved set of Daleks for me. I've been straining my eyes and using a binocular head mounted magnifier to paint them. Yes, it all sounds a bit freakish but the results are awesome.

Here's the raw material from Franc:



I then mount the individual units on the handle of a small hammer using blu-tack to paint them.





And here they are with the Tardis on my old MacBook.



Finally - the tramway has a road surface

I've finally completed (most of) the roadway on which the tram now runs. I have had to very tightly fit my home-made cobblestone paper to the tracks. You may recall that I had built up the roadway around the tracks using cork strips. I've now covered those with carefully cut paper.

The main issue was cutting to fit the curves. There's no way this can be done easily by hand. What to do?

Well, modern technology (and Franc Carter) to the rescue. I asked Franc to laser cut some guides to cut out the road surface curves. He kindly cut them to my spec out of MDF and I've used them to cut out curved sections from the cobblestone paper.

I reckon it looks excellent. Better than commercial tramway stuff! It fits really well and I reckon eooks pretty good even up close.