Their story, in their words….
When we started our build on our Dalek project we knew we had to cover as much ground as possible in the least amount of time we could since we had restrictions on time in our specific situation; the static location, a late start and further difficulties gave us a time restraint so we found a workaround to work as efficiently as possible. The four of us decided it would be best to split into two teams, John-Paul and Henry working as one team and Zach and Benjamin working on the other. We felt we could get more work done this way so for the most part, this is how we kept it because we knew it worked.
The first part of our project was making the blueprints for the skirt of the Dalek which was challenging because we knew any inaccuracies and mess-ups we made in the blueprints would mean we’d either need to completely restart the blueprint or we’d need to take extra time working around those mistakes in the rest of the build. None of us had experience drawing blueprints but we had a specific idea of what we wanted it to look like and knew what the dimensions were supposed to look like. The blueprint took many hours but it came together and it looked exactly how we needed it to.
The next pivotal step in our project was the sourcing of base materials, in our case we needed wood preferably MDF. We decided to use recycled wood to help us to avoid exceeding our budget. This alternative saved us money which we then used on other sections of our project, improving them; specifically the sound system, electronics and better quality paints etc. Another design feature of the Dalek is the 56 hemispheres on its body. These originally would have been sourced custom, however, we had access to a vacuum former ourselves. So we decided it would have been more cost-effective to make them. For this, we needed a mould. We started with a styrofoam mould, however, the heat melted the surface and therefore changed the shape so we kept looking for another solution.
Eventually, we came across a dome cake tin, 10cm in diameter turned out to be the most effective, and being metal could withstand the heat of the vacuum former. Individually they are very light in weight so they were easily hot glued onto the body.
We built each appendage of the Dalek by ourselves and each showed individual challenges. The blaster arm turned out to be finicky and had to be done with precision. The manipulator arm turned out to be very heavy and we had to find a way to compensate for it. With wooden beams ended up being able to make it structurally stable. The eyestalk proved a challenge but not an unwelcome one. It was fun to engineer. By using seemingly random items, we ended up with a fairly decent product with design features, such as a light in the eye and a hinge allowing the eye to move up and down like in the TV show.
The project overall was really fun to do and definitely gave us experience and skills for future projects that we may want to take up. We are very proud of our finished product and very grateful for this opportunity given to use by the Mark Evison Foundation.
