Day 1 - Starting on the skirt

(Originally posted on July 5th, 2013)

Hello!  I'm Charlie from Seattle, WA, USA (see my intro post for more on that), and here I will chronicle my attempt to create a New Series Dalek.

The very first thing that I did to make this mad plan a reality in my mind was to order the Moflash beacon lenses from monkey1138, who happened to have a few pairs left.  Once I shelled out roughly £28 for that, my mind was made up that, yes, indeed, I'm actually going to be doing this.

I decided to start with the skirt.  At a home improvement store nearby, I located a perfect piece of 4' x 4' fir plywood for the skirt base and top, and some sheets of 3/16" x 4' x 8' HDF (they didn't carry MDF in the thickness I needed).  I felt that these thicknesses approximated the metric suggestions I've seen in the forum.

I had the friendly man at Lowe's pre-cut the HDF for me into 30" tall lengths (the tallest of the Dalek skirt panels is 72.2cm, which is approximately 28.5"), gleaning a little more than three pieces from each 4' x 8' board.  This should allow me plenty of panels (for I shall be making mistake after mistake), as well as the ability to trim the excess height to make them all flush when assembled.  I also had him shave off a bit of the plywood so that it would fit into my car.

I know very little about carpentry, unlike my father.  The last time I did anything with wood was in high school.  While at the store, I made a few inquiries as to what cutting tools I'd need.  I wound up buying a skilsaw and a jigsaw (outer and inner skirt base cuts, respectively).  I haven't gotten to that part yet in my progress.

Once home, I took the trimmed plywood upstairs, flipped open my printed-out NSD plans, and started to measure and draw.

I've drawn out all the skirt panels on the HDF board.  They're a bit faint to see in these photos, but it'll be more obvious when I've got them all cut out.  I still have 5 more sheets of the 30" x 48" HDF left, too, so if I get in a right kerfuffle, I'll just try again.

Oh, and I wanted to do a bit of a monetary tally (in USD) on here, as well, just to let myself and everyone know how far down the rabbit hole I will be going.  So far, it's been:

Materials:
1 - 4' x 4' x 1/2" fir plywood: $21.73
3 - 4' x 8' x 3/16" HDF board: $38.94
2 - Moflash beacon lens: $41.39 (£27.78)
Sub-total: $102.06

Tools:
1 - Skil orbital jigsaw: $49.98
1 - Skil 7 1/4" 12amp circular saw: $39.98
Sub-total: $89.96

Total to date: $192.02