One good thing about summer is the longer days, giving me time to get stuff done outside work. Another good thing is the car boot sales that come along with an abundance of old toys and other goodies to buy. I really enjoy re-purposing old toys or models and scratchbuilding new ones. Its difficult sometimes to get the balance between toy and model right, but using toy parts can usually result in something approximating a toy. I like to try and build 'expanded universe' vehicles for lines such as Spacex or Apollo Moon Exploring etc. Ive probably shown these before, but I thought i'd flag them again as i'd like to encourage others to show their work too!
First off we have the Spacex style 'Lunar Recovery Vehicle'. This is a basic chassis of plastic tube, some Robotix parts, Capsela wheels, a spinning top for the cabin and a perm curler for the grab arm. The vehicle is then outfitted with various 'greebly' from suitably sized toys, such as a gold playmobil scanner, a couple of golden astronaut pilots and some gum machine capsule domes.
Probably the hardest part is finding suitable paint colours for bits which are not in the right colours, but i recently discovered that car paint gives a brilliant finish very quickly.
Second is a launch pad for my favourite rockets - one thing that always annoyed me was the fact that the little orange rockets that came with the Apollo sets, never had a launch pad. So i made one. This is basically made from bits from the excellent Matchbox/Mattel Mega Rig line. Its the chassis from one of the Shuttle transporters, a couple of spare cylinders from a sub and a roll bar for the gantry. Add a little superglue and a bubble blower and voila!
Crawling about in the attic the other night, looking for something completely different, I came across my old Dr Who 10th Anniverary Special from 1973. Besides being a reall ride back to the classic days of the show, before it all went a bit pear-shaped with Peter Davidson and Sylvester McCoy. Some of the monsters may have been a bit comical, such as the early Cybermen from the Tenth Planet or the seaweed from Fury of the Deep, but the Daleks have pretty much remained unchanged. The recent episode 'Victory of the Daleks' introduced the new, beefed up modern versions and the cool military mode classic Daleks, both of which I loved. Looking back at the 1973 magazine, it was plain to see the slow evolution of the design. Also in the mag was a cool text story, written by the great Terry Nation, called 'We Are The Daleks!'. It was illustrated by the airbrush maestro Philip Castle and has some gorgeous retro artwork. Ive taken some swift shots this morning on the kitchen table, excuse the quality - its a large format mag, so wont fit on the scanner!
While I was digging in the pile of comics, I rediscovered my Explorer 12 storybooks too!
One good thing about summer is the longer days, giving me time to get stuff done outside work. Another good thing is the car boot sales that come along with an abundance of old toys and other goodies to buy. I really enjoy re-purposing old toys or models and scratchbuilding new ones. Its difficult sometimes to get the balance between toy and model right, but using toy parts can usually result in something approximating a toy. I like to try and build 'expanded universe' vehicles for lines such as Spacex or Apollo Moon Exploring etc. Ive probably shown these before, but I thought i'd flag them again as i'd like to encourage others to show their work too!
First off we have the Spacex style 'Lunar Recovery Vehicle'. This is a basic chassis of plastic tube, some Robotix parts, Capsela wheels, a spinning top for the cabin and a perm curler for the grab arm. The vehicle is then outfitted with various 'greebly' from suitably sized toys, such as a gold playmobil scanner, a couple of golden astronaut pilots and some gum machine capsule domes.
