Turbo town wraps

The final leg of our journey hasn't been as easy as I would have liked. There was a staggering amount of hours involved! A last minute revision on the face of the hero truck model, coupled with zero time for rework, resulted in scrapping the truck mold we machined, as well as all ten finished trucks. This was something that came as a total surprise. We ended up having no choice but to go back to the original model that was supplied. So we re-did all ten trucks, which added at least another day and a half to imovable deadline. Oh well, I'm getting used to sleeping standing up :)

All in all, it looked pretty good. Hopefully we'll get to re-do the mold with the new face next season when there's more time!

After a few revisions by the director, this was the character for Fill the front end loader. John whipped this up pretty quickly. He gave me the Illustrator files, which I sent to Aspire for toolpathing.

I dumped a pile of parts on John's desk, and after a little while he had them all assembled into the character. Thankfully he knew where they all went, cause I had no clue!

I took a ton of pics of the loaders mechanics before stripping it all down. I was worried that I might forget how things were assembled after the paint was dry. Good thing, cause I seemed to have forgotten right away!

With the pics on my phone handy, the re-assembly was pretty straight forward.

With the vinyl windows applied, and the brushed aluminum wheel disks, Fill was ready for his long car ride to location. I wish the eyeballs were in, but we didn't have time to dis-assemble him for a picture :(

The last large vehicle was the fire truck. The body had been started when we got it, but the cleanup would have bankrupted us on time. It was faster to start from scratch, especially when our Techno cnc is cutting the parts! The rear portion in the picture was all cut from 1/8" styrene like the rest of the trucks.

The front already had a mold that had been made, so we were able to get a couple of good pulls from 1/16" styrene. It didn't totally work with the back end of the truck, but we were able to succeed in getting a good meld of overall design for the time frame.

Jody got all the racer fins painted and finished. Some of the colours were so transparent, she didn't think they'd ever cover, but she's pretty persistant!

One of the racers is named Jewel, and as her name would imply, she's got a lot of bling! The description for her was a bedazzled car, over the top. I think Jody nailed it right on the head. This girls got b-b-bling!

With Turbo town done, and the exception of a 2nd dumptruck head that came today, this tsunami is over!
It was a ton of work, from all the houses, to the vehicles, I thought I'd never sleep. But as always, the deadline comes, and goes. So much of it is a blur, it's hard to remember the little details. Thankfully I own a camera, cause otherwise I wouldn't be able to recall very much in a month from now.
8)
JO

Oxenham Design truck plant

Although these trucks are one offs, it's starting to feel like all we do is make small vehicles!

For the crane, production already had a mold made from MDF. It was a little strange looking for sure, kind of a cross between a walrus and a clown, and as un-symmetrical as you could get!  Totally not suited to the style of the trucks. The director wanted (needed) something different. Time is now drastically running out. We are at 18 hour days times 2 people, and 10 hours times one person. The time for last minute changes is GONE. I had started early on tackling the crane head, this is the only reason we were able to do something different than what they had supplied.

I measured up the crane chasis and drew the front and side dimensions in Corel draw, using the real world sizes and material thickness. These vectors were exported out to Hexagon for 3d model massing. I wouldn't have bothered doing all this work for the crane, but the director wanted to see something dimensional in order to approve the design. The only full 3d part of the crane would be the grill portion, the rest is all 2d cut styrene panels, so from a fabricating point of view, I really only needed the finished grill portion. As we were standardizing all the construction vehicle eye shapes, I brought in the vectors from Dug the dumptruck as well. I'll use those vectors to mass the crane face for approval.

After a little while, I had come up with this design, which was approved right away.

I quickly exported out the grill into Aspire for toolpathing. The grill and bumper had a total thickness of 1.75", so I loaded up a piece of 2" HDU, and let our Techno cnc expose the finished piece hiding in the material :)
We vacuum formed the final part from 1/16" styrene. The only thing with using 15 lb HDU as a vac mold is that it compresses a very tiny bit under the force of the vacuum, then it expands tightly into the finished part, making it a bit difficult to remove. I wouldn't use HDU for a production run, but it holds up well in the end. None of our HDU molds got damaged at all during the process.

While the grill was machining away, I built up the 2d panels I cut before the 3d run, into the structure of the head.

With the grill firmly attached and the eyebrow arches in place, this guys ready for his spanky new paint job.

I wish I had the final eyes to go in for the final pics, instead of the animatronic eye rings, but the only 2 we have are being used to fit the mechanics on the other trucks at this point.

 While the crane was being built, John was working on the bulldozer, Sandy. He drew this all up in Illustrator, and gave me the files for toolpathing in Aspire. With the model all finished, it was time for paint.

Lookin good!

With the vinyl all applied, and the frame painted up, these are some nice looking trucks!
8)
JO

boat building 101

With Dug the dump truck all finished and painted up (we didn't have any painted eyes) it was time to tackle Bob the boat.

Production had supplied the start of a vac-mold they were working on, but it didn't fit the boat properly, and it was WAY to much work to refurbish.
At the start of the job, the director want the boat to be wearing a dive mask, or goggles, or something water related.

After a quick Google search, I settled on this style of mask. I brought the image into Corel, cropped it in half, and created the vectors. For ease of machining on our Techno cnc, the mask portion would be cut from 14" pvc. I had the router cut a small pocket where the eye cutouts are, this will aid in the trimming of the vacuum form part. We'll be able to follow the shape with the dremmel, eliminating any guesswork.

The next part of the equation was the 3d portion of the boat cowling. I modeled this up in Hexagon. I didn't model the flat base plate that fits into the boat opening, that will be a table saw cut job.

Before I committed the geometry to a piece of HDU, I brought the model into aspire on its side. This allowed me to create a vector boundary around the model, for export back into Corel. With an accurate profile of the 3d piece, I could then double check the mask profiles. As the mask portion will be all layered flats, sitting on the angled front plane of the 3d model, some of the dimensions will change. And I only want to do this model once, so it was important to have all the clearances for the animatronic eye plate that fits up inside.

Once the mask was tweaked to work with the 3d model profile, I was confident I could start cutting all the parts!

The pull came out great! There was a tiny bit of webbing at the corners of the mask, but I knew that was going to happen because I wanted the under cut from the mask plate to the body form. It would have looked pretty cheesy without it. These got ground down with a dremmel pretty quickly, and as we were painting the outside of these pieces, it wasn't an issue.

While I was fiddling with this stuff, the boat itself was drying from its bright coat of yellow paint we applied.

We had painted the cowl in a bright orange colour to start, but decided that it sucked all the sleekness away from the overall look of the boat package, so we went back to the yellow colour, and added orange pin stripes to the hull.

Another character off the list. The only part I didn't get a picture of was the boat all assembled with the eyes. We added a blue vinyl sticker of the mask frame, to really accent the dive mask.
8)
JO

just another week on the town.

Jody was pretty much responsible for the fabrication of the 6 pc dock set. These were all made from 1/4" pvc. They're basically just trays. She made them just over 2" deep, so we could hide a piece of styrofoam up inside them. These sections will daisy chain together, so they can move up and down with the waves that "Bob" the boat will be making.

She cut the grooves for dock boards on our small table saw with a .030" blade in it. The cuts don't go right through, as we need the strength of the full piece. These floating docks will actually have all the cars on them, so they need to be durable, and bouyant. The hinges were made from 3/4" pvc. I drew the file up in Aspire, and the Techno cnc made short work of it!

We primed them with a rubberized spray. This lets the acrylic paint stick pretty well to the pvc, plus it gives a nice texture to the surface.

Once the final paint dried, Jody screwed all the hinges on and got the styrofoam up inside them.
They looked fantastic when they were done!

While the dock was being built, I was working on the 2 dump truck boxes for the character "Dug".
This was pretty straight forward as well. I drew them up quickly in Corel, and toolpathed them in Aspire. The sides were made from 1/8" styrene. I built each side from 3 pcs. One piece had the rabbet for the 1/8" acrylic bed, the second one was the basic shape, and the 3rd piece has the ribbed detail on it.

I wanted the bed of the dump truck 1 piece. This would be the strongest option with the least amount of weight. There are actually 2 dump trucks. One has a servo motor for fast lifting up and down, and the 2nd one has a worm drive for heavy loads. Filled with dirt, it will be fairly heavy, so I wanted our stuff to add as little as possible to it. The bending of the 1/8" acrylic was pretty smooth sailing. I cut a full size template for it from vinyl and stuck it to a board. I used our heater strip to make the bends.
Once the pieces were all made, the whole thing just snapped together. I solvent welded the styrene sides to the acrylic bed and clamped them for about an hour. Red was the only colour we had, so red it was!
The construction colour we chose is pretty opaque, so I didn't worry to much about the white and red being so drastic.

A few coats of paint later, and the dump box was done. One more thing off the list.

The head for Dug was next on the list. This was all 1/8" styrene as well. We had the room inside to add 1/4"X1/4" strips for strength. Every piece was cut on our Techno cnc, this allowed for very easy assembly.

John, who is working with us on this, is a great model maker, and has great knowledge of Illustrator, drew up Dug in Illustrator. The most complicated part of his head is the tapered, curved eyebrows.

 I took the eyebrow arch, as well as the profile length he drew into Hexagon, and used the curves to quickly build a model we could use as a vac mold. I exported this out to Aspire for quick toolpathing. Once into Aspire, I was able to get an accurate base profile vector that I could use to cut the holes in the roof of the truck for the eyeball clearances. We standardized all the eye shapes and brows across all the construction vehicles. I cut the form from HDU. As we were pulling 1/6" styrene over it, I didn't have to sand the form at all, as the small machine marks wouldn't imprint through the 1/16" plastic.

All of the eyes get split tubing around them, kind of like a cartoon drawing. I decided to pipe one eye with it, just to see how it was going to look.

Lookin' good Dug, lookin good!
8)
JO

back on the Town

I really wanted to post through the Turbo Town build, but the deadlines keep coming in such fast waves, I've really only had time to work and sleep. There have been a lot of changes that have been huge setbacks for us. The not so nice thing about these REALLY short deadlines is the fact that there is ZERO room for error. The router needs to cut every piece once, the cad files have to work, the paint can't have any problems, assembly has to go without a hitch, be because if one thing goes wrong, the whole schedule gets screwed up. Paint has been the worst problem for us. We were asked to use commercially available products, that way if anything needs repairing on location, someone there can go grab it quick. The commercially available stuff has it's own set of problems, namely the dry/ recoat times. Paint that has compatiblity issues is a nightmare at 2am!
So all that aside, I am kind of backstepping a little for now, to catch you up.

All of the eyes came to us pre-cast from urethane resin. our job on these was to spray them out, and put on the pupils. This went pretty easy once we employed my little Unimat lathe I've had for years. Jody was able to chuck the eyes, and spin them so the painted pupil came out even and smooth. We went with a small white dot cut from vinyl, as a highlight.

The construction of the 11 buildings was an exhaustive task. That was something I was not expecting. They did go together quite nicely, but it took a really long time. They also took up a huge amount of space once they were painted, because we couldn't really stack them up.

The garage door hinge was pretty straight forward. The doors will open via mono-filament wire from off screen. I pulled the hinge point back far enough to allow gravity to be able to close the doors, eliminating the use of another pull cable.

 We left the roof's on all of them removable for access. They look pretty sweet with the character logos applied and all painted.
8)
JO