When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Tuesday 13 May 2014

Leaving on a Jet Plane, or a cube van......

The weekend was a flurry of painting! 4 cockpits is a lot of painting, that's for sure!
Awesome Jody came dressed for the event. Not quite red carpet material, but kinda cute anyways!

As you can imagine, there was cockpit parts everywhere. Surprisingly, it was easy to keep track of what went with what.
The f-16 dash came out pretty sweet. John drew all the parts for the HUD, and assembled it all before he left on Friday, so it was easy for me to figure out when the time came. This was machined from white EPS foam then got 2 coats of latex as a primer. Then I skim coated the whole thing with lightweight filler. A quick sanding, followed by our rubber bumpers stuck on as rivets, then 2 coats of latex eggshell black. I did a very light dry brush with silver Rustoleum metallic paint, and this part was done. All the other dashes got the same treatment.
The cockpits themselves were pretty straight forward in the painting stage. A base coat color, followed by a darker glaze, then dry brushed with some silver around the edges for paint wear, and they were done. It still took all weekend though!

I finished the parachute canister on the F4 with some green nylon material I picked up at the fabric store, and added a cut off from an old ratchet strap as the tie down for it. This, of course was painted grey to hide the awful red color that it came in. The HDU gauge backs and hoses were put in last.

 The cube showed up at 9 am Monday. I helped load it up, then John and I headed to the studio to show them how they all assembled.
 It's hard to see in the picture, but Jody did a faux leather finish on 2 of the plane headrests. It looked quite convincing in real life!




The set up went really quick, so we were only on set for about 40 minutes! My kind of set day!!

Our next tv commercial gig is going to be kinda cool, so I can't wait to start that build. Miniatures are my favourite! That should start soon, but in the mean time, I've got lots of 3d files to come up with for it. That should be almost as much fun!
8)
JWO






Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)