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