Finally a place to work!

Now that the Turbo Town job has wrapped up, I wanted to keep the steam going. Maybe not the 18 hour a day steam we had, but some steam. We've got some ad campaign projects that are awaiting approval, so I'm using the short time available to build a new desk. The desk will be more of a work station/ front desk for when people come into the shop. Since we moved into this space in May, I have been working from a VERY small desk in the corner of the office space. I have been using my laptop for the computer design stuff as the current desk isn't big enough for the desktop computer I'm dying to get back to using!

The whole theme for the desk area was pulled from our Institute sign we did with the mechanical fish on it.
So the desk will be heavy brass/ copper and woods. In no way am I trying to fool anyone into thinking we're using the real thing, I think it's far more interesting to make it look like it isn't the real thing. Plus it's in keeping with dimensional signage and film props! This will be a fairly good size desk as it needs to house 2 20" monitors, a computer tower, my laptop and the vinyl cutter. As well as having a place to serve customers that come in for the signage end of things.

The desk was designed in Corel, with no colour renders or 3d models. I know what I'm going for, so the need to model it is a waste for me to do, as I'm not needing any approvals. Just a front, top and side elevation.

I exported the vectors from Corel into Aspire for toolpathing. Once again, Techno cnc produced the panels quickly and accurately. I love that I can do all the complicated stuff in the computer (at my miniature desk) and have accurate pieces I can assemble right away.

Of course, not everything was cut on our Techno, all the rivet strips, which will act as seam covers, were table saw pieces. Jody got to work right away laying out and drilling the 1/2" holes. Were going to use wooden button screw covers as the rivet heads.

With the front facing panels cut, Jody taped off the spots where the rivet strips will end up going. The next step was to parge the panel with acrylic tile adhesive. We've used this a bunch of times for texture. It works great for this sort of thing, and it's fairly inexpensive. Inexpensive materials seem to be far and few these days!

We made a basic woodgraing tools from a chunk of pvc we had from the last job. It worked great. Once the adhesive had hardened up, we got a base coat of yellow ochre on the panels. This will be the first of a few coats we'll use to achieve our simple woodgrain feel we want.

All the rest of the parts we texture sprayed with our scenic mud mixture. These will look killer in a bronze colour. We've also casted up some large bolt heads which will decorate the desk in spots.
8)
JO

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