Tardis

Since I made a cardboard K-9 for the 2007 BYU Homecoming Parade, I decided that for the 2008 parade we would do a wooden TARDIS.

We were originally going to do a full size TARDIS but Britt told me that was unrealistic (since we don't own a truck) and more and more people agreed with her until I was the lone voice of reason ("Its just not the same if its not the full seven feet tall!") So I caved to all the illogical requests and we decided on a half size TARDIS.

Now, all the parts for this set the club back about $400. So if you want to make one for your self, it gets expensive. You might be able to make it for a little bit cheaper since I actually bought too much wood. (We decided the night before I bought the wood to do it at half size and so I was up till 1am trying to do the conversions. I messed a few of them up and bought too much plywood and a few other things.)

So the construction officially started on Saturday August 30th since it was the last weekend before school started.

On that Saturday I went to Lowes at 7am and was there till about 11am. I had scoped out prices the day before and Lowes seemed to be the best price for the materials. I then realized that even though I had the store employee cut down all the lumber, it was still to big to fit in my car. So I called Holly and she came to my rescue with her parents mini van.

We took the wood to the shop that Nate so kindly let us use and we got to work on it.

We were all wearing coats and hats in the beginning since is was freezing!

I had a lot of good help with the measuring and cutting.

It was great working here at Nate's shop since he had every tool we needed. Good job on the windows guys!

I think we got a lot done that day.

After working for a few hours we called it quits. The next time I came back was on Monday. Monday was September 1st. It was Labor Day and we all had the day off from work and school wouldn't start till September 2nd.

A lot of club members had stuff to do that day so we had a small turnout but we got a lot done. By the afternoon I was working by myself and ended up staying till about 9 or 10 pm. (I would have stayed longer but I had to get some sleep since the new school year started in the morning.) You can really see the progress at this point.

I started to get the walls up. We were going to have the walls bolted in place but the t-nuts kept ripping out of the soft wood. So I ended up just screwing the walls into the wood.

I was so happy when it all started to fit together.

Here are the three walls. Its still missing the front doors but it looks really cool.

I then threw on the trim to make it look like the TARDIS. The letters on the wood show where the pieces are suppose to go.

Here is a good shot of what it looks like with the trim and everything.

I ended up making the doors last. They weren't hard to make but the light boxes where the "Police Public Call Box" part goes was kinda hard. The light boxes took the longest out of everything. The roof wasn't too hard after that and i even used some good old math formulas to figure out the length of a slope by using 2 points on a graph.

I went back and forth a bunch of times to get everything all finished and all the cutting and most of the assembly was done on the Tuesday the 7th of October. On the 8th we had club meeting and everyone came over to my apartment and we had a painting party. It was important that we got as much done as we could that night since the parade was that Saturday (October 11th.)

I was glad that so many club members were able to show up. We even had some first time members come. Most of them hadn't worked on the TARDIS till now so they were excited to see it.

It was cold and dark outside so Britt opened up the kitchen area and let people paint on the floor. It was way nice of her. (Don't worry, the paint came off without any problems; in fact the floor probably looks better after we scrubbed it.)

Shelby and I are here painting in our stair well. This is the first good picture of the top. The paint we got on the cement here still needs to be cleaned up, I just haven't done it yet.

After doing all that painting, we had hot chocolate and Britt helped shuttle people home. Then I continued to do the finishing touches on Thursday and Friday. Here are some of the Friday night pictures.

Here are the painted walls with out the windows.



This is the first time it was assembled and painted. Our kitchen counters turned into work benched during this time.

Instead of doing a lot of cutting and nailing and who knows what else, I just decided to paint the lines on the windows. It saved tons of time and it looked good when it was done.

I stayed up till about 1 or 2 am that last night and got up about 7am and screwed the last pieces together. By 8:15 am my brother and I were loading the pieces into his trunk and we took it over to the Marriott Center where I spent about another hour prepping it for the parade.

After all the hard work of many many people, here is the finished half sized TARDIS! My nephew is inside to show the scale of it. He is 18 months old and it fits him perfectly. If only it really was bigger on the inside.