Sunday 23 April 2017

Construction: AT-AT part 6

I've had a couple of thoughts after being away from the build for a week.

Firstly, I've always known that the front end of the body, in order to support the head (however I end up attaching it) is going to need to be very strong and secure. Cardboard just isn't going to cut it. So back to Homebase for another lump o' chipboard.


Ta da! Two ends, looking similar (though the sizes are slightly different). I've attached two L-shaped brackets to the bottom in order to attached them to the base. I'm using bolts in the hope that it'll be quicker to assemble/dissemble.

One minor issue was that after drilling the holes for the brackets, I realised I hadn't bought enough brackets, went back to Poundland to buy more and... arrived home to discover this...


Yep, the two backs of what seemed to be exactly the same thing, actually contained two different things and none of the holes I'd drilled now fit. Dammit.

Originally, I was going to cover the whole of the body in cardboard since it's, well, cheap. It's also, as I found out when lying the large pieces I'd been hoarding on the ground, very liable to warp. Since the chipboard-slot system had worked so well for the base, I decided to use the same method for the central roof. I'd also still got some (extremely horrible to work with) plywood leftover from my carbonite build so I've used that for the central side panels, screwing it in at the top and bottom.



It's worth repeating just how horrendous the plywood I was using was to work with. Nasty, nasty stuff, even though it was free.

Next step: The sloping parts of the roof. I know on an actual AT-AT there's a slight step between the flat roof section and the sloping parts, but, in an effort to simplify things, I'm going to ignore it and connect the flat roof and the front/rear vertical sections with single sloping sections. For this I need wood of a total length of 140cm.

In the shed, acquired from another school skip, I found...


So happy! It's not wide enough on it's own, but two pieces side by side gives..





Something that I forgot to mention earlier: before I went away I began to fill in the pizza plates on the head with Poundland filler. Hopefully (AT-ATs are build on hope), when this has dried and sanded down, this will look ok.


Which gives a final day AT-AT looking like...




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