Tony Hardy’s 4 Foot Jupiter 2 part 2
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The first step was to cut out the main view port and porthole. These were drilled out and then ground down with the proper cutting and grinding tools. Then they were sanded to a smooth finish. What was I going to do about the hatch, legs and pod door? They were scribed so lightly that I could hardly see them. They did need to be re-scribed. Again, I could barely see them. What do I do? I didn’t want to be making mistakes and using bondo to fill those mistakes.
No time! So I purchased some tissue tracing paper. I laid this down over the main hatch and basically did a rubbing with a pencil. This allowed me to get an accurate outline of the hatch angles and all. This was then cut out and spray mounted to some poster board. The poster board was trimmed to match the tracing paper. Now I had a template that I could secure to the hull to scribe around. I repeated this procedure for the legs and pod door as well. This worked perfectly and I didn’t make any mistakes. I just took my time. I used a scribing too that I purchased through Micromark. It really did the job. I wanted the landing legs to look three dimensional, so I used the template to cut out some leg wells the footpads were not included) in plastic sheet. These flat sheets were then glued to the underside of the hull. This now gave the impression of legs slightly sticking out from the hull with recessed footpads.
Next I used a contour gauge to map the contour of the upper and lower hull. These tracings were used to cut foam core pieces and mock-up a partial interior. Once this was all worked out I could cut the actual plastic pieces that would make up the interior walls and floor. Then it was time to create the main consoles, computers and seats. These items were made by studying videotapes, laserdiscs, stills and blueprints that I had in my personal collection. They had to be altered to fit inside the filming model, as the scales between the sets and model just don’t translate at all. Again these items were made out of plastic and foam and appropriately detailed. Artwork to represent the switches, consoles and radar screens were created on acetate and reduced in size for application. The seats are the original patterns. Again, no time to make molds here. Both seats were made in just a couple of hours and fit the bill nicely.
I had to find some scale figures to represent Major West and Professor Robinson. A trip to Toys R’ Us solved the problem. A couple of NASCAR drivers worked perfectly. They even had the same style of suits, collars and boots. What a stroke of luck! The only sculpting done here was to alter the hairlines of both figures to match the actors. Seeing as it was the same head on each figure, this helped to distinguish them a bit better.
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