Brian C. ( B9-0169 )

 

Updated: 12/19/2006
Happy Holidays 2006 - Builder Brian C., B9-0169, with his favorite bartender.

 

Updated: 06/17/2006

I’ve begun building the props for my “spaceship set / lounge / robot’s room”. It’s going to be heavily “Jupiter II influenced”, but not an attempt to make a replica or exact copy. I figure when they built the props for the show they had a lot of latitude by using materials that were readily available and lots of surplus junk wherever they could. I plan on taking the same liberties. With that in mind I built two sort of “Burroughs-ish” consoles to fit on top of the flight consoles I plan on building later. All the dimensions were rough eye balled to be fairly close to the originals, but also to fit in to my plan and available space. There are many fine replicas available, but I was able to make these for about $40 each and at that price I find the results more than acceptable.

I started out by making pine boxes resting on angled-back bases. I rounded off all exterior and interior edges with a router and then primed them heavily to hide the wood grain. Power is brought into the units via cheapie extension cords. I finished them off with a heavy coat of pewter colored texture finish paint. They remind me of guitar amp heads.

The face plates were made from heavy cardboard with a heavy coat of primer. All switch and button locations were marked out and pre-drilled. For lights I’m using Christmas tree lights from Target. They carry one that has a round globe type bulb head. I used two 100 light strings for each box. By installing the supplied flasher bulbs at either end you can independently get each half of the string to flash. For each unit (two strings of 100 lights) I used a flasher at each end of one string (two separately flashing groupings) and on the other string I only used a flasher at one end (half of string flashes other half stays on constant) thereby having three separate flashing groupings and one constant-on grouping in each box. With the face plates primed, I masked off the areas around the main bulb groupings which I wanted to remain primer colored.

Here they are after being sprayed a dark bronze color and the maskings removed. The half circle cutouts on the right are because I initially was going to use some circular gauges mounted from behind. I later switched to front mounted square gauges which I preferred. I am also using paddle switches (I have a ton of them around) instead of toggle switches like a real Burroughs.

Here’s a good shot of the inside with all the hardware attached just prior to installing the light bulbs. The brass tubes you can see are attached to the knobs on the front. The wood strip running down the middle is to prevent warping of the cardboard. If you are going to build one of these I would recommend using as much wood as possible to reinforce the back. Cardboard is prone to warping from humidity and I may have to ad more to mine later.

Here’s the front with everything in place except the lights. The push button are made from those plastic plugs from the Robot’s lazy susan. I pushed them through the back and put washers around them and painted them either black or red. The knobs and lettering came from Ocean Electronics, a great source for vintage knobs and such. I took great liberties with my lettering layouts. What they mean, I have no idea, but it looked o.k. to me. The face plate is held firmly against the wood backing by aluminum “L” bar.

Here’s the inside with the Christmas tree lights installed. Sheeesh, whatta mess!!

At $40 a piece I can definitely live with the results. Next project: I’m going to build two flight chairs out of pine, plywood, and a couple of those cheap black vinyl swivel reclining chairs with the tubular frames that you find in most people’s rumpus rooms. I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

 

Updated: 12/31/2005

Christmas 2005 photos.

Brian, Heidi, Haggis the dog, the Robot, Roxanne & Samantha.

 

Christmas, the day the chimp arrived.  I plan to modify him into a “Bloop”.  He will keep the Robot company.

With a temporary programming bay made from cardboard and spare parts.  He now ‘looks’ fully complete.

 

The hammered silver paint on the torso and waist section looks as good in photos as it does in person.  Although the silver wheel coating on the feet looks good in room light the flash picks up surface irregularities.  I may re-do them with hammer finish to correct this although I like the idea of different silvers used on different parts of the Robot.