Scrambled eggs?

EGGS-EGGS-EGGS-TER-MINATE!

A dear friend of mine is building a dalek these days. Don't know what a Dalek is? Shame on you, your pop cultural knowledge is severely lacking. I'll explain after the jump. Anyway, he's building one, a NSD to be correct - the one both of us think look the best of them all.


Daleks are mutanted humanoids, know as Kaleds, from the planet Skaro encased in big life-support/weapon/tanks. As a part of the mutation, the Daleks have been stripped for every feeling but hatred. Also, they're not really humanoid anymore - more squishy things with one eye and tentacles. And, they are pretty lousy dates to bring back to your parents.

First seen in 1963, scaring kids of any age, they have haunted our televisions and dreams ever since.

The project had started long before I got involved, with planning and blue-prints and whatever one need for building something as close to the original prop as possible. I was asked to make the 56 hemispheres on the lower part of the Dalek's encasing. They were made out of 1,5mm thin styrene plastic sheets which were heated in a 225 celsius warm oven for 1 minute 45 seconds. Any longer and the plastic just got too soft. Warmed, the plastic was pressed down a solid hemi with the correct dimesions.

Making 56 of these hemispheres, or eggs as they got named in the 2012 episode "The Asylum of the Daleks", did not go without any troubles. Perfecting the timing of heating the plastic took a few tries. The same with the cooling of the formed hemis; too warm and they would buckle when removing the solid hemisphere under the plastic - or too cold and it would stick to the solid one to make near impossible to remove.

oops!

Quite a few also "died" because I simpy forgot to set the time when I put the plastic sheet in the oven. The result, if I even tried to use it, often ended up like the one on the left.

When done, the got sent back to the head of the project, Hadley Cosplay, for painting and further construction of the Dalek. At one point we tried to make the rectangular slats on the upper body of the Dalek with the same material, but after a few bad tries, we dropped the idea altogether.

The whole Dalek was finished just in time for Banzai-Con in Larvik this April.