It’s taken a heap of fiddly work: creating a jig to make identical slats, sourcing & cutting identical slats, sanding to finish, routing half-laps for fitting, discovering I’d used the reverse face instead of the ‘beauty’ face, nailing, gluing, sanding (again), painting (repeat x3+), and fitting the glass panes.

But it’s done!

A few of the frames were a tad snug requiring the Graham Garden “Just one small delicate finishing touch” of a belting into place with a spare two-by-four. And I’ve discovered a few gaps in the frame which is not surprising as I’d rough routered the sandwiched layers two years ago now and (at the time) crossed my fingers. So a small amount of remedial puttying and possibly a bit of extra timber filling to block out stray light from the inside.

I’ve sourced some LED strips from Jaycar for the windows (ala Ecclestone’s TARDIS) and  signboxes and found some white LED Christmas bud lights which I’ll use for the roof light.

By golly, they fit! (With a little encouragement from various sanding, jigsawing, chiselling and mallet bashing devices)

A lot of activity over the past few weeks to do with the window frames for the TARDIS. The design I envisaged used slats to make up the actual frames, then to have the window panes inserted into these. The better way of doing this from a consistency point of view was to make each slat exactly the same dimensions so that assembly and replication was the easy part (as opposed to easily making them up and then spending ages making them fit).

Three days of jig making, panel saw cutting, and drum sanding later, I had 56x millimetre identical sticks of timber with half laps ready to fit into each other. Glazing now pressed on the mind and we decided to go with rebating trenches into the backside of the timber and to bead the glass in as the very last step so that any timber movement did not damage the 3mm thin glass.

I obtained the glass at Essendon Glass which was a very simple process. Googling various TARDIS constructors would have you believe that the exact glass type is difficult & expensive to procure. The bobbly glass (to my eye anyways) looked very similar to translucent bathroom glass, so that’s what I bought. The bottom left and right panes of each window (in various incarnations) is a slightly different design giving a “T” shaed appearance which I don’t mind.

For final installation, I’ll trim the holes in the TARDIS frame made all those years ago from sandwiched ply so that each window fits. I also need a method of attachment. The window frames are slightly recessed into the frame and since I don’t have many millimetres to play with, I’ll sit the entire frame in a bit by means of some slats attached to the back of the window.

Who’d have thought a bunch of windows could be so difficult? I’d mocked up a prototype of the 2x 6 pane window frames for each panel way way back before I’d even had the body structure built thinking that this would be an easy thing to do, put aside, & resume. How wrong I was!

I tried a number of designs including mortise and tenon & bridle joints and in the end setttled for the half notches (not actually a join, but a fit). The main reason was ease (relatively speaking) of construction however, the joins will then be bonded. Probably use brads and glue.

I trenched some grooves in the prototype and had some glass panes made up at Essendon Glass. The glazier didn’t give me grief when I said I was building a TARDIS so kudos to him!  Richard & Leon (TAFE teachers) pointed out with that design the glass may break whist final clamping, so in the new design I’ll rebate in some grooves that the panes can be fitted after the frames are complete.

So, it’s taken 2 weeks of jig making & calculations on the panel saw so that I can exactly and precisely reproduce 56 sticks of timber with precise grooves for fitting. As they say, it’s all in the preparation. I spent the last hour after arvo smoko to complete the corner joins on the 24 horizontal bars. Also made some spares just in case…