Building a Better Police Box

So Starfire is taking much longer than I had anticipated and part of that is due to the fact that I have been fighting the lighting in my studio area for some time now.  I believe that I may have a solution to that but I will cover that in the 4th installment of that series.  So I'm setting that down for a moment to do a bit of planning for my next major project.

To give a bit of background, last year I put together a Doctor Who themed diorama as a Christmas present for my girlfriend.  This is the result of about 4 weeks worth of effort:

It wasn't bad, considering my skill level at the time and the paints I was using.  I know I can do much... MUCH better now!

The build itself was pretty basic working from the inside out.  I started by building a box out of styrene plastic conforming to the inner dimensions of the police box.  Around that, I built the panels, the four columns on the corners, and the top bar.  I then topped it off with the roof which consisted of one square of styrene topped with another.  The roof was sculpted out of epoxy putty and sanded down.  I finally topped that with the characteristic lantern... or at least the best I could do to reproduce it at the time!  All of the text was put in using custom printed decals which... sort of worked.

So as I look to re-approach this project, I try to think of how I can do better.  So I looked at what I had come-up with for plans and turns out I had very LITTLE planned out at all!  I had taken some scant measurements and then just went with it.  For what I want to do, that's NOT going to be good enough!

The first thing that I need to do is determine scale.  This helps me translate real world dimensions into the scale world that I will be building.  This will be critically important since this will need to be part of a diorama with other figures of roughly the same scale. What I want is a constant value I can use to translate a real world measurement into the scale world I am going to create.  We can assume that any figures I chose for this diorama are going to be in the 28mm scale range (the scale for MOST miniatures currently in production).  The best calculation I can find to convert real world measurement to this scale is a 1:56 ratio.  So, anything I see with real world measurements can be divided by 56 to give me the 28mm equivalent.

So with a bit of Interweb magic research, I found the following diagram with measurements that should prove useful (source found here):

At this point, I could get into some real serious calculations and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how all of this translates into the scale that I am trying to create.  What I really want to do is normalize these measurements into a metric form that fits easily into the scale that I am working with.

I think that anything beyond 1mm is going to be very... VERY difficult to perceive so I will be rounding all measurements for simplicity (rounding to the nearest millimeter).  Starting with the base, which is showing a real world measurement of 50"x50" = 127cm x 127 cm = 1270 mm x 1270 mm.  1270 / 56 is roughly 23mm.

I'm going to simplify things a bit here.  23x23mm is going to be VERY close to 25x25mm.  So if I take all the measurements as presented above and divide them by 2, I will have approximately what I need in millimeters.

So here is the build list I will be working with (some of which I already have):

1. Styrene plastic sheets (1mm and 0.5mm thickness)
2. Square styrene plastic tubes/rods (3mm x 3mm and 2.5mm x 2.5mm) that can be cut to form the outside columns and the top beams
3. Styrene plastic strips (0.5-0.75mm wide)
4. Milliput standard epoxy putty

That's about all I need.  Hopefully I can get started on this in the next week or so after I have the dragon done.