This was one of those ideas, which snowballs, slightly out of control then has to be reined in...
Alongside the building of the actual sculpture, an exhibition of some of the development work was going to be on the cards, and I was toying with having a working miniature of the Jabberwock design, which could be built from cheap train set parts. Basically it started off as a loose idea, then various sketches explored the idea further.
Plans for features such as a bridge were taken from some of my other railway modelling projects...
And then more details from the books were included in the plan.
At this point the idea of having something themed around the Mad Hatter/Tea Party came to the fore, as I had in fact designed a laser-cut tea tray for work, as a potential project with some of the students (building a scene onto a tea tray). With the test-cut lying around the workshop, it seemed too good an opportunity to ignore.
The final design sketch.
The laser cutter churning out the original tea tray prototype.
The size of the tray severely limited the size of the model, so with the need for tight curves, I turned to some older 'toy' bits, from XTS train sets. The baseplates were cannibalised for the tracks, which were then sanded and cleaned-up a bit.
The basis of the Jabberwock would be the battery-operated chassis of the trains from the set, with odds and ends from the scrapbox.
So what happened? Well, the project got to a reasonably advanced stage when I had to drop it, as it was distracting too much from the actual build of the sculpture. I've got the part-done bits knocking around though, and at some point I will try and finish it off, but in the meantime it's just an unexplored avenue for the project.
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