Jabberwock Pt.6: A Breakdown of a Nightmare...

At roughly this point in proceedings, with me struggling to nail the design down, a combination of extreme tiredness, stress, booze, and too long spent looking at books full of Victorian machinery led to the inevitable nightmare.  A genuine nightmare in fact.  I’ll spare the details, as I doubt any psychiatrists are reading but, sufficed to say I was walking along a derelict railway line at dusk, beside an estuary (which was, in hindsight, the river which empties out at Penrhydeudraeth, Wales.  Took me a long time to realise that, it annoyed me for days, but I digress).

Beside the estuary were some old, abandoned slate wharves where slate from the quarries, transported by train, would be put onto boats, and for some reason, in amongst this mass of overgrown sidings, there was a huge, rusty, battered railway-mounted breakdown crane.  It was black with white and yellow detailing, with two silvery-coloured searchlights mounted on it.  As I walked towards it, it started to slowly trundle forward, the searchlight ’eyes’ watching me, as the crane (or neck rather) was turning towards me.  I walked past it, trying not to look at it, and it started to shuffle slowly backwards, keeping pace.  I can even remember details like it creaking, and whisps of steam emerging from it.

Now I’m not going to try and analyse the dream, because from my hazy recollection of Freud, pretty much any dream actually just equals repressed sexual lust for a close relative or pet.  And I’m aware that there is no derelict railway or abandoned crane at the real location.  But waking up with such a clear memory of it, did give me a bit of a breakthrough with the project.  There is something remarkably animal, or rather dinosaur-like about the basic crane when the jib is lifted.  I can even picture the inspiration for the crane in the dream, the Hornby 00 gauge breakdown crane in fact.

So I dug out a picture of the one I had when I was younger (the actual model is boxed up somewhere at my parents house, because why horde your old possessions only in your own home when you can inconvenience other people), and figuring it would be a good starting point for a conversion, bought off eBay the rather more Victorian-looking, older Hornby Dublo crane, a very battered example got at a bargain price.  Further prototype information was handily on the doorstep, almost literally, in that a breakdown crane is parked up in the sidings of the Vintage Carriages Trust at Ingrow Station.

OK, this isn't the breakdown crane, but this older yard crane is opposite it, and of interest.

The actual crane in question is an old Craven Ltd. product.

Note the animal/dinosaur-like head.

Supporting jacks... like feet?

This provided some more useful details, not least the ragged tarpaulins draped all over it, which could feasibly be tattered ‘flesh’.

It didn’t quite fit the bill however, given I had a powerful urge to build something as close as possible to the crane I’d had the nightmare about, the above sketch being completed in the early hours of the morning after, and with the effects of a steadying glass of vodka.  

So out came some of the old toy O gauge trains from the stash of old projects, and I set to work with a hacksaw…

The basic chassis were built up from MDF and mountboard on the waggon bases...

To make the crane rotate, I chopped up one of the already somewhat-battered ex-Britannia Model Village tanks.

And speaking of Britannia, the body of the crane would be assembled from the remains of the CCTV truck, which had in turn started life as a toy ambulance.

The crane jib would be made from an unlikely combination of cheapie Wii-controller and Airfix pontoon bridge parts.

Other details were card, model kit bits, basically anything that looked vaguely 'right'.

It is very top-heavy, but it does capture the look I wanted.

The set for the photographs, unsurprisingly, was based on the nightmare of the crane monster, and so the photographs are as close to the nightmare as I could make it.

PROS

Well, it showed me the direction the project needed to proceed in anyway, the crane angle being a perfect way of showing a monster with a long, overarching, slender neck, with a definite ‘head’ to it too.

CONS

A rail mounted breakdown crane is a pretty massive thing, and this design I’ve done was far too modern, albeit realistically steam powered.  It will come in useful for a future project however.  In the meantime, I needed to explore the crane angle further...   

Jabberwock Pt.5: The Iron Horse

Having struggled with the concept with the building of the Airfix Monster, I decided to return to an earlier piece, and the Iron Horse from the earlier Steampunk project I did.  The concept behind it was that in Britannia, circa late 1800’s, these road-locomotives would have replaced traditional horses (in the all-consuming enthusiastic rush to embrace any ‘modern’ technology, regardless of the practicalities).  They are basically steam locos with caterpillar tracks, more like steam tractors than anything, but the horse parts are decorative flourishes to disguise the machinery.  Victorian tech tended to be a bit more decorative in any case, so no problem there.

There was also a variant designed, but not produced, for a military version, which had elements which could be contributed at any rate...

A sketch developing the idea of the Iron Horse from the earlier project, in the context of this new brief...

So this isn’t technically a build in so much as a rebuild, or to be totally accurate, mending the bits which snapped off when the model tumbled off a windowsill then got put in storage for a couple of years.  I really need to get some sort of proper storage or display facility set up for this kind of thing…

The model was refurbished and detailed with a few new bits, and given a spruce-up and a bit of new paint.

PROS

As a design I’m quite happy with it, and the concept fits in with the criteria drawn up for the Jabberwock

Its relatively compact too, so easier to build and transport

CONS

For all of the above, its not very monster-ish, or intimidating.  I reckoned though it might be a handy starting point for the project.

Jabberwock Pt.4: The Airfix Monster

This then, the first build, was what I would generically call The Airfix Monster (other brands of kits are available…) There was no proper form or function to it, or even a proper plan beyond the roughly dinosaur-like sketch above, and it did spectacularly toss-aside the notion of being a functional machine, but I just wanted to see what would happen if I glued together almost-randomly a selection of suitable model kit parts to create a mechanical monster. 

I wanted a random assemblage of industrial components which came together to make a monster, and so I raided the selection of old, some very old, model kits, spare parts, and unused components which I hoard (much to the exasperation of my family who have to put up with cupboards full of odds and ends).  Well, I rarely, if ever build things to the instructions…

There isn’t a lot to say about the build process- I just had in my mind a sort of dragon from machine parts, and kept gluing on more bits until it looked ‘right’.  There are, somewhere in the mix, parts from:

Dapol ‘Pug’ locomotive kit

Dapol ‘Breakdown Crane’ kit

Dapol ‘9F/”Evening Star” kit

Dapol "Rocket" kit

Airfix ‘DeHavilland racing plane’ kit

Airfix "Sea King" helicopter kit

Airfix "M-E262" kit

Airfix "Harrier" kit

Bits from a Lima HO gauge goods van

Dapol “City of Truro” kit

And a load of other Airfix bits from the spares box, and other misc. including some scraps of felt for the wings.

It was assembled fairly hurriedly, then simply painted with sprays, black, then a dusting of bronze before a little bit of detail work, but I wasn’t going to go too much to town on the painting as really this was just a kind of 3D sketch so I could nail some ideas down.

I tried to do some fairly atmospheric shots outside at twilight, to get some loose idea of how it would look in the 'real' world, but I wasn't happy with the results...

...so I built a very basic set to photograph the models on indoors.  More on this in a later post...

It looks alright, but it did raise some important issues to influence the rest of the design process… these could mainly be summed up as pros and cons:

PRO

It looks good- conveys the atmosphere of the machine-monster, with lots of detailed parts recognisable from other sources.

It looks quite intimidating, a good ‘metaphorical’ monster in terms of the machine age invading the rural past, as mentioned in an earlier blog post.

CONS

It would be a nightmare to build- I don’t have access to large amounts of scrap metal, and ‘faking’ from found objects would be time consuming.  Scaling at 1/72nd (as almost all of the kit parts are) its pretty damned huge...  Being as I lack a budget, a lorry, or an aircraft hanger in which to construct the real sculpture, this will have to be taken into account.

Finally, and somehow the one I most have problems with, it doesn’t look like it can operate logically.  Steam locomotives have to run fairly on the level; if the machine reared back, then it would expose the metal of the boiler and likely explode.  Likewise it would be too heavy to fly, so why would it have wings?  If I went down this route then I’d be just like those people who glue unnecessary watch parts to everything to make it ‘look’ Steampunk.  It needed to follow a more logical progression…