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A Story of a POGO

The “Dalek”

The “Dalek”, so named by two of our members Flitzer and Merlin. Those of you familiar with the classic BBC series “Doctor Who” will surely see the resemblance. It is actually a portable hanger / maintenance gantry for the Pogo. This part of my project is also based of reference photos I found, while scouring various resources. This structure is specific to the Pogo aircraft and unique in the sense that I’ve not run across any other attempt to model it.

Using the reference photos and the KP kit as a scale / proportion guide, I began by making some drawing templates. The templates were important to work out the overall dimensions of the structure, so as to accommodate the assembled aircraft kit, and to work out the angles of the base, top, and primary supports.

The initial construct was a pretty flimsy structure, but as I added cross bracing as shown in the photos, and the three work platform levels, to my surprise a quite sturdy structure developed.

A problem I have when scratch building is when do I stop building and paint? In this case both halves of the hanger were completely framed, with ladders and stairs before I painted anything. You may notice that the two halves are not identical. One has a top, and the work platform levels have different notching to accommodate the Pogo in only one position.

After painting, I applied Aluminum foil to the half of the hanger with the roof or top. This made the structure even more rigid, so I placed the unpainted Pogo inside the closed halves, just to check for any needed adjustments.

Having assured myself that all components were going to fit together I finished applying the “canvas”, “tarp” skin. The skin is actually painted facial tissue. It took two complete tissues to cover the frame halves. These were painted before being attached to the frame with an extremely thinned wash of MM Desert Tan Enamel, allowing the color to vary across the tissue, in an effort to show some weathering of the canvas. Even extremely thinned it took a whole bottle of paint to do both tissues. Once the tissue had dried enough to handle it was attached to the frame with Super Glue. I allowed everything to set for a day then gave the covering a couple of good coats of DullCote Testor Spray, just to stiffen it and protect it from anticipated future handling.

At this point is when I previewed my progress in a Post on Armorama, and the hanger got christened “The Dalek”.

To complete the hanger, I added weathering to “traffic areas”, where workers would walk, with dry artist pastels, finished off the railings, added some worker figures from Preiser, Airfix, and Hasagawa, and added “wheels” to the bottom of both halves (remember I said it was portable), by slicing sections of appropriate sized sprue (8 wheels per half).

The Jeep and Tow Tractor used are both from Hasagawa kits I had assembled earlier, and were “drafted” for this project.

Some vital statistics

Basic Aircraft Kit with Mods - 42 parts - 42 Hours to complete

Boarding Ladder - 42 parts - 8 Hours to complete

The Lift - 12 Hours to complete

Repaint and Clean up other vehicles - 4 Hours to complete

Hanger / Dalek - 273 parts - 208 Hours to complete

Total Time for Project - 274 Hours (not including research)

I enjoyed every minute of it!!!!