Building Rex's Moving Castle

In honour of Star Wars Day this year I'll be introducing another toy making project I've been working on for R that I've dubbed Rex's Moving Castle.

R absolutely loves the two-part Rebels episode The Lost Commanders and Relics of the Old Republic since she first saw it two years ago. She's watched that over and over again so many times. In this episode (context for those who've not seen it), the Rebels meet Rex and some other veterans of the Clone Wars who've retired to an out-of-the-way planet. These people live on an old AT-TE walker, heavily modified from a war machine into a home, in which they travel around the planet, stomping loudly and emitting smoke – highly reminiscent of the titular Howl's Moving Castle, a movie R also loves.

Modified AT-TE vs Howl's moving castle

L and I got an idea. I'd just finished up with building Howl's Moving Castle and the creative juices were running strong. So, unbeknownst to R, we bought a old AT-TE toy off eBay and started to modify it. I kept it covered under a tarp in the office (off limits to R) for several months while I planned and built it up – very slowly.

My home office desk

In terms of projects it was quite a bit of a challenge. I've gone through that episode frame by frame, eyeballing the layout and figuring out how to not only scale it down by 1:18 for the figures, but then modify it further to fit the actual size of the toy Walker (like most toy vehicles, it's not to scale). Fortunately the Star Wars web site has some good diagrams of it from which I was able to fill in the details not clear in the episodes.

Detail of concept art of the modified AT-TE from the Star Wars web site.

The process for building this is both fun and challenging.

1. Take pictures of the toy with a ruler for scale. The hardest part here is taking the picture far away enough to minimise parallax but still be able to focus clearly on the ruler.
2. Import into Illustrator, scaled to the correct size, then start drawing the 2d plans.
3. Print out the plans, page by page, and use them to cut cardboard mock ups. Cutting along the lines of a print-out is much easier than measuring and cutting by hand.
4. Tape the parts to the Walker to see how it fits. Often I'll try putting a figure or two on the part to see if it actually looks right and is properly playable.
5. Repeat many times until the size is right.
6. Do a final full colour print out. Glue it to the foam board and cut it with a sharp razor into that shape.
7. Hot glue that the the walker. Make sure to use a level so that figures can stand on the flat platforms without toppline.
8. Relax for a few days/weeks and get started on the next part.

I started with the easier parts. Building on to the Walker with platforms at the front and back. It took longer than I expected. We'd originally planned to give it to R by the end of the 2017, but it wasn't ready. So, instead, we surprised her with the work in progress with the promise of letting her help with putting it together.

In the months since then I've mainly essentially been learning about mini-DIY. I went through a dry period around the start of this year where I got nothing done. I'd finished the back room in Feb after working on it for 6 months. I sort of gave up thinking that everything left was going to be hard. Or at least notably harder.

A coworker introduced me to Fusion 360 – a bit of CAD software meant for hobbyists and the like. It wasn't too hard to export the Illustrator diagrams, extrude them and position the parts the way they'd look in reality. That was a breakthrough – being able to see what things look like before I even cut them out. It helped tremendously with the top back platform, since it showed me I'd got some sizes way off (the downside of mocking up in 2mm thick cardboard when the actual material would be 5mm). Now that the stuff I'm working on is particularly hard the CAD has been coming in useful.

Putting together with CAD software is slightly faster than cutting and gluing, and much less likely to cause cuts and burns

The latest phase I've done is having to drill into the toy to attach parts. It's a bit scary since if I make a mistake it'll be very hard to recover. Now that I've done it I do wish I'd done it for the front side walkways because it would have supported things much better than just hot glue.

I'm done with the drilling now, as far as I can see. I like to think I'm on the final stretch but I've still many complex things (like winches and pipes) to do and many little things (like lanterns and railings). Regardless I'm trying to not count the things left so I still retain my optimism for the project.

I've set up an Instagram page, My Many Creations for this, the spaceport and other things I've been doing.

We talk about fairies

I sometimes get irked at the sanitisation of fairies in modern children's stories. I suppose it's not the best behaviour, but I'm always a bit quick to point out to R that fairies in literature are not always safe friendly helpful creatures. A few weeks ago we had this conversation when planning a shopping trip…

… and then we can just take the bus to Ferry Lane.

Fairy lane?

No. Ferry as in a boat. Not Fairy as in those things that steal children.

They don’t steal children. They do magic. Like in the Rainbow Magic books and Midsummer Night's Dream.

They so stole a child in Midsummer Night's Dream

No they didn’t. They took care of him.

Um. Because they stole him.

No. They adopted him.

That’s just what they called it.

Ok. My first reaction after this conversation (beyond that I clearly didn't win) is how does R know Midsummer Night's Dream in this much detail? And since when is she able to have a meaningful conversation about Shakespeare?

Turns out she knows about Shakespeare, the Odyssey, Beowulf and lots of other classics from watching Magic Hands – a BBC show where they act out poems and parts of plays using cartoon animals and sign the dialogue in BSL. She'd not watched the show in a long time, but apparently whatever they did made the stories stick. Over a year later she could still have a reasonable conversation with an adult about a minor detail in Shakespearean play.

Football and Gender

R is in year 2 now. Since year 1 she's been able to join school clubs. There are lots of clubs available. One of the clubs she chose for this year is Football Club.

Clubs at her school meet once per week. There are 3 Football Clubs. She does Wednesday lunchtime. Turns out that she is the only girl in that session. The fact that she's the only girl does not bother her at all. However, this week, she told us she wants to quit the club next term. The problem is that none of the boys in the club ever pass her the ball. She's taken to just sitting on the sidelines not participating.

Now I’m sure it’s not a case of 9 boys conspiring to keep the ball away from the one girl. I've met the kids in her year. Very few of them strike me as evil. I think it's just 7 year olds playing I've got the ball. I'll keep the ball. Add to that, the fact that all of them have payed football before, while R is new to it, and clearly won't be as skilled with the ball. What bothers me here is that whoever is running the club is not doing a good job of it. Ignoring the fact that they’ve completely flubbed teaching teamwork, they don’t seem to notice that their actions are causing the one girl in the class to lose interest. I don’t think the point of the club is to weed out the worst players. It should be to teach kids how to play the sport – especially kids like my daughter who clearly have an interest and have gone out of their way to join the club in order to learn.

L has spoken to the school before about this, asking for the person running the session to get the kids to pass the ball and play more fairly with each other. R says this never happened.

What am I expecting? First off, I’m paying for this club, I’m expecting them to provide a service for my child. It's not like I can come by at lunchtime at coax her into playing.

Secondly, it's about not institutionalising sexism in sports at such as young age. The school recently changed the football clubs from being a boys club and a girls club, to being mixed. They even took special care at signup time to point out that the football club is not a boys-only club, but anyone can join. So clearly they want to break down the gender barriers. However, what I’m seeing is that despite this, they’re letting it turn into a boys-only club by driving away any girl who wants to join.

Unsupervised

On Sunday we decided to try an experiment. Could we leave the girl home alone in the house for a few minutes while we popped to the shop?

She's 6½ now, so being unsupervised for a short period is perfectly reasonable. Well, for a 20^th century child. For a 21^st century child... Well, that remains to be seen.

By the time I was her age, I'd been wandering the neighbourhood unsupervised for some time. Though that was the suburbs, so it's not entirely a fair comparison. I'd also been left with my brother in a car waiting for my mum to do quick shopping. And how different is that from going with L to the shops that are 200 meters from the house to pick up a few items for dinner?

We were a bit hesitant to try this out, Last year, L left R alone in the house while she gave a package to one of our neighbours. She'd agreed with R in advance that she was just going to be gone for 5 minutes. But, when she got back home, R was panicking, putting on her shoes and readying herself to go outside looking for L. She wouldn't talk about it for ages, but eventually she'd told me that she didn't realise L had left, so when she found out she was alone in the house, she wasn't ready for it. Hence the panic.

At least we knew what we needed to avoid this time. R was hesitant when we first brought it up, but then I pointed out all she'd need to do is Skype us from her iPad if she needed us. That turns out was the 21^st century solution to the 21^st century problem of being alone. She was now perfectly fine staying at home since we'd be at her electronic beck and call. I just needed to test that she was signed in and could make a call. After much cajoling, she finally made a test call to my phone and all was ready. Just some final goodbyes and we'd be on our way.

Ok. We're going to head out now. Skype is working. Just call or send us a message if you need anything.

Playing on iPad Ok. Bye.

And if you get hungry, there's rice cakes on the counter.

If I get hungry, I'll just heat up some pasta.

Wait... No... No. You're not to use the oven or microwave by yourself, and definitely not when you've alone in the house.

Of course I won't turn on the oven by myself.

Remembering when she burnt a rice cake in the microwave And the microwave. Don't use the microwave. You must not use the microwave.

but I know how to use the microwave.

Immaterial. You're missing the point. Just don't use the microwave when we're not in the room with you...
Actually – Just. Don't. Use. The. Microwave.

You had to mention food, didn't you?

And so on.

We did get out of the house and make a quick trip to the shop. While in the check out queue, I decided to check up on her and sent her a message. No response, of course. Since Skype is now terrible at actually sending notifications, I figured it was nothing. But since my job is to worry, I just kept thinking of the worst possible situations. I send message after message, and kept thinking of more and more horrible mishaps. By the time we were on our way back, I was practically expecting smoke coming up from over the hill.

In the end, no, the house wasn't on fire. She just decided that she'd Skype her grandparents and was ignoring any messages that were showing up.

The experiment was a success. We did find a way to comfortably leave her unsupervised for short periods of time and managed to get dinner. I also learned that What could possibly happen? is just an expression, not an invitation to brainstorm.