The Star Wars Way Showing Tech Dirt and Grime.

George Lucas grew up into hot-rods, custom car racing and a key policy in the Star Wars Universe is to show how technology works, to expose the internal workings and the dirty and wear and tear and prior use and battle damage.

Kitbashing Development of the Crate / Trunk

To make the transport crate more Star Wars like the research photos without damaging its structural integrity, kit bashing components were to be stuck on and this took a fair bit of ideation trials. Many iterations were tried to get the right look.

Firstly, to increase the range and number of components I could add, I built some new moulds, especially as I only had 1 item of several parts I wanted to use for resin casting.

Silicon Moulds for Resin Cast Duplication

Firstly, to increase the range and number of components I could add, I built some new moulds, especially as I only had 1 item of several parts I wanted to use for resin casting. These components included parts from:

• Toy helicopters
• Connection components from flat pack furniture
• Garden hose components
• Nerf gun rotary multi shot magazines
• Jackplug sockets from circuit boards
• Parts lifted from PC motherboards.
• CAD and 3D printed Parts

Kitbashing Development

Satellite Components

Im not sure on the original circular component came from, I started with a mould from Creative Media Skills. The square add ons were mounding from componests taken from motherboards.

Kitbashing Central Core

The central component cog came from a multi ship Nerf gun, I used a garden hose  connector for the core.

I wanted something impressive here, that looking like advanced technology, in detail that would looking greasy and have connection points for the likes of Artoo maintenance droids or connections to wall panels or computer terminals.

It would need to look like it could run power and processing.
 
The aim was also to spread out from the central course in a geometry pattern.

I was hoping to include some light up buttons, possibly LEDS.

Cooling vents and heat sinks were also to be included.

Some sort of piping, tubes, cables was also something to try.

The gun like star points were moulded from a toy helicopter cannon. Other parts came from war hammer parts, rubber plugs, more parts from CMS moulds, Ikea flat pack parts and door handles etc.

Below are various ideation iterations I tried.

Riveting and Bumper Loops

Evostick was contact glue was used In addition, with superglue and accelerator to place the components and holding them in place prior to riveting which was the real bond.

Experiments with riveting had shown huge benefits in structurally connecting components through the prop casing, not just gluing the surface. 5mm rivets were too tough to apply with a hand rivet gun so I went with 4mm. 

Drilling holes on all the components also provided the alternative to riveting of allowing LED lights and electroluminescent string.

Rivets were preferred to screws, or nuts and bolts as more permanent and looked like part of the components as well has having no bulk inside or outside the prop casing.

The rivets could mechanically tighten to hold components against the prop surface hard and don't unscrew.

Where possible components were predrilled before gluing in place to minimise issue of torque ripping components off the panel and as there was more control for drilling individual components in vices than trying to drill sideways into the prop.

The pre-drilled holes also gave a means of holding the drill bits in place when drilling into the case, without gripping the components and determining where to drill.
 

Metal door handle loops were added as well. Part of the reasoning was for aesthetic looks. But the pain reason was to provide bumper bars to protect the components to take the impacts first.