Need­ing an escape, I recently com­pleted a quick mod­el­ling pro­ject of one of my favour­ite TV bad guys, a Dalek from Dr Who. How­ever, I’m never con­tent to build some­thing straight out of the box, so I had to dabble a wee bit with the stock kit …

The kit is one of the two Dalek mod­els that came in the Air­fix ‘Daleks in Man­hat­ten’ box set. Now, I do like the over­all design of the 2005 style trav­el­ling machine, but I really like the col­our vari­ants of the old 60s movies with Peter Cush­ing (I won­der why he is never coun­ted as one of the ‘proper’ Doctors?).

With that in mind I had an urge to build a red Dalek, sim­ilar in col­our­a­tion to the Sau­cer Com­mander style.

Crack­ing open the Air­fix kit, I found that the built-in ‘ear lights’ had green LEDs for some reason and that the sound chip on mine didn’t actu­ally work, so the first order of the day was to replace the stock elec­tron­ics with new, blue, LEDs. These were simple wir­ing jobs and whilst I was at it, I wired up four blue LEDs into the base to sim­u­late the blue hover glow from the 2005 ver­sion. I also ripped out the bat­tery com­part­ment, ensur­ing everything could be powered by a single 9v battery.

I then pro­ceeded to build the kit pretty much as per the instruc­tions, but modi­fy­ing the eye stalk so that the blue glow could be seen through it, beef­ing up the arm boxes with styrene and some WAVE option parts.

The sucker arm was recon­struc­ted with some alu­minium tubing and the gun rebuilt (the stock kit one is so poor that even the toys ver­sions have more detail!). After sev­eral attempts to emu­late the style of the gun seen on screen, I decided to go my own way and used some alu­minium tubes, some thin brass rods and some resin gub­bins from my bits box to con­struct some­thing that is sim­ilar to the gun seen on the 2010 Daleks.

I used a can of Tam­iya red spray paint for the base col­our, GW’s Mith­ril Sil­ver for the, well, sil­ver parts and a dark gran­ite for the skirt, balls (snig­ger) and neck vents.

I moun­ted it on a small MDF base with brass rods so that it looked like it was hov­er­ing and bar­ring some paint touch ups, it was complete!

So here it is: