Hugo Base Construction Process

Throughout this post there are mentions of food items.  When I was constructing the bases I kept everyone updated on my progress on LJ.  The problem was, the design needed to be kept secret, so each part was given a code name.  The code names were not planned, they just sort of spontaneously ended up to be mostly sandwich parts.  At no time did I ever post what food was which parts, or even what material was being used, so no-one could "figure out" what I was talking about.

The first thing I had to do was glue patterns onto the wood.  The legs and base-bottoms were cut from .75" thick mahogany and the roses were cut from .125" thick.  Starting with the bases, I rough-cut the bottom halves, aluminum pieces and roses.  I also cut disks that would act as placeholders for the glass for most of the process.

In this picture you are looking at a base bottom (lower crust).  The final base was curved but at this stage it has straight edges.  There are little blocks of wood screwed onto the ends to make sure the aluminum parts lined up correctly.  The aluminum parts were cut from some bar-stock 1"wide x .125" thick.  The curved area leaves a space for the glass to be added later.  I don't recall having a code name for the aluminum, this step was done before the code names were created.

After the aluminum was glued in place, the rose layer (upper crust) was screwed on with 3 little screws in the corner.  The bolt was also used to make sure everything lined up throughout the whole process.  In between the upper and lower crusts, there is a disk of wood where the glass would be.  This helps to protect the rose layer from breaking during the process because it was fairly thin and, at this point, brittle.  Darkwing830 referred to this stack as a sandwich and the whole food-references thing was born.

I then took the sandwiches down to my bandsaw and cut them to their curved shape.  By cutting all three layers at once I was insuring that they would all line up perfectly.  After they were cut I clamped each one into my vice and hand-sanded all of the saw marks out.  I tried using my power sander but I didn't have as much control as I liked and I was losing my crisp edges.

Next, the rose layer was removed from the bases and the rose detail was cut.  Cutting was done by hand with a 2/0 scroll-saw blade in a jeweler’s saw frame.  After cutting, the edges were filed smooth, making minor adjustments and corrections at the same time.  After filing, the roses were sanded and hung for clear-coat.

While I was waiting for various parts to dry, I cut, filed, and drilled the stained glass (ham).  The particular variety used was called Mimosa.  Never having worked with glass before I made sure all of the cuts I had to make were straight.  I was most concerned about drilling the hole in the center.  When I originally took it to the stained glass shop, to farm out the drilling, the person at the counter literally sucked her teeth at my request.  That was a bad sign.

When making the sample base, I went to our local big-box home improvement store and bought a glass & tile drill bit.  It cut thru the glass like a dream.  So I just did all the drilling myself.

Below is a shot of the bottom halves, before the glass was glued in and then another shot after.

Other parts in the base were the brass tubes that protect the glass and the wooden plugs that hide the bolt-hole in the bottom (cookies).  The tubes were cut just a hair higher than the top of the roses, so they couldn’t crank the Hugo rockets down onto the glass and break it.  The plugs were disks, hand-cut from rose scraps, which we signed and dated.

Once we had a bunch of the components done, there was this whole assembly process.  The roses were glued to the aluminum, the bolts were glued in their holes, the brass tubes were glued around the bolts and the wooden plugs were glued in the bottom.

You can see several of the assembly steps in this picture.

And finished sandwiches in this one.

Then there were the legs.  26 bases (24 required plus 2 extra) x 3 legs each = 78 legs.  At .5hr each, just to sand, we spent more than 37 man-hours on the legs alone.  That doesn’t include cutting, drilling and finishing time.

Just like the bases, the legs were cut on my bandsaw. There was a first rough-cut, the holes were marked and drilled, and then a final cut. I’ve said this lots of times, to many people, but I would never have gotten thru this without darkwing830 .  He literally sanded until his fingers were cracked and bleeding so that we would make ship-date.

After cutting and sanding, they were hung for clear-coat and then set out to “cure.” In fact all of the pieces, except for some of the last roses, spent almost a week sitting out so they would completely dry.   Even still, I was told that when opened, the shipping boxes were filled with heady fumes.

The final component was the tiny little aluminum plugs used to hide the screw-hole on the legs (pimento).  I took a length of aluminum rod down to the bandsaw and sliced off 78 little disks which had to all be sanded and clear-coated.

The legs went on quickly and the plugs were tapped in.

Below is a finished base, with darkwing830 holding a Pseudo Hugo made from foam core.  The fake rocket helped throughout the design process to make sure I had good proportions.

And finally 6 finished bases, waiting to be packed for shipping.