The Lindenbergs

A reference website I use for building and selling Ghostbuster props puts out a calendar each year (hopefully) and takes submissions from its members. Here are my offerings for 2010:

I was trying for the silkscreen effect used by Andy Warhol. Not my best effort.

Now this one I like. Its based on an Andy Warhol Mickey Mouse print.

Labels: kenpo karate judo sambo taikwando

Anna is really blossoming this year -its like her brain's kicked into overdrive.



Last night I was having a grapefruit and was asked how it tasted. I replied good, but a little sour. Anna ran over and grabbed a banana and mid-way through it stated that is wasn't bad but was "a tad sour and not quite ripe yet".

-Eric (Dad)

I got the Jukebox completed literally an hour before our party started. The top curved piece will eventually have to be pulled, re-sanded and re-painted, but it did the trick for the evening.

Here's the last set of progress pics as well as a few of the finished product...

This one's still a work in progress. The idea has been simmering on the back-burner since my brother-in-law gave me an old touch-screen monitor. Our street is having it's annual holiday Progressive Dinner this week and I thought it would be fun to have it done and loaded with holiday songs when everyone comes over for desert.


As with almost all crazy Eric projects, the pre-planning is pretty sparse. My complete plans were sketched on a piece of the kids drawing paper. I was looking to design something that would be about chest level and that would minimize the number of cuts I would have to make (I'm not great with a jig saw -straight lines are a challenge).


The dimensions of the cabinet will be 48 x 48 x 60. The sheets of MDF I bought are 48" wide, so I won't need to trim for width (yeah!)


...and now we have a box. I used cheapie firring strips (1x2s). I tried to get the straightest pieces I could find, but there was a little warp in some of them.


The top of the jukebox will be round. I figured the easiest way to go about it was to make a circle with a diameter of 48" and then cut it in half.


Ta Da! It took a while for me to figure out how to attach the curved pieces to the body. Running spacers along the bottom then attaching them to the cross members made it an easy answer and reinforced the frame.


A test fit with the touchscreen monitor and the keyboard drawer. My goal is to have the drawer front hidden as part of the front design. I haven't quite figured out the details, this could be interesting...


Another test fit, I wanted to make sure all the components had sufficient space, wiring had correct pass throughs, etc. The PC is an old Pentium IV with a 6 GB drive. The speaker is a guitar amp I use with a keyboard I have in my office.


There's lots of free software available on the web for emulating a jukebox interface. This is one of the cleaner, more simple ones.


The jukebox will have tubing running up the sides and around the top. I figured 2" PVC would work well for the sides -a couple of jig saw cuts and I have two half pieces. I'm crafting the top piece out of foam to be covered with bondo (auto body putty), sanded and painted. No pics of that piece yet -I haven't made it.


The front panel for the lower section is cut and painted. The two pieces of PVC painted to look like steel and the inset piece for the bottom plate painted. I didn't have a better place to put them, so I used the frame as a drying rack (it was 20 degrees outside and snowing -so the backyard wasn't an option).


Crafting the bevel for the top front to cover the monitor was killer. It will sit at an angle with the top leaning further back than the bottom so that the screen tilts upward. I'm sure there's mathematics that would have helped me calculate the top curve -but that's beyond my high school-level education. I just kept making paper templates until I figured it out.


Getting the bevel seated and secured was key. Then I traced around the back of the monitor and calculated where the screen would fall. Looks easy when its done, but the process took ours. But, all's well that ends well, the bevel is sanded, primed and painted. I routed out the inner cut to have a graduated edge.


A couple of shots of the finished front pieces. The PVC tubing is painted and attached to the bottom plate. The black piece in the center will be used to craft a piece to cover the keyboard drawer and hide the "seams" between the top and bottom plates.


The small piece of PVC (far left) is used as a reference for making the top curved piece (width, height and curvature).


My goal was to "skin" the top of the juke box with a large single sheet across the top. The MDF is fairly thin, but much more rigid than I had anticipated. Getting it to bend was no small feat. In this picture its attached across the top and the box looks like its ready to take flight.


Progress is made in tiny steps. It probably took an hour to get the one side done. I had to brace the jukebox against the garage door and lean against the MDF sheet to pin it down long enough to drill holes and sink the screws. Now the thing looks like it has a stinky armpit...


I tried to countersink all the screws. Unfortunately, I wasn't particularly successful (doing a full lean and driving screws is hard) so the surface won't be quite as shiny smooth as I'd hoped.


All told, I like how its turning out. What do you think, does it look like my sketch?


All primed and pretty. At this point there's about 1.5" of snow outside and the garage is pretty cold....


My efforts, to-date, finished around midnight. I wet-sanded the primer base and applied roughly three coats of high-gloss black paint. The lighting in the garage isn't great, so I need to do a bit more painting in daylight to make sure I have even coverage.

Labels: jukebox build construct MDF

I've taken a break from movie prop making and thought I'd try my hand at a couple of other projects. First up, a custom dartboard cabinet for an electronic dartboard my Dad gave me years ago. The board is an odd size so standard cabinets don't fit it. The cabinet is made from a plywood back, a 1" x 2" piece of pine for the sides, and a 11" by 24" pine plank for the doors. Assembly went very fast, just a few hours, but the staining and polyurathaning took forever. Overall I'm pretty pleased and the family's got some good dart playing in this week.

Anna has become a huge speller. In everyday conversation she incorporates spelling part of what she has to say. Example: "Dad, can we watch a 'm-o-v-i-e'. She actually gets about 90% of the words she spells correct -even if they're not spelled phonetically. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between the words she chooses to spell and the words she's learning to spell in school. She's just figuring it out for herself.