Anyway... I, well this site, crossed a new threshold of geekdom today, I got my first random email about the site from someone I don't know personally. It was cool because 1) someone took the time to write and 2) it means more than just my immediate friends and family read this stuff.
The author - happy to share his name or link if he wants to send one again - wanted to know the status of the WOPR case after having stumbled across my site from a random Google for Wargames. Since I haven't talked about it in a while, a quick status update:
The control circuitry for the lights is done, save for the two parts I burned out before realizing it isn't wise to run 12 volts through something meant to handle 0.7 - I are an elektrical engineer :). I have NOT, however, taken the time to wire up all 700 odd red and orange LEDs that would comprise the WOPR light banks. That's really the easy part of this project though, the hard part is the case.
I had originally planned on carving the shape out of modeling foam, coating it in fiberglass and then disolving the foam out of the fiberglass shell with acetone or something. I'd seen this done before for fiberglass model airplane bodies so I figured it would work well. The only problem is that the WOPR case is a hard shape to carve - especially when I don't know what the heck I'm doing :) A few days ago, however, my boss came to me with a much better approach...
He suggested getting a big block of earthen clay - it's pretty cheap and I could always just pack it around an old shoe box or something so I wouldn't need quite so much. The clay would be much easier to mold (and much more forgiving of mistakes) into the right shape. I can then take a Plaster of Paris negative of the two halves of the case and then form two fiberglass positives out of that. Alternatively I can use the Plaster mould to make foam positive using just spray in foam and go my original route. Either way it's better because I'll have the plaster castings left over should I ever want to make another case AND it's a lot easier to make the initial positive.
So why haven't I done any of this? 4 days of physical training a week AND looking for a house during the week, and.. well.. fun on the weekends, doesn't leave me a lot of time to work on it. I still have my sketches of the case and dimensions (they survived the last move) so the project isn't dead, just on hold.
So there you go, hope that's all the info you could ever want. Should any other random emailers like to say hello, just send mail to web(at)arr-the-kraken(dot)com. Replace the things in parentheses with their obvious symbolic counterparts - I can't make it too easy for spam address harvesters to get my contact info :)
Cheers.
