Little bit of progress over the past few weeks. First off, I finished all the sanding on the Timer housings, all the way from 80-grit to 3000-grit! It took a long, long time to separately sand all 8 bodies plus the 8 separate top covers, but when I finished they were smooth as glass. The paint went on great so those are all finished and look wonderfully manufactured. I'm honestly a little surprised printed plastic could turn out so nice. I did have to file down the inside of the cutouts for the buttons a tiny bit so they would fit.
I also completely stripped down the collar/washer around the activation button and repainted it glossy. It's a little bit frustrating though because in close up photos of the prop, the collar is clearly sitting on top of the pump, but in half the screengrabs from the movie, the collar is underneath the hole in the pump so that it's nearly flush:
So, have to make a judgment call here, and I'm sticking with on top of the housing. I also added a bit of padding since my button boot was sticking up too high. It might be a little too high still, but that's about as far down as I can drop it before it starts tapering, so this is much better.
I've also been experimenting with the assembly of the timers/reels with reel motors. I got a bunch of these:
DC Gearbox Motor - "TT Motor" - 200RPM - 3 to 6VDC to play with, and after Dremeling off one of the axles and a couple of extraneous bits, they JUST fit inside the Timer housings. So, if I can find a way to connect these to my drive shafts, they just might have enough power to spool the tubing. They are reversible too, so connecting these to a 3-way toggle switch is probably the way to go for Fwd/Rev driving the reels.
Here I've just staged it for size testing with a scrap of sheet metal acting as the end plate, and a steel dowel pin. The final pins probably will probably only be different in that they are tapped at both ends, as there appears to be an M3 hex cap screw outside both the Timer and the End Plate. Also this isn't one of the final Timers, but a shorter prototype that I've kept around for testing.
Speaking of that End Plate, I just last night noticed this:
These 2 Upper and Lower Reels have different End Plates! Why?! I can't figure out yet. Maybe it was a space issue and the case wouldn't close without the bumps colliding? I don't think most of the Reels are flatter on top, but there aren't enough angles in the reference photos to say for sure. Looking around a bit more, I noticed:
I can't say 100%, but it appears the drive shaft might not actually connect to anything inside the Timer. So it's very possible all of the motorization details are just visual effects and they never actually mechanized anything. Even so, I'm going to try to get mine to work.
And another thing that might be faked:
This is a screengrab from the opening scene. Now in all frames of the film where the Timers are off, and in close up photos of the screen used prop, it appears to be a green LCD display on these, which I don't believe would ever be able to produce an LED dot matrix like this. But if this is faked, they went above and beyond to fake it, since if you crank up the brightness you can even see the "off" pixels, and some red light leaking through the imperfect button cutouts.
So whether I can recreate actual working timer displays is still up in the air. The entire timer housing is 1"x3" on the outside, with just a bit less space inside, and the cutout for the display itself is only 0.35" tall x 1.35" wide. And so far I haven't been able to find an LED matrix that size.
And lastly, I'm now getting around to working out the dimensions of the 4 circle "wedges" in the lower half. Looks like an inner radius of 1.75" (to match the vacuum chambers) and an outer radius of just under 10", and around 0.75" thick with about .05" sunk below the base plate. As with everything in this build, mocking it up in paper and cardboard first is the path to success.