In the fall of 2013, my wife persuaded us (me and my then-8-year-old son) to head up to LIWhoCon - a Doctor Who convention on Long Island. We live just outside Philly so this seems like a hop skip and a jump.

My son had a great time - mostly hanging out in the games area - but he also listened to a few speakers. The highlight of his trip was hanging out with Sylvester McCoy, his favorite doctor. When we got home I suggested to j that we might build a dalek. And he had distinct ideas about which it should be - the Special Weapons Dalek, which had only had one on-screen appearance ever: with Sylvester McCoy.

Looking around the Internet, I found Project Dalek - a website devoted to Dalek modelers. They have fan-made plans from meticulous experimentation, on-screen measurement, and in-person visits to museum sets. While they're a subscription-based website, I was glad to pay them a few bucks a year to tap in to their knowledge base.

They didn't have any plans for the SWD, but neither did anyone else, really. There is a really low quality set of plans that were drawn by someone a decade ago, which give some rough measurements and are just about legible; but the base of the SWD is the same as the base of the Imperial Dalek, for which substantial drawings exist.

I figured these two sets of plans were sufficient to get me started.

We wanted this thing to be remote controlled, for maximum 9-year-old (and 40-some year old) fun. We needed to be able to transport it, us, and our luggage in our hatchback. I'd never built a robot, nor a movie prop - let alone one remote controlled and bigger than I am. So it was clear that we wouldn't be making a full-scale dalek. We wanted to actually complete something eventually. Hopefully within a year, so we could take it up to the next LIWho Con.

Now, having limited from-scratch manufacturing experience (except with wood, for reasons of furniture!), I looked at the plans and figured that the hemispheres on the Dalek were the most difficult part of the build. I don't have a vacuformer, nor interest in putting one in my already cramped basement. So I figured that if I could find a ready and cheap source for these, I'd be off to a good start. So, measuring some ping-pong balls and doing the math, I had my scale: at 40%, I could use ping-pong balls.

All of that planning took a couple of weeks; mostly scouring the internet for plans and then marrying them. So by mid-November we were ready to do *something*.