And Still More Kit Bashing (full version)

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Hello and thank you for choosing to watch this video. And still more kit bashing is the sixth video in the kit bashing series which looks at the models made for the Jerry Anderson television series Thunderbirds.

[00:00:15]A lot of really good stuff has been written about the show, really good publications and websites, but there's a lot to cover and this particular aspect of the visual effects is quite niche.

[00:00:26]Thunderbirds was set in the near future and Derek Meddings and Mike Trim were responsible for designing dozens of futuristic vehicles and aircraft and locations. Much of the world like the cars feels very familiar and this adds to the overall credibility that the series has. Many of the featured models were contracted to a specialtity model making company called Master Models, later Space Models, and I'm planning a video about those, too. The special effects team were responsible for dirtying down all of the models and added a lot of detail, taking parts from an unlikely array of commercially available plastic model kits and household items. Some of the aircraft were made entirely from kit bashed parts. Anything was fair game if it would look good, and the goal was always to make everything seem real. They use large scale plastic toy cars, friction-powered toys from Germany and Japan along with model kits from the US and from the UK. A lot of skill and imagination went into the model making and I wouldn't want anyone to come away from any of these videos and think that all of the models seen in the series were just made out of bits and pieces.

[00:01:35]The FX Gertterbridge kit is the key for me at least to analyzing all these models because parts of this kit appear in so many places in the series and we know how big it is. So when we recognize one of these pieces on a model, we can then extrapolate the size of that model and then sort of retrofit back to any other pieces that are on there and how big they would be and researching from there.

[00:02:03]So, jumping right in to Thunderbird 1's hanger. And just to sort of get this one out of the way, there's a lot of discussion as mention has been made of the the lemon squeezer that's in Thunderbird 1's launch bay. This is actually not seen that much. Most of the time it's obscured by Thunderbird 1 itself or the all the sort of clouds of smoke when it takes off. I actually managed to dig out from the back of our cupboard the version you see here, which is not identical, but it's certainly the same idea. The sort of way the parts break down. It looks pretty similar as you can see. I'd love to know what the exact one is. Just to, you know, scratch that itch. I actually think this looks great. I mean, I think Mike Trim in interviews has said he kind of regrets, you know, how, you know, how obvious it is. And I don't I don't know. I I don't agree. I actually think it just looks really good and it looks like it's it's there to do something to sort of like probably clean out the air from from the takeoffs or whatever. Either side of it are these two sort of cylinder looking things. And these are made out of a periscope toy called the Super Snooper made by Marks. And as you can see, it's sort of been customized and sort of turned upside down, changed around a bit, painted, dirted down, weathered as these things always were. The toy also appears in an episode of Stingray and the Lighthouse Dwellers. Actually makes two appearances on the puppet sets. So that's that's kind of a bit of fun.

[00:03:28]Something else that is in a puppet set is in the Thunderbirds episode, the Duchess assignment involving the sale of a painting called Portrait of a Gazelle to Wilbur Danbridge III, who's got this company called Gazelle Automations, loves everything to do with gazels and Jeff Tracy knows it. Anyway, great episode. In his office, he has this wooden statueette and it's this one that we had at home and has a little bit broken, but still it's cool to, you know, have this rather unknown little prop. Also, in the Duchess assignment, there's a really memorable rescue where Virgil, you know, goes down in the mole to rescue the Duchess from the basement of a burning house. And then Scott gets this vehicle that he refers to as the restraining outfit and he uses that to sort of hold up this one last wall to prevent it from falling down and collapsing the the basement beneath. The vehicle itself is based on the Vicar's Viger tractor toy like like most of the pod vehicles, but there are some close-up shots of the sort of suction cup apparatus and which is a larger model and the rubber suction cups themselves look like good oldfashioned sink plungers. But what I want to point out is it's a lovely bit of design that makes it look credible without necessarily explaining what it is. And this is made from an old 35 mm movie film core. And these are the things that in the olden days where people used to make things on film like Thunderbirds, we'd roll the film onto one of these cores and then put that on a projector or an editing bench or what have you to run the film. And if you look at it, you can see the sort of nick where the film would be sort of hooked in so it would catch. And you can see that on the restraining outfit arms. And you know, I'm sure there were dozens of these around the the cutting rooms at AP Films and they were all in one location. And I could imagine Derek Medings or somebody like, "Oh, those are pretty cool." And you know, Nick and a couple or something. I just love it. I think it's it's a great example of using sort of a everyday thing for a different purpose.

[00:05:31]And it just looks terrific. Just looks great.

[00:05:35]The Sidewinder is one of the most memorable vehicles from the series, and this episode opens with various scenes of jungle animals fleeing as we see glimpses of the giant machine. It's just it's fantastic. And Barry Gay's music captures just the sheer power and menace of of it all. This sequence is just a great piece of of film making. Pure gold. I love it. The original model was about five or six feet long. And it's been mentioned in several interviews and publications that the big arms on the front were made from muffin tins or tiny cake tins. So, what are these muffin tins? Muffins to me look like fairy capes or cupcakes. They're quite shallow. They're not they're not this same shape. These are a lot more conical. So, trying to figure this out, our old friend, the Gerta Bridge comes in handy. And at the front of the machine, you see a couple of what I call the original greblies, which are the the square things that would show up on the front of the pod and numerous other places. Greblies was a term, I think, coined by George Lucas on Star Wars because obviously they did tons of kit bashing, but kit bashing started on Thunderbirds. So, I call this the original Grebly. It's on the bottom of the Sidewinder some of the time. It's not always there. And from that, you can work out, okay, if that's that size, then these muffin tins are are this size. So you know kind of what you're looking for. So I've I looked around a a lot of places. I looked in our local Poundland which is the present day equivalent of Wworth's >> primitive yet kindred >> for a while. I lived near a restaurant wholesaler and I thought this will probably have muffin tins and they didn't not the right size and shape.

[00:07:10]Also, if you're looking online, you can look at things which you know look look exactly like it and then you then you realize it's actually a thimble and it's only like an inch tall or it's a cast iron flower pot and it's you know 22 in tall. So obviously they're a particular size. They're a particular angle. They kind of have this ridge around the the wide end and there is a seam. You can kind of see a seam where it's kind of like folded or welded together. So, finding something that are exactly that, is it a tall order? I briefly considered paper cups, Dixie cups like you get at a water cooler. They've got the seam, they've got the ridge around the wide end, but they're too small. So, anyway, looking long and hard, googling, you know, bits and pieces. I mean, this is sort of over, you know, over several years really. I've been sort of like digging away trying to look at this, not non-stop by any means, but, you know, off and on. And one day I found something on eBay that looked right.

[00:08:10]The shape was good. The size looked good. It had the ridge. [laughter] So I thought, right, they were only a few quid. So I I took the chance and uh ordered them. And I was so excited.

[00:08:23][laughter] I got the package and I I tore the paper off and I got everything out of there.

[00:08:29]And um yeah, you know, here they are.

[00:08:32]You know, the these ones are not as bright and shiny as the ones on the Sidewinder, which were probably brand new. And the ones I have, you know, are at least 60 years old and probably been in and out of more ovens than who knows what. They've got scorched. And but comparing them diligently, these are these are these are exactly the same.

[00:08:51]These are the ones that we used on the sidew.

[00:08:54]I'm so thrilled to have these.

[00:08:59]So, you can't really ever talk about the Sidewinder without talking about the Crab Logger. The Crab Logger features in one of the last episodes to be made.

[00:09:09]It's a spectacular machine. It's a gigantic model. It makes a startling appearance in the episode. It has the same music as the Sideline and it's, you know, it's fantastic. It's what Thunderbirds is is all about. And it, you know, it's a it's a giant model, as I said. I think it's about 8 ft long.

[00:09:25]The rear includes a couple of Tiger Joe tanks and there's just a lot of kit parts, Volulma containers, the Gerta bridge, and then the front section has these giant wheels. And I'll use the term wheels, although I'm referring to the primary sort of the back piece, the tire. Anyway, so this is one of those things I think ever since cottoning on that sort of, you know, that they would make use of found items, household items, kits, toys, whatever. and that these wheels were probably something because you know wheels would be hard to make. Although to make one and then cast it and whatever is not out of the question. I it doesn't seem like that was something they did much of on Thunderbirds. Maybe sort of later on on the other shows but again time being money if you could go out and get something ready made it probably do that. So I wondered for years where these came from. There are 10 of them actually 11 as there's one in the center of the main body. And these wheels are huge. They're about 5 1/2 in in diameter and about 8 in wide. And there's an inner diameter of approximately 2 and 1/2 in. They're a very strange shape.

[00:10:33]They're less like a wheel or a tire and more like a roller. There are 24 ribs running along the width of these wheels.

[00:10:40]The silver hub part is from a Rosedale 30 ton toy truck, the same as the ones that were used for the army trucks seen in the imposters. And there's also one of them parked at the base of the cliff here. And this is the same truck that also appeared in Campbell with green, which you can check out on the on the even world kit bashing video. So outside of the hub, I'm convinced that the black part is all one thing. And it actually looks like these wheels were made of white or light gray rubber cuz you can see when the crab sort of meets its fate and it topples off the cliff. You can see the underside and you can actually see the full wheels which is where you get to see how wide they really are. And also you can see that the tread on most of the wheels in certain areas is sort of white and it kind of looks like the black paint has worn off during the course of of filming. Rampaging through dense forest and small Mexican villages will do that. In all of the shots that you see in the show, in the episode, and all of the behind the scenes pictures of the model, including the ones, you know, where it's sort of in the process of being destroyed, there's no sign of any sort of part of these tires, these wheels being, you know, separate things joined together. You know, it's not like two wheels that they've sort of doubled up to get the width and the ribbed treads don't look like they've been stuck on. You know, you look at most models, photographs taken during filming and something will be different or, you know, certainly with this the sort of the the amount of things it kind of went through in the in the rigors of filming, you know, something would have gotten fixed or broken or or come off. So, so I'm convinced that these black parts are one whole piece. It's not something that's been put together.

[00:12:27]So, I started looking at where they may have come from. Thanks to the British weather, we are provided with many uh rainy Sunday afternoons uh which are perfect for researching and googling the day away. It's worth saying that Derek Mitting's original sketch has giant wheels like this which are wide and ribbed and look very much like what's on the model. Other aspects of the design are different in the finished model to the original sketch. So, I think probably Derek had something in mind when he designed it and drew the wheels he knew he was going to be able to use.

[00:13:00]That's my theory. So, I started looking around and thinking about what what they might be. Growing up, we had a lawnmower, you know, was one of the push along ones and it had a large sort of metal roller at the back and, you know, was about, as far as I remember it, was about this sort of size, about the same sort of diameter, much wider, but, you know, so I spent a lot of time looking, you know, at lawnmowers that were around at this time. And, you know, something called a rear half roller seems to be generally the right dimensions. So basically that big sort of cylinder on the back seems like on a lot of lawnmowers that comes kind of in two parts. Certainly when it's rubber that are basically the right dimensions generally but I haven't been able to find any particular one that's the right size is rubber has the right sort of tooidial if that's the right word the donut sort of aspect that we see the bit that looks like the tire and the ribs. I haven't found anything that sort of has all of those aspects.

[00:13:55]So I looked at some larger grass cutting machines like the things that are used for football pitches or cricket squares or or you know bowling greens, you know, beautiful straight lines. I also took a look at some of those sort of really big toys, you know, for little kids, the ones that they can either sit on or sit in and then pedal the thing along. And and those wheels are sort of big and chunky, they don't have the width.

[00:14:20]They're they're more like regular wheels. So that although they may have a diameter of you know 6 in they may be only 2 or 3 in wide like a regular familiar wheel. Definitely not in 196566 later on you might get sort of like dragsters or hot rod type versions of those things but that was sort of into the 70s so it wouldn't have been available.

[00:14:41]I thought back to Derek's sketch and again on the assumption that he knew what the wheels were going to be when he drew them when he designed them.

[00:14:49]Thinking about what he may have been aware of. So I thought, what about like some sort of camera dolly or camera crane? Something that would have sort of large, very stable wheels, maybe rollers that that would keep it, you know, very stable. Again, you probably couldn't steer it with that, but you know, something with that would have wheels that would allow for very sort of predictable travel in one direction.

[00:15:12]Then I thought, what else has rollers?

[00:15:13]What about printing machines? Maybe there's some big rollers in a print factory somewhere. again if they're sort of you know what would be rubber and I remember as a kid we had a roof rack that was a detachable roof rack for the car and it came with these little sort of half dome white sort of rubber feet sort of things where it sat on the roof of the car obviously to stop it scratching and it having grip and they were that very very solid white or light gray rubber and I seem to remember things at school in the gymnasium sort of that same sort of white rubber. So, I started thinking, all right, what about what about caravans? They have inflatable tires. Maybe they have a little roller on the front. What about trailers? Maybe there's some trailers that would have these things. But again, an 8 in wide wheel, you know, is going to limit steering quite a bit. You It's very wide for its diameter. So, that large surface, that large wide surface must be an advantage for whatever this thing is originally. maybe a buffet from a boat or something to protect it when it comes into the dock. And then I recalled a behind the scenes photo from when they were making UFO and it's, you know, half a dozen of the the effects guys kind of like playing around in the in the water tank or behind the water tank trying to look like they're splashing around and there's a fulls size little rowing boat in there. And that kind of got me thinking, okay, how do boats get into the water? They have a trailer that's pulled behind a car and they have like, you know, sort of slides or wheels in some some cases rollers that allow the boat to sort of, you know, smoothly slide backwards into the water.

[00:16:48]So, looking at these boat trailers, they have these gripping rollers to hold the boat secure without damaging it. And these are called wobble rollers. There's many many different sizes, different designs of trailer, different makes, different brands and all the rest of it.

[00:17:05]But these things were a thing back in back in the 60s as well. I must say a big thank you to the people at SBS Trailers, which is a company that have been making, you know, trailers for nearly 100 years. I think was contacting them just to see what kind of insight they may have. And they were good enough to send me a couple of the oldest rollers they had. They're 5 in in diameter, which is right, I think. And these are three and a half inches wide.

[00:17:29]So they're definitely not as wide as they need to be, you know, but they're solid rubber. They're heavy. The internal diameter where that wheel hub piece would go is about right. It's 2 and 12 in, I think. So these definitely look like a really good contender, but there's just one too many things that are not the same. And as Lieutenant Colbo would say, there's just one thing that bothers me. I've been unable to find any pictures of of old or newer versions that are the same dimensions that are wider than they are high. Back to the internet with renewed vigor. So, I started looking at boat trailers more broadly. Looking for rollers, I was just getting the same results. So, looking at boat trailers, I struck upon some videos of launching the boats from the trailers, which are great. And then I found a video from these guys in America who are refurbishing a boat and its trailer. And I got intrigued when he started rumaging around underneath the boat. And I could see it was really kind of old and rusty. And you can kind of see these rollers that are really old looking and kind of squashed and beaten up. Now these are not identical to the ones on the Crab Locker. They don't have the ribs. The end is slightly different, but they do look like the right size and the right dimensions. They're wider than they are high. I am looking to identify exactly the make and model, but you know what? This is close enough for me to say the crab level wheels are made out of wobble rollers. They're smooth, but you know what? A different make, a different model would be exactly the thing. I'm delighted.

[00:19:06]I refer to these as the Thunderbird 3 launch stands. So, I've been trying to figure out what these things were made from. This is a real mystery.

[00:19:15]>> Mystery.

[00:19:17]>> They appear to be pretty consistent in all the shots. There's three of them in Thunderbirds I'll go. They've got red, red and black instead of yellow and black checker tape, but they basically look the same. They also appear as the Sump Pro sort of fuel pumps and there's also three of them and they possibly are the same things customized. The same configuration appears in the background the atomic base in the mighty atom at the beginning and also in the rescue at the end of that episode. They're part of the underwater intake that Gordon destroys in terror in New York City. We see of the Fireflies cannon and this is a larger scale model of that section only. And you can see several holes. It looks solid which suggests it may have been part of some sort of maybe hydraulic system, some sort of fluid or lubricant that would you know kind of go through these holes. We can measure the size using the triangular ends from the dirt bridge kit which you see around the base inside of bird 3's hanger. And I made this rough sort of onetoone model just to give an impression of the overall size of this thing. In the words of Doc Brown, >> please excuse the crudity of this model.

[00:20:25]>> This helped me sort of visualize, wow, this thing's pretty beefy and if it was metal, probably pretty heavy and then featured with the big model, the 6T Thunderbird 3 model that you see taking off. So we can probably determine that they're pretty robust cuz there's some pyrochnics there and it was a big heavy expensive model. So, these things are probably pretty sturdy. So, yeah. Again, they appear to be metal. The top looks like it has screw holes or attachments around it, which got me thinking, okay, maybe some sort of like movie light or theater light because they had flanges where filters or colored gels could sort of be attached. There's several comments online that suggests that these are actually a vacuum cleaner motor. We know that a Hoover constellation was used for the main reactor in the Mighty Atom. So conceivably the motor from that vacuum cleaner could be what was used for the Thunderbird 3 things. Certainly a good candidate. And although they look similar, they're just not the same. It's not an exact match. So I'm pretty confident these are not um made out of vacuum cleaner motors or motor casings.

[00:21:37]Something that's important to note in the Thunderbird 3 hanger model is that these stands have 1/2 of a metal 35 mm film can on top. Uh 400 ft film can I think and this is what the spaceship stands on cuz again cuz I think the probably there's a hole through the middle of it looks like. So it needed something for the ship to stand on. So I think what we're looking for is something that really looks like the undersea seawater intake. That seems to be the the the complete thing unencumbered with the Thunderbird 3 film can and then bits of the Gerta bridge.

[00:22:12]>> Anybody got any bright ideas?

[00:22:16]No bright ideas.

[00:22:18]>> So yes, there's all those things going on. I think these holes are the key. The ones that are really prominent on the Firefly and in the Mighty Atom. I think the holes are the key. Reminds me of that scene in the Humpford October where they're trying to understand the the sub. Kind of reminds me of that. What are these doors?

[00:22:34]>> Those doors, sir, are the problem.

[00:22:36]They're >> like the holes. The holes are the problem. There's also these sort of bulbous ridges on the sort of the widest part, which suggests they're there to sort of to strengthen it in some way. If it is some sort of pressurized thing, it would, you know, need to be kind of robust. Or or it might just be a bit of a design flare. They may be that these aren't some sort of purely functional just internal casing, but maybe there's something that you actually see and a bit of design went into it. I've searched for film equipment, lights, tripods, editing equipment, projectors, [sighs] World War II air raid sirens, winch motors, washing machine motors, lawnmowers, water pumps, swimming pool motors, water filters, oil pumps, starter motors. [laughter] We're we're in pretty uncharted waters here with this thing. We know Thunderbirds was made on an industrial estate in slow. There was a hawker factory nearby. There was also Citroen cars were made nearby. Mars bars were made nearby, which all require heavy machinery to make those things. This is starting to look like a bit of a needle in a in a hay stack or a fire flash airliner lost at sea or a spaceman a drift in the abyss of space. So, let's hit pause for a second. The public characters and sets also made use of household items, machine parts and the like in their set dressing. That's a whole separate project unto itself. But one thing that's always stood out to me is the set of the Fire Flash's wing that you see in Trapped in the Sky when the Hood plants the bomb. There's something there that looks like, you know, big heavy cast metal, some sort of large, you know, mechanism. This brown thing, you know, the guys did a great job making making the set cuz it looks very much like part of an aircraft, like an undercarriage strut, you know, and I've researched this to try and find out what this thing is. And I'm 90 plus% certain that it's from the main undercarriage of a Hawker Hunter, a 1950s jet fighter. If you look at this detail of the cylindrical part, you can see that it matches. Now, I don't know if this is, you know, a standard part and it's on other aircraft as well. I don't know. I just found this picture of a Hulga Hunter aircraft strut landing gear leg and it looks really similar to me. It's a pretty exciting find, although I'm sure other people found it long before me. So, so going back to Thunderbird 3, this may be another source of the launch stands. you know, aircraft undercarriage would be metal. It'd be somewhere on it there might be this thing for to help with the brakes, the hydraulics, you know, who knows a hawker hunter, [laughter] even if it's there. It's another hay stack. But, you know, this is kind of where I'm currently leaning.

[00:25:27]You know, we know that they had an undercarriage leg from somewhere, so other aircraft parts could be an option.

[00:25:35]I wish there was a conclusion to this particular story. There is a hawker hunter at the RAF Museum London. I think they've got some blueprints there which I might go and try and check out and see if I can see this thing. But if anyone knows what this thing is, where it's from, what its function might be, even if we don't know exactly, if we know, oh yeah, based on that thing and those holes and the size, whatever, it's a fuel pump or it's an air filter or it's a who knows what. You know, anything would be great. You know something else I think might be related.

[00:26:08]It's also seen in the mighty Atom seawater intake and as part of Thunderbird 3's hanger, not the silo where it takes off, but where the setis kind of go up and down. There's this sort of shallow domed thing that looks like it's about a foot across that has these sort of three holes in it that look like they're probably for some sort of sockets. There's two things sort of on either side that look like a handle could have been attached to that. And I feel like this, you know, might be related [clears throat] to the launch stands because again, it's part of that same model. It would have been there when they were making that model. It was certainly there when they were making the mighty Adam model. So maybe it's part of the same thing. I don't know. So yeah, if anyone's got any information on that, that would be great as well.

[00:26:51]That pretty much wraps it up for this one. Thank you uh very much for watching. Thanks in advance for any help you can offer. Please subscribe, tell your friends. It does make a difference.

[00:27:01]You can buy me a coffee. There's more artwork on the website. There's a couple of blogs, what if model boxes, commissions. Anyway, thanks very much for watching and I'll see you soon.

[00:27:11]Bye-bye.