Hey gang,
I've been rolling some things around in my mind about the ESB Vader belt boxes and I wanted to see if we could either confirm or correct some of the commonly accepted details. Many replicators these days use Hammond brand project enclosure boxes when building up the belt boxes, but it seems that there are differing opinions about which specific model/size is most accurate. I have seen Hammond 1550C boxes (https://www.hammfg.com/part/1550C) be used by some, but others feel those are too big and prefer the size of the Hammond 1590S boxes (https://www.hammfg.com/part/1590S).
I reckon a lot of people attempt to scale things based on the size of the belt itself, which of course only really works if you assume that you have the belt width correct. For the "hero" belt in ESB, I've seen a lot of people use an approximately 2.25" wide belt, while others use an approximately 2.5" wide belt. Since there is some disagreement there, I will set that all aside for now and attempt to use other components to scale from.
I figured we'd look at the green and red lights on the belt boxes as a starting point to scale from. I think most people agree that the green lights on the screen-used belt boxes are Saia-Burgess brand indicator lamps like these:
... and the red lights are Camdenboss brand incandescent indicator lights like these:
Does anyone have any contradicting information about these parts? Please let me know if you do.
If I can move along assuming that these parts are correct, I can scale things based on those. I busted out the calipers to measure everything:
For the green lamps, the black bezels are about 23.94 mm tall by 17.93 mm wide by 5.90 mm deep and the green lenses are about 19.82 mm tall by 13.54 mm wide with 4.26 mm of depth exposed.
For the red lights, the chrome bezels are about 8.02 mm in diameter and 1.9 mm deep and the red lenses are about 6.61 mm in diameter with 4.00 mm of depth exposed.
With that info, I could then quickly model up some simple yet accurately sized 3D models to play with digitally:
I then took an image of one of the real belt boxes and using some software called fSpy I determined the approximate focal length and camera distance/position used to take the photo so that I could recreate the same perspective in 3D space in Blender, which is my prefered 3D software for stuff like this.
Then I could scale the image and camera in 3D space until the sizing of the green and red lights in the photo matched the outline of my green and red light 3D models.
With that I knew that everything else I modeled from this perspective would be fairly accurately scaled. I quickly modeled some place holder silver knobs (including the one loose/broken knob!) and little section of braided hose to match the photo and help get a sense of the whole thing. Hammond Manufacturing is kind enough to provide 3D models of all their enclosure boxes on their website for download, I assume to allow customers to more easily work out their designs and determine what boxes suit their projects. So I downloaded the 3D models of a few different enclosures they offer to see how they scale with this image.
Interestingly enough, the 1550C, which some think is too big, seems to actually be a little bit too small:
Obviously, the 1590S is even smaller:
The one I found to be the best fit was the 1590C, (https://www.hammfg.com/part/1590C) which is larger than either of the other two models:
So that's where I'm at! I can't say for sure that the ESB production specifically used these Hammond 1590C boxes, but whatever they did use appears to be very similar in size. The slight taper these boxes have matches well too.
Does this make sense to people? Am I way off here? I would love to get some thoughts from other people and their experience putting together some ESB boxes.
Cheers,
Mike.
