This is a very good kit from Comet Miniatures, readily available in dedicated model shops. The casting detail is excellent apart from the skirt hemispheres (52, I think....) some of which had flaws, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with a couple of hours of filling and sanding. The kit includes black nylon gauze for the shoulder grill and templates to cut it with, and historical background to the instructions in enough detail to let you do the topic justice. At £20 and about 12cm tall with two build options, I reckon it's good value and should keep Dr. Who fans happy!
The skirt plates fit together pretty well from a structural point of view - in other words they stay together long enough to let you finish completing the assembly. However, I had several rounds of sanding and filling to get a satisfactory finish. Here, I've just run some acrylic paint over some hairline cracks that remain. This is easier than P38 or milliput for small imperfections and, when dry, the acrylic paint sands off to a nice finish. I keep a bottle of any old junk for this - here it's 'Tentacle Pink' from my Beatles job. The yellow is Halfords high-build primer, as the sanding had removed the satin lustre mould finish from most of the skirt plates, which also had the odd casting warp, so they ended up looking the better for it. NOTE: assemble the skirt plates on the base, using the base (which has guides for the plates) as a jig or former. Don't accidentaly glue the plates to the base - you'll have to get the base off to finish the skirt and light the model!
Here are the shoulder plate spacers. They look a bit too high and low, but this is about right, as the shoulder section shown here has a slight curve to it - look at the right hand edge. Placing the spacers as shown here allows the plates to sit at the right 'height' from the body (well, it did on my example anyway!)
The arms locate in two ball-and-socket joints, and the balls are provided with both support and friction by a back plate. The only means of fixing the back plate is a central post, which I felt was too flimsy, so I added a blob of P38 at each side of the back plate. You can see it here through the hole I cut in the mid section - this was originally a small wire hole (I just enlarged it for this pic).
Here's the plate detail overlaid with a schematic.... The rest was easy. The surface detailing is well cast and assembled as per the instructions. I sprayed the body parts in sections of course, and the skirt hemispheres were primed and sprayed after tacking them to a piece of scrap styrene sheet.
Here's a Mk3 and a Mk1. The kits differ mostly in the base, but the Mk 1 also has the chest plate. The Mk3 has 6 chest pieces, signifying one of the movie variants - there were many versions of Dalek!
Slightly darker, showing off the lights a bit better.
The base hides the battery pack and switch.
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