make it yourself

Alien Console Bank

A stack of instrument panels off the ship, lit from behind so every dial and indicator glows on its own. Built from one sheet of foam board, a string of green lights and a jar of bottle caps, and it reads properly at the distance a porch actually gets looked at.

• $52 ish
• 5 hrs start to finish
• confident beginner
• 3' 8" tall when done

grab this stuff

What you need

• Rigid foam insulation board, 1 in. x 4 ft x 8 ft $22
• Foam-safe construction adhesive $7
• Green LED string, battery, 50 count $9
• Battery puck light for the screen $5
• Matte black spray paint, foam-safe $6
• Silver or pewter craft paint for dry brushing $3
• Bottle caps, jar lids and cut dowel for the controls you have these
• All in $52

Tools, and that is it

• A bread knife or a long craft knife
• A drill with a bit matching your bulb size, usually 3/8 in.
• A straight edge and a marker
• A caulking gun for the adhesive

here we go

How to make it

1. Cut three boxes, not one console

   Cut the sheet into three open-backed boxes of different heights, roughly 16, 12 and 9 inches tall, each about 16 inches wide and 20 deep. Butt the edges and glue them; foam adhesive holds better than it has any right to. Stack them into a bank with the tallest at one end.

   oops-proofing

   Use foam-safe adhesive and foam-safe paint. Ordinary solvent-based glue and regular spray paint both dissolve XPS, and you find out about ninety seconds after you commit, by which point the panel has a crater in it.

2. Angle the faces back

   Cut the top edge of each face at a slant so the panels lean back about twenty degrees, the way a mixing desk does. This is the single cut that makes it read as a console rather than as three boxes, and it costs nothing.

   oops-proofing

   Lean them back, never forward. A face tilted towards the sky fills with rain and catches the porch light as a flat white glare, which kills every lit detail you are about to spend four hours making.

3. Drill the indicator holes before you paint

   Mark rows of holes across the faces and drill them to match your bulb diameter. Uneven rows in odd-numbered groups look alien; evenly spaced grids look like a radiator. Forty to fifty holes is plenty for one string.

   oops-proofing

   Do the drilling first. Drilling through a painted face chips the paint round every single hole, and there are fifty of them.

4. Glue on the controls

   Bottle caps are dials, jar lids are big rotary switches, short lengths of dowel are levers, and a rectangle of scrap foam is a keypad. Cluster them in groups with clear space between, rather than spreading them evenly across the face.

   oops-proofing

   Resist labelling anything. Letters and numbers make it a prop from a film set; blank controls make it a machine nobody here knows how to operate, which is the thing you are actually building.

5. Paint dark, then dry brush light

   Spray the whole thing matte black, let it dry, then drag an almost-dry brush of silver across it so the paint catches only on the raised edges of the caps and lids. Two minutes of dry brushing does more than an hour of careful painting.

   oops-proofing

   Do not paint it silver overall. A bright console reflects your porch light and washes out, and then the indicator lights have nothing dark to glow against. Dark base, bright edges, glowing holes, in that order.

6. Light it from inside, one string, no controller

   Push a bulb through each hole from behind and tape the wire to the inside face. Stand the puck light behind a piece of frosted plastic set into the tallest panel for the screen. Battery boxes go inside the boxes, which is why the backs are open.

   oops-proofing

   Set the string to steady on, or at most a slow fade. Chasing and twinkling modes read as Christmas lights the instant anybody sees them, and they are the default setting on almost every string sold.

7. Weight the bottom and put it on the porch

   Drop a brick or a bag of sand inside the base box. The whole thing weighs about four pounds and a gust will take it off the boards otherwise.