Light Up Teleporter

This piece was inspired by the Games Workshop Warhammer 40,000 Necrons. We were going to use it as the ultimate objective in a campaign we planned. We got the entire campaign set up, my friend rigged it to his favor and no one showed up. It was great.

This teleporter was built from the top of an X-Men playset and the following items:

3/4" expanded styrofoam
Cardboard for the base
Fine and Coarse flock
Plastic ferns
Foamcore

I cannot find a picture of this playset, but it was the hand and torch of the statue of liberty. In place of the flame there was this device on top.  If anyone can find a picture I would appreciate the help.

The piece is based on a 12" x12" piece of corrugated cardboard (not my usual double thick stuff either!) Masking tape was still used to hide the corrugations, however. The X-Men playset was the Statue of Liberty torch with the three arm mechanism on it. I've never seen the movie so I have no idea what it's supposed to do, but the toy lit up and spun around. For about 5 minutes, anyway. Then it broke. The playset was dissasembled, the wires for the lighting were maintained and a little rewiring was required to get the three- armed mechanism to work outside of the playset.

The styrofoam was cut into squares to form the pyramid, and a hole was cut in the top two layers to accomodate the teleporter aka three- armed mechanism. A hole was bored through the other layers and a notch was cut out of the bottom layer to accomodate the wiring and on/off "switch" for the teleporter.

A piece of foamcore was cut into a circle and engraved with a symbol using a blunt pencil. It was then pressed into the bottom of the teleporter.

I then taped off the lights in the teleporter and base coated the styrofoam pyramid black. I then spray primed the entire piece black. The teleporter was lightly drybrushed silver and the pyramid was drybrushed dark grey up to white. The base was painted green. The symbol was repainted black and green was carefully poured into the groove of the symbol.

Course flock was glued on with PVA to look like creeping jungle growth and the base was flocked with fine green flock. Some plastic ferns were glued on with PVA, but most fell off. That's ok, they looked like they were dieing compared to the other foilage on the piece.

The switch is just a straight piece of wire that is pushed into a loop of wire to complete the circuit and make the teleporter light up. I ran this thing for 3 hours solid one day and the batteries are still holding up.