Imperial War Museum - 1962 Wolseley 6/110 mk II
Imperial War Museum - Extraordinary Heroes
1962 Wolseley 6/110 mk II
In October 2009 Berry Place was contacted by The Imperial War Museum regarding the addition of a new gallery entitled ‘Extraordinary Heroes’ to its main site in Lambeth. The new interactive gallery would display stories, digital content, objects, models and of course medals that related to many tales of heroic endeavour – the exponents of which became recipients of either the George Cross or Victoria Cross.
With bombs & airships already commissioned the next model onto the roster was a scale model police car complete with crash damage. The police car in question belonged to PC Tony Gledhill GC who pursued a gang of armed robbers through the streets of South East London before crashing and giving chase on foot. He finally overpowered the gang and his actions resulted in four convictions including John McVicar who had been tagged ‘Public Enemy No1’ by Scotland Yard.
The problem was in finding a cut off point for the level of detail to make the car suitable for open display on gallery. It was agreed that we would omit details that would be easily breakable such as wing mirrors & windscreen wipers, and that interior detail would be excluded.
The car in question was a 1962 Wolseley 6/110 mk II police car and the model would need to reflect the crash damage which had been sustained in the original crash.
We started contacting owners groups, collectors clubs and vintage society’s with a view to borrowing a Wolseley, even Ebay thinking that we could buy one and then sell it after use. We were contacted by a very helpful enthusiast by the name of Taff Gillingham from the Wolseley owners club, who put us in touch with a certain Conrad Parr, who as it turned out was able to supply not just a car, but also answer any Wolseley related question we could throw at him, from gearbox queries to tyre tread types.
After a number of discussions with Tim Rapley from Physical Digital and Dan Fleetcroft from Bromley Technologies a date was arranged for one modelmaker, one car enthusiast, a data manipulator and a scanning expert to meet in a shed in Surrey and scan Conrad’s car with a high end mobile 3d scanner.
This scanner captured car detail to a tolerance of about 50 microns, or twice the width of a human hair. This allowed Dan and Chris at Bromley to build a digital model of incredible detail, breaking the data down by components so that we could apply different processes to different parts of the car. For instance, hub caps were isolated from the wheel scan data so that the real hub cap model could be chrome plated without requiring the whole wheel to go through that process.
As it turned out in the end, the crash detail could not be applied digitally, although not for lack of trying, the polygon count on the model was just too high to make this a controllable method of deformation.
So the team at Berry Place worked in the bodywork deformation by hand around the front wing, grill and headlight using the period photographs for reference. The flashing police light was added and the suspension altered to account for a flat tyre on the driver’s side. Within a few hours of being finished it was on-gallery.
Ex PC Tony Gledhill GC has seen the model and by all accounts is thrilled with the result.
Client – The Imperial War Museum London