by Unknown
no sleep allowed! In past years, I’d done many things—put together a little model shop, built a lot of miniatures and props; rented trucks, ordered materials, sprayed a lot of paint; breathed a lot of Bondo…I’d had several friends from design school find their way into movie design and prop building work, the way I had, and they too had friends who were very capable people. The crew I was lucky enough to put together was made up of extremely talented union craftspeople. Since Universal did pass on the work, they approved our running the job with union people, hours, and pay scale—but off-site.
The crew consisted of Leslie Ekker, Robin Reilly, Bob Wilcox, Dick Chronister, and yours truly, as ringleader and chief troublemaker. I knew Leslie from school days. He had worked on the first Star Trek movie, and by that time, Blade Runner, Brainstorm, Close Encounters, and many more. He went on to run the model and miniature efforts for many movies, including True Lies and Apollo 13, and is now a Visual Effects Supervisor. He can make or design anything.
Robin is another amazing guy. He has a degree from USC in sculpture, and was a propmaker for years, from the days of Battlestar Galactica. He is a specialist in both form and function. Not just a person with a real finesse with shapes, he’s also an expert welder, machinist, and problem solver. Also an ex-motorcycle road racer, who splits time between movie work 62
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and helicopter piloting. He recently finished fabricating (the frames completely from scratch!) a fleet of composite-framed bicycles for Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. This is what he does in between flying for Papillon in Hawaii, and other charter and military contracts. He’s IFR certified, a CFI, multi-engine rated…and unlike the rest of us who built the K.I.T.T. car, actually operates turbine powered crafts all the time!
Our electronics genius Bob Wilcox did all the circuitry and component design and fabrication, with a lot of help from Dick Chronister, making it all come together in time…
Bob’s expertise was staggering. Like Robin, he was also a car-crazy guy with some wonderful projects in his past. Bob had read the Gordon Jennings articles on two-stroke tuning. Using the formula, he welded up his own expansion chambers for a road bike project. Superior brains and a real hands-on ability, too. I remember one of the last nights of the interior project, when I had done all that I could. I was leaving, well after midnight. Bob had the whole panel hung from the ceiling like a side of beef, and waved to me, smiling and wiring, rock and roll leaking out of his headphones loud enough so that you could hear it in the next room…He had to design and build everything we used. There was hardly an off-theshelf part to be seen in the final car. It is an amazing tribute to his patience and genius that there was a car at all. He and Dick Chronister were fabricating all the electronics as we were shaping foam, milling panels, and sawing the poor car to bits. I had the pleasure of working with Dick again, when I was designing all sorts of crazy things for Back to the Future. He was the same as ever: able to make anything that the show needed, completely reliable, and a thoroughly nice guy. Leslie and Robin helped me with all the fabrication tasks, running the gamut from structural to aesthetic; from framing and machining to foam cutting and shaping, and with the glassing, painting and detailing. If memory serves, from “go” we had about 15-18 days to get the car into the shop, mock up the dash in foamcore, prep replica instruments for approval, make the supports, carve the foam for the three units, ‘glass Designing K.I.T.T. •
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them, surface them, paint them, design and build the instruments, get all the graphics done, assemble the thing, troubleshoot it, and deliver it to the network…Holy Cow.
The fabrication I was responsible for was done in phases—in the beginning, I had only the interior project to deal with. The nose that I made came later. The interior needed to be done in time for the “teaser” that Glen was putting together for the network. The producers, in parallel with having me make the interior, had a nose built on another car. This was fabricated by a very talented guy, named Jon Ward. He delivered them a modified Trans Am in time for their schedule. Some of the pilot was shot using the exterior of this one from the teaser. That’s the different nose you’ve noticed—it dates to a time before I had built the more familiar one. His nose had a blunter look, with a high-mounted scanner in an otherwise stock configuration, and perhaps no rear light cover. They used some of the shots from the “teaser” in the pilot, and not all of the older footage of the earlier nose could be replaced.
Jon went on to make a number of vehicles for other shows; ones I worked on, and a lot more, too. He has built everything from a life-sized replica Stealth Bomber for a commercial to some very successful race cars. A couple that he built for the Carrera Panamericana, which runs the length of Mexico, won their classes—and an outright overall win, as well. A serious builder of machinery.
With the teaser done, and a little time before the pilot had to be delivered, Glen was interested in designing and building a new nosecap. This was a physically bigger, messier job than the interior, which had its share of ‘glass work, but also a lot of delicate clean-room operations. It was too much for the first shop, so I handled this work at another shop, Image Engineering.
Tom Valentine and Peter Chesney owned the place. Tom had built a Wright Flyer replica—an airworthy one, which was displayed for years by the “Spruce Goose” in Long Beach. In later years, we worked on flying toys together at Apogee, the special effects shop Jon Dykstra was part of. 64
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Tom’s a remarkable guy, and now a production designer. Peter went on to do the effects for many big shows—last time I saw him was on the set of Men in Black. They were great people to work with, and we had a lot of fun together.
We carved several different versions for Glen to look at, and made the final in very quick time. As with the dash, we were extremely careful to manage the contours of the piece so that the highlights tracked very true, without bumps or ripples. We tried to approach the shaping as we would a serious project for an industrial client, and I think this was part of the appeal that the car had for Glen. To finish off the nose, we cut the grille pieces from plexi after scribing them with their precise curves. They had to duplicate the form of the sculpted shape we’d made. In order to establish those curves, we took a “slice” out of the nose at the height of each slat, digging trenches in the finished nose with an air tool, exactly where the slats would go. The air tool was slid along a special straightedge rig to make sure that the cut was horizontal. Then the slats were positioned in the nose, scribed, and the rest of the material cut away. We reinstalled the slats, which nicely continued the form development of the nose. We used the scanner circuitry from Jon’s front end, building a much lower and wider “vee” shaped reflector box of aluminum to fit.
After the pilot, the prop shop at Universal built replicas and an interior mock-up (for close-ups or “inserts”) for the rest of the series. What were Glen’s first reactions upon seeing it? Are there any stories you could share about the particular challenges you faced while building the prototype?
Glen was great to work for—after we set the design, he trusted me to make sure that it would look like the pictures I’d drawn. The whole time I was drawing, I was thinking about how I’d build it, so that part wasn’t too hard. Call it a kind of truth in advertising—or truth in sketching and thinking…but the client ought to get exactly what they think they’re Designing K.I.T.T. •
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going to! Glen was a real straight shooter—a gentleman, true to his word, and someone who really understood the scale of the project. He didn’t come up with a lot of changes that could have torpedoed our chances of finishing on time. When the car was done, he was delighted, and even sent me a few bottles of champagne. I went on to work on many other shows for Glen, over the years.
As far as challenges, there were two main ones: creating the buildable, interesting-looking designs in time, and getting the project done in the few days we had. Th
e biggest challenge was really the schedule. How much of the actual electronics design and implementation did you do?
Bob Wilcox designed all the circuitry, as I mentioned, and built it all, too, with Richard Chronister’s help. My involvement with the electronics side was more focused on how the “look” of the dash would be affected by the possibilities he saw for us. I checked out a lot of parts, choosing what seemed to look best from what Bob said was actually available. Lots of trips to surplus stores, looking at buttons and switches, poring through his catalogs looking at displays…that kind of thing. We needed as much ready-made stuff as we could find, with so much fabricating ahead of us, and only a couple of weeks to get things done. On the other hand, the whole point of the project was to deliver something different than you could buy down the street at your Pontiac dealer, or Radio Shack, for that matter.
Bob gave me samples of the breadboard he used, so I could lay out templates for the displays which would have the LEDs located on the board’s hole centers. We worked out what he thought was possible in the time we had, and a projected schedule that had a list of “druthers’ -it would be nice to sequence the engine start automatically, and the gauges should come on line in a certain order, time allowing.
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Besides making all the displays and drivers, they built a big control box which sat in the far back of the car. The instruments were controlled by a technician off-camera, so the instruments could be “driven” remotely. We had the capability to ramp up readings, which increased RPM and a number of other functions together, with RPM leading temp and pressure values. There was also a “float” to vary non-critical functions randomly within a certain range, to simulate a running engine. The speedo could run up automatically, be manually driven, or held at a certain value. All of these were for close-up inserts of the dash, and it’s still amazing to me that Bob and Richard could do all that in the time we had.
Can you remember any humorous stories about the electronics or props malfunctioning during shooting or on the set?
I was not part of the production of the show, although I visited the set a couple times. Thank God everything seemed to be going ok, although with any prop of this complexity, being used outside an insert stage, in live action, there’s a big element of risk. There wasn’t time to make a backup car. If something goes wrong, with a live-action crew waiting around, the clock is still be still running…to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a day. I do remember a few tense moments, from the time just before we turned the car over to the network…When it was all put together, it was immediately clear the displays were malfunctioning. Bob, cool-headed as ever, checked all the wiring, and realized what had happened: the voltage drop from the remote control box to the dash was excessive, and the voltage-sensitive LEDs were not getting enough power! We were getting awfully close to delivery time for the car, and there wasn’t time to order bigger guage cabling from a supplier. Bob solved this rather brilliantly by using the wiring for those low-voltage outdoor lights—which (unlike welding cable) was available at the hardware store down the street. The Designing K.I.T.T. •
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wire bundle ended up as big as your wrist, but everything worked great!
Talk about thinking on your feet…
What was used to make the detailed black bezels (with the white vertical lines and letters labels) that surrounded most of the dash LED Displays? Robin milled these from 1/8th inch (or 3/16ths?) Plexiglas, and painted them with Ultra-flat black Krylon. I made up lettering from press type—I may have shot negs and made INTs (custom rub-down transfers) for some of the readout graphics. The vertical hairlines were white graphic arts tape.
What inspired the design of having stationary button panels (or “switch- pods” as we call them) inches away from the steering wheel hand grips? It’s a natural evolution of interior design, and over the years many people have tried to get the controls closer to the wheel. Take a good look at a Citroen GS, which came out in 1970—the switchgear may not be exactly beautiful, but shows very good thinking. In one transportation design class in school, we had an IP project for Chrysler. This was all the way back in ‘77, believe it or not…
In the Seventies, Chrysler were branding themselves as the “engineering” company, and they had the hope of making some really zoomy-looking electronically controlled IPs. Why not have those crazy design-school kids throw it around a little? It was a nice idea to get away from the old pointer needles…But I have to say that a lot of the ideas we students cooked up were pretty goofy. Some owed more to the dazzling wall of unlabelled lights on the bridge of the “Seaview” (from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) than any thought of an ergonomic information display. That was just what I was hoping to avoid that with K.I.T.T.
Back in ‘77, I had tried to get the controls up next to the driver’s hands when I sketched out those dreamy ideas for the future. I dragged a couple 68
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of those old sketches along to the first meeting with Glen. I figured: what the heck; even if he hates them, they could give us something to talk about. As it turned out, they weren’t that far off the mark. Glen wanted something stylish and different, but believable, and just a step beyond what was out there. A few years later, I think Chevy offered a package on the Camaro Berlinetta that featured a couple control pods close to the wheel. That was neat to see, but Detroit lead times being what they were, they may have had that in the pipeline, unbeknownst to me, even before the time we were sanding bondo in Beverly Hills. In the pilot, there are a few scenes of the voice modulator with the words
“Knight 2000” on the voice modulator light.
We called it the My Mother the Car light, as we built the dash (from another older TV show, with Dick van Dyke). It was one of the requirements of the project, and we hoped it wouldn’t look strange to people. We needn’t have worried! They may have left the lettering off the insert dash used for subsequent shows.
What is the story behind the transition of K.I.T.T.’s voice modulator from a square red light to the three-bar LED display? I was called in to do some concept sketches for a revised “K.I.T.T..” The producers wanted to have the Universal shops and George Barris do the work this time, so the sketches were the total extent of my involvement. Those producers didn’t really have the same approach to design as Glen’s. I was flattered that they asked me back to help design the revisions, but I could see that things were different. It was kind of hard for me to see the appeal of some things that they wanted to do. It seemed to me that a lot of features they wanted were a little unbelievable. Things that overstepped the boundary between “wow, that’s cool” and “oh, come on…are you kidding?” But that’s a pretty fine line sometimes.
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I see that they did follow my ideas very closely for a couple things. The flip-up “pursuit Mode” trigger shield, for example. I thought this would be a neat combination of the joystick-mounted firing controls and the panel-mounted, shielded “Armed” switches on fighter planes. In the big picture, of course it was just a TV show, and there are limits to time and budget. But within those limits, I hoped the look of the original car would suggest that the Knight facilities had experienced designers, capable of producing a sophisticated prototype, the caliber of a factory show car. I felt all the details, from the lettering to the shapes of the instrument nacelles, should be carefully matched to the look of the car. Those things give credibility to the appearance.
The second series was clearly headed a different direction—and I only had the opportunity to make a few sketches. I had hoped to keep the feel of the design looking like a natural evolution of the earlier generation. Of course, there are many approaches to design besides sleek and futuristic…The clumsier, “kluged-together” (or built out of parts on hand) look is a lot of fun, too. It’s a nice change of pace to do something that appears to be the result of a scavenger hunt. Like the Back to
the Future Delorean—but that was another project!
I did those concept sketches I mentioned for the later car, trying to streamline things a little. They had the time and budget for the new car to think about silkscreening graphics on film for touch-sensitive panels, and also placing the lights or LEDs behind that film. The idea was to give a slicker, smoother appearance. The single-screen monitor was possible on a dash made only for an insert stage. Unlike the pilot, they were doing all the IP close-ups on an insert stage. We couldn’t afford to hack into the dash of a running car to park the back end of a longer picture tube, but they didn’t have to worry about maintaining the hvac systems of a functional car. Naturally, a bigger monitor gave superior image size, resolution, and “read” from a greater distance.
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Out of what material were the “lenses” made for the colored illuminated lights around the voice modulator (Auto Cruise, Normal Cruise, AIR, OIL, S1, S2, P1, P2 etc…)? Was the same material used for the top
“trough” lights above the voice modulator (Power, Fuel On, Min RPM, Ignitors)?
The lenses were Plexiglas (cast acrylic sheet), either clear or milk, with diffusion material behind the clear, and “gels” (pieces of hi-temp colored filtering material) added behind either one. The Plexiglas was reasonably heat-resistant, and milled or cut nicely without shattering. It presented a nice, flat plane to the eye, unlike a floppy piece of gel sitting out, exposed. The diffusion material spread the light more evenly.
I may have used litho-negs for backlit lettering in a couple places. In the old days, you could wander down the street to your friendly neighborhood graphic arts lab, and get things like this made in an hour or two. You gave them some camera-ready art (lettering in this case), and they made a negative. It was heavy clear plastic film, with the reverse of whatever artwork you gave the cameraman. So a grid of black lines and some lettering, for example, came out as a clear grid and lettering against a completely black background. If you had a five-buck sheet of press type, and about eight dollars for the camera service, you could have a beautiful instrument face, ready for backlighting, in much less than a day. Some diffusion, a little gel—presto!