It’s been nearly nine months since The Wand Company unveiled its plans to recreate the classic Star Trek tricorder as a fully-interactive electronic prop replica — following its similar Original Series communicator and phaser products — and as Spring rolls in, the company has shared some updates on how this major undertaking is progressing.
A few weeks ago, company director Chris Barnardo released an initial statement about the tricorder replica’s long development time — the first comments about the project since last July’s announcements — promising more to come as the weeks and months ahead continue.
[You] have been patient, but now an update is long overdue. Work progresses well on the development as we overcome the challenges of creating an exact Tricorder replica that functions properly and is a worthy companion to our Phaser and Communicator. I know that you are going to have hundreds of questions and I hope that these emails, with news and tidbits of development chitchat, will answer most (if not all) of them, as we concentrate our efforts to get this Tricorder manufactured and into your hands.
Remember that we are a very small team and are hugely grateful for your patience, so bear that in mind if we don’t have time to answer every question. We can assure you that, as fans ourselves, we are as desperate as you to see this wonderful version of the Tricorder working for fans around the world as soon as possible.
I know that we have left you hanging, but I also know that you believe (rightly so) that this is because The Wand Company will not knowingly compromise on the details that make our Tricorder something that you will love, as we leave no stone unturned in our quest to make this the best ever functional replica, which is taking a bit more of our time and concentration that we had bargained for.
Over the coming weeks, we are now at last ready to take you on a journey through space and time as, bit by bit, we unravel the steps we have taken to bring this iconic piece to life. So wherever you call home on this pandemic-ravaged planet of ours, I hope you will be able to sit back and enjoy the story as it unfolds.
As part of the first early-March update, Bernardo shared this CAD file illustrating the guts of the planned tricorder replica, teasing fans that it offers “a sneak preview of some of the details and functions” that the finished product will contain.
Following up on that promise for future updates, The Wand Company team shared a lengthy behind-the-scenes breakdown of how they’re utilizing the last remaining original Wah Chang-designed tricorder props from the Original Series — owned by Star Trek film and television series modelmaker Greg Jein, perhaps most famous for building the Enterprise-D and other classic Next Generation models.
Greg’s tricorder is one of the two originals that were made by the late, great, Wah Chang in June 1966, long before anyone knew how enduring Star Trek and his prop designs were to become… the one in Greg’s collection is the “Wah A-B” (so-called because parts of the original two “A” and “B” units were swapped around after Season 1).
Meeting in late 2019 (luckily, before the pandemic would have made such efforts a daunting challenge), Jein shared his original screen-used tricorder with the company for laser 3D scanning and other examination processes to serve as base reference material for The Wand Company’s efforts.
The 3D scanning of inanimate objects is more accurately performed with either a laser scanner or a “structured light” scanner. For the tricorder, we used a Hexagon Metrology system comprising a ROMER Absolute Arm with an RS3 laser scanning head. The arm is balanced to enable the operator to move the laser scanner smoothly around the subject, and contains seven precision encoders to keep track of the exact position of the scanning head.
As reflective surfaces (such as metal and glass) do not scan well, before the scanning could start, the glossiest parts of this priceless prop were gently spray-coated with a scary-looking but, everyone was assured, totally harmless self-vanishing 3D-scanning spray. Greg oversaw this process to make sure that the prop wasn’t damaged.
Under Greg’s patient and watchful eye, the laser scanner’s 65 mm long blade of red light ‘painted’ over the surface geometry of the tricorder, rapidly measuring the distance from the scanning head to the surface 4,600 times per line, plotting highly accurate positional coordinates that stitched together to build up a three-dimensional point cloud of the tricorder’s surface. On a nearby laptop, a 3D image seemed to appear out of thin air as more and more of the surface was scanned.
After checking with Greg that doing so would not damage the prop, Andrew opened the tricorder’s top and bottom doors to peer inside. As expected, the top compartment was almost completely lacking in internal features. Those details – the rack of “memory discs” and the circular moiré element – known now only from what can be seen in first season screencaps, are long gone.
At some point in the summer of ’67 after the end of Season 1, the production team decided that they needed more tricorder props. The two original masterpieces were taken apart so that copies could be made and, in the process, the original props were damaged and eviscerated, with the original guts now lost forever. Opening the lower door revealed some slightly more interesting details, which Andrew has since been keen to include in our replica.
The 3D scan data is a fantastic resource for guiding our CAD modelling, but we also took as many physical measurements as possible. The measurements provide a good old-fashioned control reference and, equally importantly, handling these classic props always brings us closer to understanding the original designer’s intent. Studying these incredible items with our own hands and eyes helps us to bond with them and become immersed in their story, in a more powerful way than just watching a 3D scan emerge on a computer screen.
The 30-micron (just over one-thousandth of an inch) accuracy of the 3D scan data is great for the overall geometry, but even finer resolution is needed to analyse the surface texture of the black Kydex material from which most of the tricorder’s body is made.
We had already studied this material when developing our Star Trek Communicator replica, and had been generously loaned a piece of the original 1960s Kydex by HeroComm, which we had been able to scan with a Zygo 3D surface profiler which uses white-light interferometry to measure the surface undulations with an incredible 1-nanometer resolution (a strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers thick!).
However, to check the way that Wah Chang’s vacuum-forming process might have stretched the Kydex texture in different regions of the tricorder, we took a few silicone rubber impressions of the surface. For further reference, we weighed the tricorder and, of course, measured the geometry of the strap and its stitching
While there’s still no formal release date or pricing set for The Wand Company’s tricorder prop replica, Bernardo notes that there is still “quite a bit of the story to come” as the months ahead progress towards a reveal of the final product.
Last summer, the company said they were targeting a price point of around $250 USD — quite the bargain for such a replica, as anyone in the collecting arena will tell you — but as more specifics arrive about their final offering, you can be sure we’ll share them here.
If you’re interested in this classic Star Trek tricorder prop replica, you can register on The Wand Company’s website for more news on the project, and preorder availability, as things move closer to fruition.
