Welcome to Project Dalek!   The best advice I can give you is read, read, read. Read builds about your favorite Dalek, read the answers to frequently asked questions, and buy and read the Dalek Builders' Workshop Manual - it gives the answers to the how questions, while the plans give you the "what size?" answers. This site is an amazing resource, but it is HUGE. Thankfully, you have time look around and to see how a few other builders went about creating their Daleks before you are ready to start yours.

Wow! Thank you for the great explanations. It is looking really good.

This will be my fourth Dalek build since I started making my first one last year and more than likely the last one, as I am running out of space to store them all. But I have decided to make a blue one based on the blue Daleks. Here is a Photoshop line-up to show you what I am aiming for.   I have already started having got the dome skirt and shoulders ready and the collar has been made using foamx board which is brilliant for this task and easy to cut with a Stanley knife and very bendy. I've also made the claw and the gun ready to put on the gazing balls. Having already made three Daleks it's getting a lot easier to make them plus the fact that my friend has all the moulds for the other parts so that saves a lot of work. Ok here are some pictures to show you where we are at... The claw has a metal tube running through the first section with a perspex circle screwed into a fitting that holds it in place you simply pull it from the back end of the tube and it shuts down the spring-loaded claws. I printed out a holder for the claws and the claws as well after knocking it up in blender. More progress as I get to work on Dalek Oracle my fourth Dalek thanks to Project Daleks wonderful site.  

The frosted acrylic tube and the 5mm LED strips arrived. Decided to change the internal tube that holds the LED's so it has rings around it cut out where the LEDS are so now looks like.     The 5mm LED strips use the same LED's as the narrow 2.7mm ones and with the same spacing. I managed to remove the steel tube and replace it with the frosted acrylic tube. So below is a taster for what it looks like when together but it stops as can't draw enough current, so i need to provide the power to it separately which is what I had to do before anyway. I just lost my cable to do it somewhere in this mess in my room.     We need more power Scotty 🙂   I also wrote the code to drive the eye shaft up and down from the linear potentiometer on my voice modulator. Had a few issues with dead zones on the potentiometer and also in the ESP32 ADC as well 😞 But I will get around it by getting a slightly long linear potentiometer so can avoid the dead zones.     I also fixed the bug in my voice modulator configuration screen, it now saves the changed value correctly and if you go back in later  on you will see the updated values. it was a silly little bug, I was calling the wrong display method 🙂