Awalon
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April aupdate
🕑 Added 2024-04-24 15:33:20 +0000 UTC'Allo folks! Been a hectic month with way too much business travel for the day job, but there's a decent bit of progress between the train station coffees!
(pics pretty representative of my workshop life recently~)
Suit-rig newsbits
spent a day cleaning up the edges and just making it more workable. The whole thing is still humongous and takes 30+ screws to open up, but at least now there's fewer sharp edges :)
tried insulation liner - works pretty well, but risks coming loose and any issues will simply be unfixable during cast-time. Can't really fill out the irregularly shaped gaps either. Scrapped.
tried melting clay as liner. Cheap, simple and reusable. Doesn't work. Only takes a small and invisible adhesion-issue somewhere along the sealed edge and you've got a leak that can't really be fixed during cast-time. Also, even the slightest jostling of the mold risks loosening the seal.
Tried the old rusty-trusty silicone caulk. Works pretty well, but with a few downsides. Curing time is an issue, and it'll require cutting to open later. It's my hope that the combo of those two will result in an easy-re-sealing scenario. Just slather on a thin layer of differently colored caulk across the cut... cures quickly and easy to re-cut?
I still haven't had the chance to try filling the mold fully, but that's not far away. I have to do a little bit of carpentry and/or plumbing, make a roof-near pouring rig that can also hold the waiting liquid on a shelf or something. We're talking 50-60 litres that needs to be poured at an even rate, not too keen on handling that with pure muscle in such a delicate scenario.
After that... Well, full plan including the above, and assuming all bits work:
build the pouring system
triple-check the durability, reinforce wherever needed
test-fill full mold
finish surfacing the mannequin mold
get the finished mannequin in place and prepped
CAST!
Hell yeah, almost there! We'll see how much I manage before the May post!
Other stuff
In other news, suitworks.se is up again!
switched to Shopify from a local swedish provider (quickbutik). Support your locals and all that, but by now it's half the price and double the features... Alas.
hooked up some bookkeeping automation to the shop, should save me a bit of time
dug around for post-handling automation too... There is some, but unfortunately via a paid plugin, and mostly makes sense if combined with a specific postal label printer. If things ever take off volume-wise to a silly degree it might be worth it. Right now I reckon it's survivable with doing that stuff manually at least.
did a preliminary dig-around on hooking up print-on-demand-posters/schwag to the store too. Obviously not a primary thing, but eh, might be a fun side-load. I'll sort out the details once I've gotten the basic hood production fully up and running again.
I'll try to get the production machines running this/next weekend too, set them up for both a few restocks and maybe try out 'made on order' as a concept. Considering the huge variety of models/sizes/colors/features you can get even with just two 'base models' it'll more or less be needed if things are to be manageable.
I did also get some great measurements and production pointers for the makeup paintjobs (hi astolfo!!) that I'll put into practice. Had some variations on the lip paint between batches - needs a bit of standardization. I'm honestly quite tempted to try the 'decal' concept on the brown-with-black-paint models while I'm at it, might work better there than the lighter-skinned ones I tried earlier. Much easier production, might give a more crisp look, but not sure it'll look right.
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That said, that's all for this round. Gonna' be stationary for the next few weeks and hopefully get the mold at least test-filled, which has me pretty excited. Also a bit of hands-on with the hoods again!
You all know the cliche-sounding but true wrap-up words - thank you again for all the support, y'all are keeping me sane throughout all the work :)
Did I gloss over something interesting? Comments, DMs and all that!
