May musings

Bonjour! Time flies, it's already been a month!

If you've kept an eye on the facebook page, you may recall reading I've been working on casts since the 'first test' of the big-rig. This is a mixed-bag-of-news type situation - I ended up shoving the rig back into storage and rebuilding the spray-casting chamber.

Why? A few factors that hit me during the testing...

• I need lateral stabilization of the mold too. It's pretty symmetric, but not quite enough to avoid issues from the slightly skewed bouyancy point. Damaged the flimsy 'first attempt' anchors from the twisting. The tricky bit with lateral stabilization is that I'll probably need to re-print the torso with dedicated anchor-points built into the model from the start.
  
• Redesigning the arms would save me a LOT of dead space and let me cut the form factor of the rig down by 40-50cm width. Their current spread out design is a remnant from the early days of spray-molding, where armpits were an accessibility issue. With full-immersion dip-molding that's not nearly as much of a problem.
  
• I should probably flip the cradle to a front-mounted one, rather than the current rear-mounted version. Would allow me to reduce the form-factor of the mold, and possibly just have a 'push-rod' or two versus pull-anchors in the back. Would make the mounting/dismounting of the mold significantly easier too.
  
• The mold could use some medium-weight filler. Right now it's displacing nearly 100L of water, which results in fairly big forces all over the place. On the other hand, a mold that's too heavy will be an absolute nightmare to wrangle around between casts. First thought was to do a hollow water-fillable mold, but if that leaks out into the latex it's a disaster. Thinking to be done.
  
• I need much more precise fillers to reduce the needed latex amounts to reasonable levels. Printing them would probably be the most realistic option. 

With other words - viable, but pretty sizeable re-prints needed for the next step. As I've got a feeling it'll be the final ones needed I am quite keen to do the 3d modeling and math properly this time around. There's also the printer health factor - I'm pretty close to the end of what my printers can take. They're around 5y old and have had over 10kh each, so they need quite a bit of finessing to run smoothly. Leaning towards upgrading the array to something from this decade before re-printing. All in all, will take me quite a while to get BigRig 2.0 done.

Considering that the arm reprint will let me redo the form-factor of the rig (and do some design adjustments), it was an easy decision to tear it down for now. Quick and easy rebuild when it's time, and then I can improve a few lingering design issues too. Doesn't explain why I rebuilt the spray-casting chamber though, does it?

That's connected to the second reason - I'm itching for results right now. It's been WAAAY too long since I had any suit output whatsoever. The brown one is from december 2020 and the white from ~feb 2021. That's over two years ago! Time has flown way too fast, and I sense that if I don't get something out soon it'll start fraying on my sanity.

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Setting up the spray-casting rig to use with the most recently printed mold was a quick ~1.5 day job, and I even got to upgrade a few problematic bits from earlier:

• Better ventilation. Previously I'd run into problems with the ammonia concentration throughout the chamber sooner or later. Can't vent it outside easily with this workshop.  Instead I modded a full-face snorkel system to grab fresh air from outside the chamber, which lets me work on things indefinitely.
  
• Bigger chamber. Previous version had shelves against one side which ate a bunch of space. Since I got that moved to the extra storage space back in ~september, I can now use the full size of the weird little alcove. Purely a quality-of-life thing.
  
• Better lighting. Lesson learned. Dedicated led strips for nice and symmetric lighting throughout the chamber.
  
• Improved paint sprayer. Previously I used what was more or less the cheapest viable one out there, with an 1.5L tank that I had to refill multiple times through a cast. Now I upgraded to a bucket-fed continuous sprayer that lets me cast all day long without refills. I also end up using a lot less latex per cast with the new sprayer.

It's a good thing I set up the spray-casts too, as it turns out I seem to have forgotten something about the coagulant coating of fullsuits. Done a whopping three cast attempts already, but I get recurring surface issues (see image) in roughly the same spots. Gritty pattern and way too thin, no real coagulated layer. It's probably related to the spraying of the coagulant, versus the small-scale bucket dipping. Some troubleshooting to be done, and genuinely quite fascinated over the symptoms. 

Hopefully I can figure out the issue and get the casting going there before summer hits. Shouldn't be too tricky, the reset-time between casts is fairly short when I scrap them early. I'm doing this with 2+ years more experience now, might be that I can get the spraycasting good enough for prototypes to the people?

Regardless of method though, there's one sub-project I'll have to deal with soon. Mask movement. The method I used on the old suits with foam latex just isn't viable for distribution - a very problematic combo of fragile and time-consuming to make. I'm thinking that once I have the spraycasts going and the torment of no-suits-being-cast is over I'll spend a bit of time on R&D with the hood-rig. With the new spraying method I can use the same latex vats, so perfect color matching is a thing. I'll try a few ideas on the hoods, and if it works nicely I can cast them separately and attach them after the suitcast.

Hood tech design ideas will show up in a later post :p

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So, what next?

• One more update in june, then the usual july vacation and august plan/roadmap post
• Main aim for the june post is to figure out the coagulant issue and get one successful cast out. Start off the autumn with a clean mental slate, so to say.

Until then - I've said it before, I'll say it again, your support is ever so appreciated. Feel like I've been workshop gremlin'ing for ages, and it really helps to have y'all with me on the project :)

PS: Annoyingly enough I've got some day-job drama brewing right now too, so it'll be a bit of a balancing act up until the summer. Hopefully it'll pass over soon so I can get back into the groove of things.