April adventures

'Allo folks, how's life?! 

It's been a hectic month, but good progress on the big project at least. As usual a mix of the todo-map, photos and text!

Before we get into the suit rig progress, smaller summaries on workshop-relevant stuff:

- During last week I successfully "resigned" from what I affectionately called day-job-#2, aka another 10-15h/week due to small-firm-and-pandemic. Towards summer and on I'll be back to a survivable 8h/day of work at last. Obviously going to be a big boon for the latex projects, and oh lord how I look forward to it! With a bit of luck and timing the suit-rig will be done by then too :)

- (SUIT-122) Hoods, mold warmup & skin-toned stuff taking longer than I'd hoped. Patreon drops will come asap, but I've had to focus on the 'big rig' and surviving work over the last month. Now that I've offloaded some of the job angst from my shoulders + gotten the suit-rig to where it needs to be, I hope to get the hoods flowing again. It'll also help when the big-rig is mostly built so it doesn't physically block access to the hood stuff :p

- (SUIT-128) Fixed the workshop power supply. Janky auto-fuses ftl.

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Now then, big-rig. It's gotten most of my workshop attention lately - honestly partly because by now the build is relatively straightforward and just requires a whole bunch of carpentry/crafting. Much easier to balance that with the currently-but-not-much-longer stressful day-job load than trying to do creative hood-work and figuring out new designs (plus, no kidding, the big-rig WIP takes up so much space that I can barely make other stuff while it's still mid-build).

Major milestones since last round;

- (SUIT-123) Got the elevation stands in place. Once everything's hooked up the main chamber should now gravity-drain itself, saving me the trouble of building a high-powered suction pump.

- (SUIT-125) Got the drawbridge door built. However silly it may sound, there's good reasons for specifically this design. It gives me a constant-height table or whatevertocallit that I can prep the mold on prior to sliding it into the chamber. Plus, it lets me add tarp "curtains" that I can then fold up on the outside after closing it, guaranteeing it won't leak. Alternatively I can try to seal the door without 'em and not have to worry about it hanging crooked etc, but that'll be a maybe for later. We'll see how the curtain plan works out first.

- (SUIT-108) Figured out the plumbing. Can't say I found the best supplier (tips appreciated), but one of the local HW stores had a decent enough selection of tubing and brass bits. 19mm PVC tubing from the pump to the chamber should be okay enough flow-wise - can always up it if I need more flow. It's a bit of a balancing act though, too thick of a tube and all of a sudden there's a huge amount of latex wasted in just filling the transfer tube.

- (SUIT-127) Built the pump core, aka the bladder. 300L and fairly robust and reinforced, should survive getting deformed as part of the pumping action. I'll be finishing it up by attaching it to the lid shortly...

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So, what next?

- (SUIT-131) Build a hatch into the pump lid. Gotta' be able to fill, stir and filter things after all. If it wasn't for the fact that it needs to be leak-proof it'd be trivial, but not that big of a challenge. Perfect use for some of the acrylic glass I've got sitting on my "misc materials" shelf.

- (SUIT-130) Add the curtain system to the casting chamber. As explained above, final bit in liquid-proofing the chamber.

- (SUIT-129) Build the mold mover system. Roof railing's already got the basics in place, but I need something on the 'floor' to both support it while moving and allow me to anchor it in place for when it's casting time. Tricky for two reasons - door-floor and the need for fillers on said door-floor.

- (SUIT-124) ...speaking of which, I need to make the fillers. Without them the chamber's good for upwards 1000L, which is clearly a problem. During CAD'ing it was relatively easy to get that down to 200-250L, so that'll be the target. With the way the chamber's built it's relatively easy to add attachment points, so with a few boxes and/or foam-filled plastic bags it should be relatively straightforward and even possible to have interchangeable fillers. Much easier to design everything when I've got the mold mounted though, so it'll have to go on the todo-queue.

- (SUIT-126) Order all the damn latex. It's time to empty the accounts and get a ridiculous amount of liquid latex for this thing. I've got around 70L in cans here right now, and with the guesstimated ~250L mentioned above... Yeah, I reckon I'll have to safe it and snag another 220L or so. The hoods will eat through a surprisingly large amount when I get to making them, and it'd suck to end up short in the big-rig.

- Besides all the above, I'll need to start testing with live liquid in the system. I'm sure there'll be some snag that'll need solving.

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It's been tough to estimate things whatwith the day job situation going a bit haywire, but I reckon I should be able to get the big things done by end of may at least. Finish the pump, curtains, mold mounting and fillers - plus the latex ordering. We'll see which side of the may patreon post things end up on. 

Overall, I'm glad to see the goalposts at last. We're on the home stretch here. If all this works out, we'll at last be able to make suits with a better quality-vs-production-cost balance. From there it'll be fairly straightforward to make differently sized molds and tweak things further. Less "enormous crazy inventions" and more "experiment with adjustments here and there". 

Again, thank you all for helping out on this crazy series of projects! You know the drill - did I gloss over something? Miss something obvious? All feedback is welcome!