June jumpstart

Bonjour folks! Another month, another set of progress. I've had most of June off from the day job, and will have a pretty relaxed work pace during July. Suit rig is getting a lot of focus, so let's jump straight to it.

Suit rig stuff

When we last left off on the rig I was about to water-test it. Well, I did. I also did a liquid latex test with it.

Upsides:

• The liquid filling/draining system worked perfectly. Will probably have a few improvements later, but it's definitely good enough for now.

• The upgraded mannequin mold with thicker walls and more infill hits the spot. The walls let me adjust the tolerances on all the plugs so they fit just perfectly.

• The plumbers putty (aka 'sanitetskitt', wtf Sweden) handles water leaks pretty well and allows for reasonably quick and easy plugging.

Downsides:

• Turns out my experience about latex leaks being easy to plug is only valid for low-pressure/volume leaks. F'ing difficult to live-plug a leak with tens of litres feeding it at high pressure. This includes plumbers putty not working well with latex.

So... Yeah. That's annoying. With the current setup requiring re-doing the seal for each cast there is guaranteed to be some missed spots every single time.

At least the other parts of the system worked perfectly, so I can simply keep them and focus on the one remaining troublesome part. For the chamber I'm going to do a two-pronged approach:

  1) A quick 'leak practice rig' that'll let me experiment with sealing leaks in a controlled fashion. Doesn't have the sheer volume and pressure of the actual rig itself, but I reckon it'll be reproducible enough for janky solutions to reveal themselves. I'm going to spend some workshop downtime during July trying out various ideas to see if one of them hits the spot.

  2) I started CAD'ing a printed chamber. Because fuckit, it's time to go all-in on this. Details below.

So, CAD'ed chamber... obvious questions:

• Why not a CADed chamber from the start?

   One word: money. Printing a full chamber is quite expensive at €500+ per round, and for a long time I was VERY uncertain about how to do the design. I really did not want to re-print a full chamber several times. Now on the other hand I've gotten a bunch of design and prototyping experience, so I reckon I can get the major design aspects right in one go.

• What will the CADed chamber fix?

   The main resolved issue is the leaks caused by janky seam edges and uneven screw placements. I can simply design all the seams to have nice, big and flat edges that can easily be proofed with a gasket liner, and the screws can easily be placed flat along them. To my knowledge this is the last remaining major issue for the entire casting rig, so let's get it done!

There's a few other benefits to the CADing too. Most notably the precision and resource-efficiency it allows for in the actual casting process. In short, the surface area of the mannequin mold is pretty much exactly 2sqm. Finding the golden spot of weight and tolerances is pretty straightforward - and I landed on a 15mm gap between chamber and mold, which results in roughly 30 litres of liquid required. In reality it's more due to e.g. the hands having negative angles that need adjustment. Still though, even if we say 40L, that's a very manageable amount and weight for the rig.

Once I have the design done and printers started I'm guessing it'll be around two weeks to print and assemble it, so fits nicely into July. Should hopefully be able to present the results with the next monthly post (which tbh I don't like doing late in the month, but...)

What's next?

• Finish the CADing asap, get the printers going. Screw placements, pipe and liner slots, etc.

• While printers are going during July, experiment with leak sealing.

• (if viable, test the previous chamber with discovered leak sealing method?)

• Assemble printed chamber (ETA second half of July?) and test it immediately.

Other stuff

Shop is up and plodding along, but still haven't done a refill. Slightly too much of a struggle with the rig that keeps eating my energy. I'm probably going to do a push on it towards late July when I've gotten the CAD-rig assembly done.

Besides restocking and/or trying out made-on-order things, I reckon I'll do a bunch of preparation work and e.g. keep 10 pre-glued zippers in stock at all times. It's waay fiddly preparing them on order, as I am currently doing. I'm also itching to try out a whole slew of new hood designs, but yeah, big suit rig gets my focus until it actually works.

On a completely different note too, I'm working on getting back in shape for rubbering up in the autumn. Day job stress during last year and all that. Feels good to finally be able to put most of that behind me and get back into things that are slightly more fun :)

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Until next time though, yet again - thank you all for the continued support. You help keep me sane, and with a project this nutty that's very much needed! You know the drill on DMs/comments, feedback always welcome!