Frantic february

Whoey, this was a rough month. A mix of the day jobs eating me alive and the workshop stuff not quite going fully as planned (grounded a phase late on a saturday, 2 full workshop-days wasted on fixing it, boo).

For a bit of context on the whole 'eaten alive by the day job'-thing, my usual weeks look like...

40h job1
10-20h job2
10-20h workshop

My long term goal is to swap that to 0-0-40, i.e. sustainably work fulltime on the suit projects. Right now I'm working my ass off on reducing job2 to 0 in a good way before summer. It's a long story, but the effort should be worth it for the suit workshop plans in the long run. I'll tell all about it someday :)

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So, anyway, what's the status on things you ask? 

Hoods and related small-cast stuff:
- new hood models (SUIT-83), printed and done - finishing them up in all the usual 5 sizes this week. Probably going to spend half of march casting things at this rate :)
- updated fancy elf hoods with tattoos and whatnot (SUIT-122), still on the queue for the casting frenzy in march. Done some minor prep-tweaks to the laser patterns and managed to source some better glue brushes though!

New suit rig
- Swapped supplier (20% cheaper yo) and started stocking up on the needed latex (SUIT-126). 80/260L, getting the rest as we go along
- Experimented & scored a glue that works perfectly on the tarpaulin liner for the main rig (SUIT-105). Can cut down and handle the pieces separately then, big win for ease-of-development.
- finished the core chamber (SUIT-104, sans folding door structure)
- tweaked pump design a bit and assembled the core mechanics (SUIT-109)
- finished up the electronics for the pump (SUIT-110, programming tweaks still needed though)

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Okay, what now then?

What's next for the hoods is probably obvious. It gets a bit more interesting for the suit rig - the path to victory grows ever clearer.

- Plumbing (SUIT-108) is very much needed at this stage. Not for actual use, but for design experimentation and validation of the overall design concept. Once I'm able to verify that it works as expected I can finalize the pump construction (bladder+lid-mounted valve). Haven't had to source this kind of stuff before, so hooray internet/hardware store trawling.
- finish the pump build (SUIT-100, bladder + lid with mounted plumbing). Yeah, not much to say beyond what's above.
- Moving furniture around in the casting room (SUIT-121). As mentioned in the previous post, I need to elevate the chamber about 50cm from floor height to exploit gravity in the post-cast drainage. Unfortunately the current spot has plumbing in the roof (basement, go figure) so I need to shift stuff around. The only viable spot currently has my fairly large 'raw materials storage', shelves and stuff... so it'll be at least 1-2 full days to get this stuff shifted. Hurgh.
- Build/buy/fix elevated table/stand (SUIT-123). 50cm, ok, sure, how bad could it be? Well... It's going to carry 250-300kg of holyshit-expensive and disaster-if-leaks liquid, and it has to accomodate the drainage plumbing somewhere in the middle of the chamber bottom. Nontrivial, but eh, I have ideas.
- Make fillers (SUIT-124). For those of you who have done the math and forgotten my design post, 260L is way too little for a human-sized chamber... unless I fill the dead space with something. Will take a bit of work and tweaking to get it right, but I've got all the tools and materials I need.
- build the door (SUIT-125). My initial thought was to source some heavy-duty ziploc and just zip it shut, but that's turning out to be difficult and/or risky. Same with attempting to leak-proof the wooden door - probably doable, but holyshit disaster if it fails. I'm going for the origami strategy instead - extend the enormous tarp liner outwards, add a core structure, and then just fold the surplus tarp behind it. Guaranteed leakproof, plus gives an okay working space for the mold while it's out. Except for the fact that the chamber needs to be elevated 50cm, which means the origami idea all of a sudden needs a bit of extra planning... Funfun.

As you can probably tell, I'm going to have a busy month. Sourcing plumbing (SUIT-108) + finishing pump (SUIT-100) + moving things around (SUIT-121) have the highest prio, rest'll be best-effort in whatever time I have left.

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Strange sidenote, got contacted by a guy who wanted to vaguely 'invest' in the suit project. While I'm skeptical until there's a combination of money on the table and business sense in the dialogue, it did get me thinking a bit more about the numbers involved. Might be interesting for y'all to know what your support helps with. So, without further ado, a few back-of-envelope-numbers around this project:

- current tiny workshop rental/month: $300
- one new color vat for the small casting rig: $500
- larger workshop rental/month: $1000 (estimated)
- new suit rig, material costs incl. latex: $6000
- printer array upgrade/refresh (needed in a year or two when more full-body molds are on the agenda): $7000
- One full time assistant at ~minimum wage for a year: ~$30k

Pretty obvious where all my day-job money is going, ey? I can typically spread out the bigger one-time things over a couple of months and manage, but the running costs and their contractual obligations are a bit worse. Most of it boils down to time in one way or another.

Typical example - bigger workshop (27sqm -> 70-100sqm). Needed and would help with a lot of things, but it's a contractually binding big jump in costs over several years. To comp for that I'll either need to daytime-work more (defeats the point), produce more sellable stuff (needs an assistant/lots of time) or increase margins per time unit of work (reqs finished suit R&D aka spent time + sustainable sales, or other type of income e.g. media production). I'll get past this one way or another, but it'll be a long journey.

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On a final note - as mentioned in previous posts, I have now recorded the lifetime support status as of today. I'll ping those of you over $50 in the upcoming days and sort out sending of thankyou-hoods (single color black/brown/skintone, elf/newmodel) straight from the lab for those who want 'em! 

Again, thank you all for your support on this strange and unique project - next update in the middle of march :)