November news

'Allo folks - another month, another update!

I'll be blunt and say that it's been a slow month workshop-wise. First half of November was angsting and working on the whole day-job liability exit thing, then once that completed successfully on the 14th there's been a lot of wall-staring. Still feels weird that 7 years of stress and/or headache is over.

I do however have a decent Christmas holiday coming up this year. "Salary taker's year" with all the holidays being on weekdays, lucky us ey? Perfect timing to recover from all this and get the workshop going again. Three more weeks to go...!

As part of the holiday recovery, no December update post. Heads-up. Next update in January - will give me a chance to get the posts back to early/middle-of-month too.

That said, haven't been idle in the workshop in November. Just less than I'd hoped :)

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Suit rig

• Prints for the upgraded chamber are coming along nicely. Roughly 30% done. At this rate it'll best-case-scenario take until the end of ~January, so...

• ...I ordered 2 more printers so I can get back to a 2x2 array, and a set of 0.6mm-nozzles for faster prints. If we're going to be chewing more prints of this scale in the future (which we want to do!) it's worth the investment.

  • Should've gotten them earlier in the month... but when the printers were getting shipped from Germany to Sweden, DHL decided to send them to Norway and lose track of them. Wtf?
    Luckily Elegoo's customer support handled it nicely. They sent me two new parcels and will try to track and return the old ones. Plus one on the recommend-o-meter. New ones arriving this upcoming week.

• Cleaned out and sealed the detachable arms+legs on the mannequin mold, and working on getting the surface re-done for it. Too much hassle per cast with them detachable, plus the constant small breaks when jostling during this experimentation phase. We'll just have to live without leg-entry suits (and instead actually get the regular back-entry ones actually produced!).

This brings us up to the following todo-list on the suit rig:

• (most important but optional for some things: finish the new chamber print + assemble it)

• Figure out how to get the chamber-emptying drainage system to be less janky. Drainage obviously needs to be down at the bottom of the chamber, and I can't get the chamber lifted more than ~5cm due to roof height restrictions in the casting corner. Guessing I'll need to build some sort of big-but-shallow tub and do a bit of scooping while it's draining.

• Finish the surfacing on the mold after the arm+leg perma-attachment. A bit of sanding and painting.

• Run a partial latex-fill test to make sure there's no weird surprises.

• Cast things

We'll see how the plan holds up, ey? I can probably do most of the testing on the current prototype chamber, but it's quite clearly not going to hold up for full-filled production. Assembling the new one will be a fun task too, whatwith all the details to get right and reinforcements to add. Workload requirements aside, fuck yeah, this is it.

Hoods etc

Another important thing I'll spend a bit of time on during the holidays: getting the hood production going again. Out of brown painted ones and running low on black ones from the earlier production run.

Besides the basics of 'start the machinery' and 'do a bunch of casts' I feel this is the time to upgrade some of my methods/strategies too.

• Try switching to back-lacing as a default option, to make the hood fit more adjustable.

• Make a bunch of jigs and custom clamps to render the lacing/zipper installation easier and standardized.

• Pre-attach the lacing to hoods before initial packaging. Currently 80% of orders are with zipper, so might as well drop the non-zip option and save that for write-ins. The current method, where I have to attach the zip on order, means each order causes me a small scheduling headache. It'll be nice to get that resolved.

Feels like this should be achievable during the holidays, assuming I get all the material sourced beforehand. I'm going to leave the "make on demand" I've speculated on for later and try to minimize the stress for now.

Spring plans

I'm probably going to aim for the following during Q1Q2;

• Suit casting rig, handle it as it comes along. Hopefully get it working -> some testable output.

• Keep the hood production going and models/sizes stocked. Maybe add a new standard color.

• Get a bit of own suiting/outings going again, 'cause the best product testing is self-testing.

• Weeklyposting on the main pages again

I'm also hoping to get going on one of the current 'bigger upgrades';

• Product

  • Start prototyping the "fake mouth" gag/kinematic thing that I've been wanting to try making for ages.

  • Figure out eye-lenses & nose-tubes for that kinky TE-factor

• Production

  • Switch hood casting from vat-dipping to chamber-filling. Should let me hotswap colors and require much less buffer liquid.

  • Upgrade the ventilation and switch up to a better resin -> get resin printed molds going

  • Try casting from negatives. Details TBD. Resin print? Ceramic shell? TBD, but similar benefits as chamber-filling~

  • Try making foam latex molds with the newer printer tech -> see if I can incorporate into hood production somehow.

Main prio will of course be the aims, and these upgrade things are all on some sort of "if there is time/energy" basis. Luckily after the whole dayjob startup drama cleanup those resources ought to be a lot more plentiful!

Tempted to look into making some new models, but inspiration isn't quite there for that yet. Feels like I need to tick off a few of the 'upgrade' boxes first.

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Since the next update will be ~mid-January, let me pre-emptively wish you all merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy new year and all the other seasonal things that hit us in December/January. Fingers crossed I'm not jinxing anything by saying "2025 is going to be the Year of the Suit"~

Thank you yet again for the continued support, especially during this turbulent period. Until next time y'all!

(ps: you know the drill, DM/comments always welcome if I gloss over something interesting)