October Opdate

'Allo folks, and happy spooky season!

First of all - one piece of good "surrounding life" news, and one piece of bad news in the same category.

Good news: Finally, after 3+ years, GF got her drivers license. Means I don't need to spend half of my free time teaching her, and can instead focus the efforts on the workshop. Also means she'll have more free time to help out with things in the future!

Bad news: the "big thing" mentioned previously fell through in the last minute. Seriously unfortunate. It'll cause me a lot of extra work in the short term, but I did land a solution that'll still free me in ~2-4wks.

I'll drop the "big thing" story in a separate post. When all this is over and a bit of time has passed, I'll likely delete it. I feel that I need to air it for now so y'all get a sense for why I've been a bit less workshoppy/rubbery during the... well, last 2-3 years. You've supported me throughout it, which I am ever so grateful for, and y'all deserve a bit more of an explanation. So, off to second post for that. Here, we go on to workshop things.

Workshop news:

Surprisingly much, despite the above sounding so ominous!

• Verified that the plumbers putty edge solution works just fine. Filled up to brim with water, ready for a half-test with actual rubber now.

• Resolved a sourcing issue with the primer I use for the coagulant. Previous supplier switched paint brands to one that didn't work as well. Managed to find a replacement after trawling through the various hardware/paint stores in town, so hallelujah for that.

• Prepared the mold. Assembled, polished and surfaced. It's good to go now.

• Prepared the work area for a half-body cast attempt. Cleaned, cleared stuff out, figured out how to do the actual cast, etc.

• Repackaged all the latex hood vats into jugs for more compact storage + cast-attempts with the suit rig.

• Modeled up the "production version" of the rig, according to current best thinking. Full description in future-notes below. Will sanity-check with a crafty colleague or two, then get the ball rolling on printing it while I finish experimenting with the current prototype rig.

• Was originally planning on finishing the half-suit cast attempt, but the above mentioned bad news ate every waking hour of this weekend. It's on top of the work queue now at least! Hopefully this coming weekend I'll try a proper rubber cast with it.

"Production rig":

As mentioned in previous posts, there are a few good/necessary things I've learned over the current experiments. I managed to spend a bit of time to design a new chamber that fixes them, which should finally be fully production viable. BPA (bullet point abuse) below.

• Do not print hollow pieces. Risks with durability, and can end up filled with liquid if there is the slightest leak between layer lines in a single spot on the huuuge mold. Production rig has solid, 5mm thick chamber walls plus a 10mm (either side) thick clamp wrap-around.

• Keep it to two pieces, back and front. Sealing the current one requires surprisingly much effort due to the extra "middle seams". Also, they introduce additional structural weaknesses into an already quite pressed chamber.

• Make Fucking Certain there are no negative angles that'll prevent a smooth unidirectional closing of the chamber. I don't have to explain this one, ey…

• Upped the 'margins' by 5mm across the board. Overall not a big issue, but better safe than sorry... And the arms, especially, can be tricky. Placed one of the slicing cuts a bit badly on them, resulting in me being unable to really tell if they are correctly angled or not. A few degrees off can be a few millimetres by the hand, which counts for quite a bit when there's so few to go around.

• Avoid right-angles along the edge. Made sealing properly with anything but putty borderline impossible.

• Use acrylic resin, not epoxy, to seal the surface. Out of the ones I've got, the epoxy doesn't stick to the PLA at all. Just flakes off under stress.

So while I haven't had time to go all the way with a test cast in the "prototype mold", I dare say this will make it production-viable at last. It'll also take me at least 36 days of 24h printing, and chew up a whopping 37kg of plastic costing me ~€700 or so. There's one of the main reasons why I've been reluctant to do full-sized prints earlier, but by now I reckon it's time.

Anyway, it'll take like 2 months to print, so I might as well get started early. I can work on the current prototype chamber while it prints, and worst case scenario I learn a few more things that I adapt onto the new one. Seems like a pretty okay autumn/winter crunch.

Futurenotes:

• The mold currently has detachable arms + legs. Made it so in order to be able to 'hotswitch' design changes easier, plus make removing the cast suits a bit easier. I do suspect I should skip that idea once things hit "production level", as the reassembly entails at minimum 24h wait + 4h work of extra prep time to seal the seams. Would make it more difficult to create 'leg entry' suits though, so... yeah, dunno'. I'll try for a bit before I commit.

• I'll need to revisit the paperwork setup soon, as the webshop-integration of my bookkeeping system is being decommissioned on november 15th. Not the biggest headache, but it'll still need a bit of effort. Every bit of effort saved per transaction is worth it - not just for the raw time, but for the energy threshold it creates. Will see what kind of solution I figure out.

• Webshop's still on the downlow. Up and running, but haven't restocked. Will plan for it in the near future once the ~~day job drama~~ thing in the sidepost is fully done and has settled. A few smaller upgrades to the hood production planned while I'm at it, like making the zipper installation way less cumbersome. Looking forward to it.

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A bit disjointed efforts and post content, but I suspect you'll understand why when you throw an eye at the "day job explanation" post. That's been... quite the journey. Jfc.

Anyway, rubber cast test next, and I'll get to work printing the "production mold" while I finish that!

Also, finally getting back into proper suit shape... A few more kilos to go, but that's just a month or two at this rate. I'm overjoyed, and can't wait to get back into it (literally)!

I'll end this as I always do - thank you for sticking with me and supporting the suit efforts. Hopefully I'll have a result-filled November post coming up for y'all :)