April aupdate

'Allo folks! Been a hectic month with way too much business travel for the day job, but there's a decent bit of progress between the train station coffees!

(pics pretty representative of my workshop life recently~)

Suit-rig newsbits

• spent a day cleaning up the edges and just making it more workable. The whole thing is still humongous and takes 30+ screws to open up, but at least now there's fewer sharp edges :)

• tried insulation liner - works pretty well, but risks coming loose and any issues will simply be unfixable during cast-time. Can't really fill out the irregularly shaped gaps either. Scrapped.

• tried melting clay as liner. Cheap, simple and reusable. Doesn't work. Only takes a small and invisible adhesion-issue somewhere along the sealed edge and you've got a leak that can't really be fixed during cast-time. Also, even the slightest jostling of the mold risks loosening the seal.

• Tried the old rusty-trusty silicone caulk. Works pretty well, but with a few downsides. Curing time is an issue, and it'll require cutting to open later. It's my hope that the combo of those two will result in an easy-re-sealing scenario. Just slather on a thin layer of differently colored caulk across the cut... cures quickly and easy to re-cut?

I still haven't had the chance to try filling the mold fully, but that's not far away. I have to do a little bit of carpentry and/or plumbing, make a roof-near pouring rig that can also hold the waiting liquid on a shelf or something. We're talking 50-60 litres that needs to be poured at an even rate, not too keen on handling that with pure muscle in such a delicate scenario.

After that... Well, full plan including the above, and assuming all bits work:

• build the pouring system

• triple-check the durability, reinforce wherever needed

• test-fill full mold

• finish surfacing the mannequin mold

• get the finished mannequin in place and prepped

• CAST!

Hell yeah, almost there! We'll see how much I manage before the May post!

Other stuff

In other news, suitworks.se is up again!

• switched to Shopify from a local swedish provider (quickbutik). Support your locals and all that, but by now it's half the price and double the features... Alas.

• hooked up some bookkeeping automation to the shop, should save me a bit of time

• dug around for post-handling automation too... There is some, but unfortunately via a paid plugin, and mostly makes sense if combined with a specific postal label printer. If things ever take off volume-wise to a silly degree it might be worth it. Right now I reckon it's survivable with doing that stuff manually at least.

• did a preliminary dig-around on hooking up print-on-demand-posters/schwag to the store too. Obviously not a primary thing, but eh, might be a fun side-load. I'll sort out the details once I've gotten the basic hood production fully up and running again.

I'll try to get the production machines running this/next weekend too, set them up for both a few restocks and maybe try out 'made on order' as a concept. Considering the huge variety of models/sizes/colors/features you can get even with just two 'base models' it'll more or less be needed if things are to be manageable.

I did also get some great measurements and production pointers for the makeup paintjobs (hi astolfo!!) that I'll put into practice. Had some variations on the lip paint between batches - needs a bit of standardization. I'm honestly quite tempted to try the 'decal' concept on the brown-with-black-paint models while I'm at it, might work better there than the lighter-skinned ones I tried earlier. Much easier production, might give a more crisp look, but not sure it'll look right.

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That said, that's all for this round. Gonna' be stationary for the next few weeks and hopefully get the mold at least test-filled, which has me pretty excited. Also a bit of hands-on with the hoods again!

You all know the cliche-sounding but true wrap-up words - thank you again for all the support, y'all are keeping me sane throughout all the work :)

Did I gloss over something interesting? Comments, DMs and all that!