May hem

'Allo folks, and hooray it's almost summer! Y'all doing alright?

Many things are still going a bit slow whatwith the stressy job-switch and all that, but the main suit rig is still a nice therapeutic build. Plus, I've had a precursor to a heureka moment with the overall tech... More on that in a bit. 

First off, let's talk suit rig.

Pump:

- Finished the pump bladder (suit-127). Still needs to be tested though.

- Finished the lid (SUIT-121). Doesn't need to be tested quite as much :)

- Declared pump build done (SUIT-100)... 

- ...but I still need to test it properly (SUIT-133). I'll reopen and reshuffle things if there's unexpectedly big problems.

Chamber:

- Occurred to me that the rig's a bit vulnerable to long-term load deformation, whatwith only having two concentrated support stands (SUIT-132). Reinforced the bottom of the rig with a steel plate. 3mm, not very visible except from underneath, but it'll prevent stupid catastrophic faults at least. 

- Finished up the door pieces (SUIT-130), and then promptly removed the door so I can work on the chamber innards. Screwing it back on the hinges and gluing the edges later, easy enough reattachment.

- Mannequin's re-assembled and good enough for chamber design. For actual casting there's a whole load of cleanup and prep, of course, but right now I just need it to exist and weigh/occupy space.

- Got the rails sorted (SUIT-129). Not the prettiest solution atm, but it's good enough. The head is supported on a small wheeled platform that's easy to attach to the bottom for the actual cast. Top rail bar swivels enough to at least turn the mold a bit. Might rebuild it for 360* rotation if needed - we'll see if I can fit it heightwise.

- Held off on ordering the latex (SUIT-126), will do that + the PU foam (see next point) once may's salary and some expense reimbursements come in. The trouble with the hood casts kind of threw a wrench in the main plans, but eh, c'est la vie.

- Main filler blocks 'designed' with glorious cardboard molds (SUIT-124). The plan is to fill them mostly with styrofoam or other equivalently cheap carvable stuff, then fill the rest with polyfoam. Once that's done they can be carved and fitted with actual precision (and re-carved/adjusted in the future for other mannequins).

 Overall though, the filler blocks has one detail that slipped my mind: there's going to be a huge amount filler going into those blocks. 

Sample math:
The full chamber is about 880L.
The mannequin is around 90L
Upper blocks: 25*50*90 times two -> 225L.
Lower blocks: 50*25*60 times two -> 75L.
880-90-75-225 = 490L hollow space, pump fits about 250L.
-> will need to pad out another 200-300L in the back/front of the rig. Not that bad tbh, plenty of dead space behind/in front of the mannequin that can be worked with.

All in all that's going to be about 500-600L of fillers, aka ~0.5-0.6m^3. If we have a look at e.g. https://www.artsuppliesonweb.com/en/Catalogue/Polyurethane-products/Polyurethane-foam/PU-foam-hard-40-A-B-50-kg that applies towards 80-100kg/m^3 we can easily see that we're talking around 50kg of polyfoam. So yeah... Another one for the shopping list, but hopefully I can partially pad them with cheaper stuff.

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Now, the hoods. Yeah. They're giving me way more trouble than I initially expected, combined with me being sapped energy-wise for troubleshooting. It's not all doom and gloom though, so stay with me here!

For a bit of context, the molds are made out of printed plastic with 3 stacked surface coatings. The outermost one is there for its hydrophilic properties, which are needed for the coagulant-based casting. Unfortunately the triple layer complexity means it's a bit problem-prone, not to mention that the solution as a whole is kind of improvised and not quite perfect. Occasional faults, breakdowns, re-coatings needed, difficult to clean, etc.

When things go wrong from the above, there's typically fairly large defects on the cast hoods. Thin spots, lumps, edges, holes, etc. It's possible to work around them in some cases, like covering smaller lumps with tattoos etc, but all that works best for a fault-tolerant fantasy design. The 'realistic' hood design is a bit trickier, and I haven't quite wrapped my way around how to handle them. Add in the airbrush struggles and my general overworkedness and voila, there's the delay.

But... Y'know how it's been a while since I went all cutting-edge with things? I reckon it's time for that again. I was poking around journals a bit and found the following from last summer - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/admt.202100094 - and let me quote the highlight: "Adding acrylic acid to a resin containing poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate lowers the contact angle down to 0° against water creating a superhydrophilic surface."

If I can replicate that, it'll be an absolutely ridiculous boost to this project. Faster turnaround times, significantly less prep-work, higher quality casts and trivialized cleaning. Unfortunately it's not exactly a 'go down to the store and buy stuff'-situation, but rather 'source half a dozen chemical compounds from industry suppliers across the globe and go full-on chem lab in the workshop'. Haven't seen any other commercial alternatives, nor any other research with simpler materials... I'll have to start preparing, because again - holy grail. Lots of reading to do, gotta' refresh my polychem a bit and figure out how the hell I'm going to do this. 

New ticket series for it - SUIT-134 for the 'big one', SUIT-135 for just getting any kind of cast done, and SUIT-136 as the first step - researching. Also lol at how far out the deep end project-wise this is. Some people settle for crossdressing with a bit of makeup, but here we  try to source high-end medtech polymers in order to replicate recent german 3d-printing research. Life is weird sometimes :p

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That said, what's next? Let's do a bit of guesstimating.

June:
- Ordering foam & finishing up the fillers
- Finishing up the door, simple enough
- Testing the pump, also simple enough
- Crunching through the hood troubles and getting out at the very least the patreon batch
- One more patreon post with a pre-summer update towards the end of june, including a retrospective on the season 3 plans from last august. While I'm dissatisfied with the pace of progress sometimes, we've definitely passed a bunch of major milestones!

July:
- No posting, 'cuz summer vacation as usual (been at this for a while omg).
- Research & sourcing on the holy grail polymers
- Misc stuff in the workshop, probably a bunch of suit/hood work

August:
- Plan for season 4 around the middle of the month
- ??? hopefully casting suits ???

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I know the ticket maps/refs may seem odd sometimes, but just wait 'til the retro!

Again, thank you all for your support. Especially if you've made it down here. Home-stretch towards summer, here we go :)