June junk #2!

Technically july now, but belated june post before the summer sabbathical!

Q2 was... brutal. Urgh. I've got serious abstinence going for workshopping the interesting things again! The production system issues definitely ate my life - the original plan was to finish it in late march, and I think y'all know how that went. Sometimes I miss just crafting with existing techniques, but then I remember that there's way too many technical gaps for our purposes. Gotta' tech up for magnificent masks and suits!

There's a lot of plans and hopes for the next season, among other things attempting a workshop upgrade. I've started laying some groundwork for bringing in help too, thus the behind-the-scenes-picture accompanying this post. It's kind of fun trying to nail down what I'm actually doing design-wise. No actual concrete plans for additional people, but I've had a few training sessions with friends. We'll see how it works out, still need the production system to function before there's any point in dragging people into the workshop for reals.

On that topic, I've been testing out the hopefully 'final' version now a bit, and so far so good. Moved from an 'upside down' cast that somehow generated a crapload of microbubbling to a 'right side up' method. The tricky bit was getting the molds attached to the rig in a way that's easy to maintain. In the end a steel plate and some plastic sockets did the trick, but it was a damn journey :)

Doing the usual summer sabbathical on the page now, although I'll still be reading and answering messages. I think the near-term plan over july/aug will be something along the lines of...

1) restock 'basic black' hoods and iron out whatever remaining kinks there are in the machinery
2) set up for brown hood production, restock a bunch with fancy paintjobs
3) set up the printing systems for glue-free experimenting and get started

There's two 'big' things for the early autumn too, but both need to wait until I'm a bit further with the above three for reasons that'll be obvious:

4) add new hood models etc to the shop. Obviously I want to be a bit more certain about the production tech before I make eight billion molds :)
5) experiment & make a non-foam-mask suit. I've mentioned it before as one of the motivation for the glue-free concept, but I think the foam masks are fundamentally unworkable for anything commercial as they are now. 

Besides the tricky manufacturing, the masks are just too fragile. I can't cast the mask as part of the base suit with the current spraying-method either, although it'd be doable if I had 4m roof height in the workshop so I could dip-cast the entire thing. That leaves post-cast mask attachment. 

Now, I'm not overly fond of 'assembling' a suit out of separate pieces, but c'est la vie. On the upside it does mean I get to make a 'perfect' mask before attaching it, and it'll be easy to make different designs. Once I've got this down, whether I've got progress with the glue-free stuff or not, we're way closer to prototype suit sales.

Anything I've missed in my logic? Hopes/dreams? Ping me! It'll be a bit of radio silence on the page during summer, but I'll still be around and workshopping :)