April achievements

Yoooo! I'll hop straight to it: FIRST LATEX CAST is a success! Deets below, keeping it short and to the point~~

Big-rig;

• Cleaned out my pile of empty 3d printer rolls :(

• Sanded down and prepped the mold. Sounds easy enough, but yeah, ~2-3 days of grinding/sanding/... and a week of layering paint. Definitely needs a bit more work, but it'll do for a test run. Thinking I'll need some sort of better system for this in the future.

• Hooked up piping, mixed up liquid latex and did all the fun/nervous preparation. Lined edges, applied putty, triple-checked, clamped, etc.

• Recruited two work buddies for "fuck knows what'll go wrong, but need you on standby"-help

• Did the actual cast!

  • 4 jugs of liquid latex at roof height, drained one at a time into the mold.

  • All went well, until the drain-pipe cap decided to dislodge from the pressure. 10L drained out, had to refill, etc. Small heart attack and future fix-item, but no major disaster around it.

  • Separating the halves went surprisingly well too - as far as I can tell there's only one accidental contact point by one of the calves. Not sure if it's a design issue or just accidental tilting/fuckup when separating the pieces. Will see if it's a persistent issue and figure out a solution if so.

Big-rig TODO:

• Finish up the FIRST LATEX CAST, practice repairing air bubbles etc. It's quite janky, but the practice is irreplaceable.

• Attach and seal the foot caps

• Replace the big PVC pipes with thinner electrical piping. Might even need some fancy shapes to jostle out air-bubbles before the rubber enters the mold. Details tbd.

• Design and print (?) drainage nozzles with latches. Need something with lower flow, and a cap that Will Not Get Dislodged.

• Make a combined drain-tube/big drain tub for the draining process. Definitely need to move things around for better ergonomics too, but that's blocked right now by the building relining project (see other news).

• Finish up the foot-clamping system and tweak the chamber tilt slightly. Some printing, some improvised carpentry, shouldn't be too difficult.

Other stuff;

• Created a 'community chat' on patreon. Getting Q&As public by default will make things easier for everyone. May not always be the fastest on replies due to a lack of notifications from it, but will experiment over a few months and see if it's helpful or not.

• Big relining project for the building's pipework. That is nice. What's less nice is that they need to intercept the "outgoing" pipes in order to get their relining equipment in place and done, and that interception has to be done at basement level. Guess who has a cramped basement-level workshop? Yeah... Most of my tech is now tetrised into a corner, and the entire place is even more cramped than usual. Should finish up by mid/late may and be worth it in the long run, but yeah, it's a hassle short-term.

• Hoods, side-projects etc on hold until the relining project finishes.

• Regular FB-posting and new shoots etc, on hold until after summer (getting back in shape and/or finishing up the big rig are blocker issues~)

• Summer vacation's coming up in June this year, so I'll do the usual posting gap. One more in May, then next one in July. Y'all know I'll be spending a disproportionate amount of time in the workshop during the holiday anyway, just a matter of when things get posted :)

• The july post will outline the future plans. With the big-rig concept proven (albeit some small jank to fix still) we can finally start looking ahead again!

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One more post ahead of the june break, and perfectly timed for the major milestone of having a working rig! A bit of a hectic month ahead though, with two mid-sized business trips for the day job. Eh, we'll see how it goes. Exciting times!

Y'all know the drill - ping, comment or pop by the chat if I glossed over something interesting. As always, thank you all for the support on this magnificently weird project :)