March mnews

'Allo folks - another month, another update! I'm also running low on alliterations... But let's dig straight into things!

(misc pics, including 'jfc it really took 2h to remove all the styro pieces' and me forgetting to wall off my suicidal shop vac)

Suitstuff

Decent progress, if I may say so myself. Looking at the todo-list from the last post;

• [X] clean up chamber pieces (as painful as it was)

• [X] mount on stand (might reinforce/rework slightly, tba)

• [X] drill & prep screws for doors

• [X] drill/mount attachment points for the mannequin

• [X] drill/mount basic plumbing (looks meh, but should work)

• [ ] add liner for waterproofing

• [ ] rehearse/experiment

• [ ] resolve the feed-shelves

• [/] finish mannequin (new torso soon done, rest todo)

• [ ] try it out and hope i thought of everything

I'd say something about us now getting to the tricky parts, but let's face it, most of the parts here are tricky. Not like we're doing anything standard with easy 'how to'-references, eh? Hopefully all of this works so I get to make the next one from a position of "I've done this before".

Doing a bit of additional waterproofing with a liner should be relatively straightforward, but I've got a small dilemma really. I've been planning on testing the seals/process by doing a full 'water cast', but that's actually trickier than latex. Plugging potential water leaks requires more finesse than rubber, which you can plug simply with a bit of household paper and a hairdryer. I'll have to think of something, otherwise it's going to take me weeks to cycle the water level upwards past every sneakily janky point in the mold.

Anyway, assuming the liquid testing goes well, we're pretty much ready with the core functionality. Some testing and rehearsing, finishing up the mold properly, and then we're off to a real cast attempt! Should say, I'm pretty sure there'll be something wonky I'll need to fix. I'm going to make predictions here;

• Getting the mold into the rig after preparing it with coagulant and everything might be tricky. I'll be able to grab the pins, but if I wiggle them too much the leg-attachment-seal might fragment. (context: covering the seam between pieces with spackle and surface treatments so it's smooth, and it's not very durable)

• The mold and/or mount durability might be iffy. It's going to be around 50-70kg going straight down towards the head, and I'm not 100% on whether I got the critical points covered by the hard foam I'm using as a rigid base. I'll go over it again and see if I can find and fix potential weak spots before doing any major filling.

• The plumbing system might behave weirdly. Typical example, pouring from a height into a splashy pipe will definitely be problematic. I'm pretty sure that I'll need to add some sort of anti-airbubble-system to it, otherwise they'll likely propagate to the mold-side and ruin things. Details TBD, but at least it's easy to mod the pipes.

I'm pretty excited for the upcoming month... Finally getting close to working suit casts again! Fingers crossed y'all.

Other stuff

Since you're reading this, I'm guessing you've also seen the 'taking a break, back late q1' post on fb/insta and the plan-musing in the last post. We've now hit that stage, so what's the plan? I've got it more or less settled by now, so let's summarize things. Y'all get the bullet point list, will do something more stylized for the public post in a few days.

(note: finishing the suit rig has highest prio, will be done in parallel with everything else mentioned here.)

• [march] Post a public 'hello i is back' with plan detailing, kicking things off. Honestly pretty optimistic, my situation has improved vastly over the last six months.

• [march] Index the current stock and warm up the machinery. I've got a stash from the last batch production, and the machines should be good to go after some minor service and refilling of the vats. Will still need to do some test casts, just 'cause getting surprised with functional issues later would suck.

• [april] Switch the webshop over to Shopify (probably). A few reasons behind this, first and foremost that it'll be significantly cheaper. Old supplier upped their pricing quite a bit. There's a sneaky second part though - accounting system integrations. It's not the biggest thing, but it'll be another thing that all of a sudden is fully automated. Minor side-effect of that is that I'll probably need to swap the shop currency to swedish crowns (aka SEK) and deal with the occasional 'what is that in usd'... But that's survivable, I reckon.

• [april] Get the shop up and running again, mix 'current stock' with 'made on order'. I've got things reliable enough that it should be okay now with the latter, and it'll save me the hassle of keeping stacks of boxes with all the sizes and configurations in stock.

• [may-july] Occasional shop-posting and such, but still no high-intensity weeklyposts like I used to do. Need to get back into the media game first, which will take me a little while.

• [may-july] Try to automate or simplify a few more side-tasks, e.g. the packaging/postage handling. As per usual it's not that much work to do manually, but it does add up. Every bit that gets automated helps.

• [may-july] Product quality crunch. I'll try to iron out any and all of the production kinks that result in any iffyness. Mold fixes, glue improvements, chemical composition analysis, etc. I want things to be so under control and structured that I could do it in my sleep... or delegate it to an assistant.

• [august+] Season opener, further plans tba. Hopefully I'm set on media, have the shop going, and the suit rig working.

As per usual, there's a lot more that I'd like to do, but let's finish the vegetables first, ey? I'll resume speculation on big, future projects after the rig is done and the shop is up and running sustainabily... but off the top of my head, here's a few things on the dessert list: more mask models, suits in shop, hood features, more mask/suit media, getting a shop assistant, improving the moldmaking process, trade-fair visits (GFF anyone?), etc.

Fingers crossed this spring goes well, lots to look forward to!

-----------------------

We're nearing the end of the 'recovery period', and y'all know I cannot thank you enough for sticking with me through it. Thank you again for the support!

You know the drill - DM/comment if I glossed over something interesting, ey?