November news

'Allo folks!

As usual, some progress, some lessons learned, and some course adjustments. I finished the rig mounting, but hit two snags:

• First being that the tolerances in the spacing were a bit iffy, resulting in issues fitting the mold. Honestly should've seen that coming, the wrap was a bit of a 'test it out and see if it works' rush job. I'll need to redo this with a much more carefully controlled spacing system.
• Second snag kind of falls in a similar category - sliced the mold incorrectly. See pic. With the wrap in place, I missed the wide angle on the feet. Technically possible to fix, but tricky as it'd require re-slicing + sealing quite a large part of the mold.

With the snags in mind, I'm scrapping attempt #1 and redoing it properly, carefully, with all the bells and whistles. See the other pics~

• Switching from the putty to regular fiberglass epoxy casting. While good in many ways, regular liquid casting is just more time-efficient and results in better mold-seamlines.
•  Doing the mold spacing much more precisely with double-taped 3cm styrofoam cubes and a transparent wrap. Reasonable amounts of labour needed, and the transparent wrap lets me keep an eye on the mold so I don't lose track of the topology and part placements.
• Slicing it with a solid back and split front this time. Besides the feet being an issue, it's probably more valuable to have easy access to the quality-critical front than the rear.

So far so good, the back piece is done and I'm prepping the front for casting now. I'm still a bit antsy about the whole thing whatwith not having done a fiberglass mold of this size before, but eh, not the first time I go out to the deep end.

Overall plan from the last post still stands - finish the (new) shell, mount+plumb it, seal it, test a bunch and then cast. Hopefully no more snags. Staying focused and crunchworking on this.

Other stuff

Besides the suit rig, hoods and so on are still on the planned pause while I sort out the day job stuff. It's still on track for 'best case scenario' there, but I need to spend quite a bit of time on it still. I'll be able to say more about the revival plans in ~february or so when I've gotten over the workload hump.

Now in the short term, we've got the christmas/new years season ahead of us. I'll take the usual holiday post pause in december, so next rig update in the middle of january. Should have some decent progress by then, 'cause I'm obviously going to spend a decent chunk of the holidays on rig work!

Again, thank you all for the support throughout this slightly less glamorous part of the suit journey. Stay tuned, and I'll be back with news in mid January. Until then - happy holidays!