November news

The most boring month for alliteration, but it's sneaking by surprisingly fast. Two threads of progress this month, hoods and the suits! 

Hoods:

You may have seen on the FB page that I mentioned solving the texture issue on the hoods (see SUIT-99 pic for an excaggerated explanation - my surfaces simply weren't smooth enough). Long story short, about 3h of sanding and surfacing per mold was needed. And I have a total of 6 active molds (5 sizes, 2L). Yeah. That ate like a week. Luckily it worked well enough - not 100% perfect, but massively better than before. I'll try to make 'batch 5' in the near future (+ patreon christmas drop?)

Besides the texture handling, I got feedback that the new thicker hoods are a bit trickier to handle overall. Obvious solution's to sort out zippers (suit-112). While I can already do basic zippers that do the job, they most definitely aren't pretty. I need to spend a bit of R&D-time on finding the perfect model and perfecting the attachment methods. The research will come in handy for the suitery later too, feels well-motivated.

Speaking of well-motivated, my current crafting nemesis - the eyehole cutting - needs some R&D too (suit-116). I've been doing it primitively with a mark-and-scissorcut method, but that's feeling iffier and iffier as the rest of the quality goes up. Plus, it takes forever and requires actual dexterity and skill. Isch. A small desktop-sized workshop press ought to do the trick, but I haven't found a good set of mountable cutting pipes yet. Might have to make my own somehow, or do some serious modification to a non-mountable hole punch set. 

Suits:

I'm about 20-25h into the new suit rig build. What does that mean? Well, I've spent two weekends clearing out space in the small 27sqm workshop so I can actually fit the rig somewhere (suit-102/114, gloriously mspainted with reasonably accurate scaling). Besides that, some of the components starting to trickle in (suit-103). I miss the good old days when a 'project' took like 10h of work :p

I'll post some pics next round when I've cleared out all the last junk (third car-full to the local waste disposal centre!) and have things up and running again. This will genuinely be a bit of an overall upgrade. We'll go from a 3-room sequence of "clean -> messy -> health hazard" to "clean -> messy -> veryclean" now that we'll no longer need to spraycast things. Having the printers in the same room as most of my miscellaneous workshoppery did a number on their maintenance requirements, should get much better now. Probably won't need them for suit-stuff for another 3-6 months, but I'm itching to make new hood models and starting on the whole glueless-movement-thing. Fun times ahead!

Once I've been on the third waste-disposal-round it's finally time to buy the rig materials and get to work on the build. Still in that 'equal amounts excited and nervous'-phase, but holyshit it's happening! Seriously need to get a workshop assistant or two though, because jfc there's so many sub-projects to do on all of this stuff :)