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I was out of town for a week and I need to get back on schedule. It's hard to not just be lazy after a week of being at the beach drinking beer most of the day and napping whenever you feel like it. Oh, and my sister got married. So it wasn't just a random excursion smack dab in the middle of a month that  demands alot of work get done. Right before I left I ordered all the parts I needed for building my own pressure pot and it is done! Now I can cast my own flawless clear resin pieces.

What you've got here is an air compressor and a paint pot. A paint pot is intended for using with a pneumatic paint gun, like one might use to paint a house. Instead of attaching the hose where the paint would leave the pot I closed it off with a pressure gauge. Add in a few other things like another pressure gauge with a regulator, an inline dessicant and a ball valve and what you've got is your very own DIY pressure pot. I will be doing the first tests this weekend on the recasts of my Fresh Batch Dunny's and after that it's on to Skerpent.

New Stuff

I just received the Doctor Who box heads from my friend Stephen Larkworthy www.boxheroes.com and they look great.

So we've got The Doctor, which will be me and I will hopefully be able to find a passable suit at the good will, Ood, who doesn't belong to anyone yet and I might just wear it on a different day, Dalek, which my friend Mawuli is going to wear but I'm going to be keeping that one, and The Silence, which my friend John will be wearing... and his head comes with hands as well. Geoff will also be there in full glory as Cyberman which I made last year. It would be cool if full suits could have been made but in this quantity it would just be too difficult to get it all to San Diego. I'm very excited to start painting and will post pics as soon as I do.

We just received out 3D printer and if anything moves forward with my BYOZ the logistics of the project will change and might not include the 3d printer at all anymore. After seeing the results of the printer I feel that it won't yield a satisfactory product. It prints geometric things awesome but when it comes to more organic things the way it prints isn't quite what I was hoping for. All the pieces would have to be heavily sanded and in the long run I would prefer to hand sculpt all the pieces from scratch, save money on the 3d modeling, and then cast all the parts in resin. Because of the Skerpent project I'm working on now I'm about to invest in building my own pressure pot so I can pressure cast my own molds and casts and moving forward from there I could do the BYOZ project or something of that nature super clean and more of what I would want then using the 3d printer. Plus, the printer is really slow. It took over an hour to make a Coke bottle that was 4" tall. AND...at this point, I don't even feel like using Kickstarter to get a project off the ground is even necessary. I can build my own pressure pot for under $200 and the materials aren't cheap but I have alot of it already to do small runs so any pieces that get made in the near future will just go up for sale after completion. Even though the 3d printer wasn't quite what I wanted I'm still excited to be setting things up to make pristine casts.

The only thing I am making right now for the printer is a replacement spool for a table top packing tape dispenser. We have like 4 of them in the office that don't have spools so are useless so I'm making new ones with the 3d printer. 

Each dispenser will get 2 of these. The inner ring that is segmented will fit into the hole in the tape, 1 piece on each side, and then there will be a separate axis that goes through the center and notches into the dispenser. Not that big of a deal, but it will be the first model anyone here has actually made and printed as opposed to downloading an existing model, and I do not have much experience modeling. When I get some printed I will post pics. 

Fresh Batch Dunny's are getting closer to being done. All the casting is done now I just need to paint the heads and sew the cloaks. Thats all... :). That alone is gonna be alot of work. Still working on commissions as well, so, as usual, crazy busy.

Resin

I spent much of the weekend working on my Dunny's for Fresh Batch which entailed casting some clear bodies using some dyes and powders that I recently acquired and I found out the hard way that resin does not last long in a humid environment like Atlanta. I had a batch of clear that had been open for maybe a year, junk. Another batch that had been unopened that I've had for the same amount of time, junk. Then my friend Greg brought some over like a month ago and we opened it and poured some things with no luck and in just that amount of time enough moisture has seeped in to make it foam up like the rest. So I turned to the last unopened batch that I got about 2 months ago and FINALLY I got some pours that didn't foam up. Imagine those stupid fireworks things we had as kids that looked like black altoids and when you lit them they grew and grew like an ashy snake, that's what my resin kept doing... but only like an inch up out of the mold, but still annoying and useless. I had learned that the brand of resin I have been using must be moisture free and any will cause the mixture to foam. A while back I tried to dye something during mixing with some RIT dye and it did just that, foamed like mad. So I spent 3 or 4 hours mixing, pouring and praying it worked after changing variable after variable only to get the same garbage result until I got to that last batch... and it was such a relief. So I popped a couple usable casts though they need alot of finishing. The air bubbles are bad on the clear and I don't have a pressure pot yet but I think I got them minimized enough to pass especially since you will barely see the bodies on my design. but I can say the metallic dust is cool. The GID is also very potent. One of the casts that got messed up was with the GID and once I saw it foaming I yanked it out of the mold before it was done and got gooey resin on my hands. I thought I had gotten it all off but when I went to bed and turned the lights off my hands were glowing like mad. I guess it was good to know the GID was working.

Skerpent is almost standing. Need to change the angle of his stance and then add the tail and I think he'll be close to another reveal.