March milestones

'Allo folks, and welcome to another round of the awa show!

...yeah, we aren't quite at that media level yet, but holy shit stuff is progressing!

tl;dr - successful water-test of the full chamber, DONE! Took WAY more effort than I'd ever imagined to get to this point, but it's finally rubber casting time! Writing this post mere hours after the third water-test results and right before heading down to my favourite ramen place to celebrate, may be a bit shorter/rawer than usual. WOHOO though!

Big rig progress

Been swamped in day-job stuff (50h overtime in march go go go), so focused on finishing the rig. That focus has clearly paid off! Bullet points for the major accomplishments as per usual, because I'm damaged from work and cannot write without abusing bullet points.

• Finished the rig build with a charming set of wheels and support structures. Not the prettiest, but eh. Honestly - a major lesson from all of this is that it's very, very energy-intense to make nice and good-looking production tooling if you've got a cramped workshop. Not like I can easily move large sheets of plywood around, as an example. Will see how things end up looking once I upgrade to a bigger place - feel free to quote me on this when that's happened and I still produce janky molds!

• Sorted out the roof rack. Not much use of it yet, still have to figure out how to attach the leg-pegs in a good way. Thinking I'll do some sort of vice-holding rig for it, so I can just clamp on to the pegs when needed. Not necessary for the water tests though, so that went on the "soon, but later" pile.

• FIRST water test - fail. Turns out that the "closed cell foam" isn't quite as closed-cell as I'd like when it's under heavy pressure. Heavy pressure such as a metre of hydrostatic pressure, as an example. Half of what it'll cap out at. Major cleanup, followed by some serious foam excavation, re-casting and sealing of sneaky cracks in the interior. Also a week of drying, coinciding with a week of workshop hosting at the day job.

• SECOND water test - fail. Plumber's putty blew out at the bottom. Implemented a fix consisting of window-liner or whateveryoucallit around the edge to mechanically support the putty, plus some adjustments to let me add vices in better locations. Also a week of drying. Yeah...

• THIRD water test - SUCCESS! Holy shit! It works! Filled up to the foot holes (the terminology of this project is a bit nuts sometimes)!
  VIDEO of the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqE-BwRWNxE
  (yes it's not exactly a fancy video, but that's what unedited progress looks like!)
  Only issue I noticed is that there's some minute crack-leaks penetrating the foam higher up too, but eh. I reckon that'll solve itself after the first latex cast when the leaked liquid cures inside the structure. Wasn't a big leak either, probably lost a decilitre or two during the fill-up process. Now I just need a week of drying out the water before I do anything. Yeah, it's a trend. Luckily I've got a 4 day business trip coming up so hooray?

All-in-all, 80 litres to get to the feet. Probably another 10 to fill it completely. It's going to be nerve-wracking to fill it with latex at like €10/litre... No guts no glory, eh?

NEXT UP on the suit rig

• Sort out the foot-peg roof rack attachment so I can prime the mold surface properly

• Finish the mannequin surfacing. As you can see on the pics there's a bunch of seals that need to be cleaned up still.

• Seal the foot holes. Have the caps prepared already, easy fix. Just kept them open for testing convenience.

• Clean up the workshop and organize it for actual rubber casting. Lots of misc carpentry, plastic treatment and similar tooling lying around after all the mold fixes.

• Sort out ~100L of dyed latex. Black, I'm thinking. Have around 50-60L of it sitting around already and it never goes out of style. More importantly, it's very dye-dominant so I can get rid of misc slush-remnants from the other colors.

• Run a latex cast test!

I'll say already now that I'm expecting the first cast test to end up meh. Probably uneven coagulant, plusminus some mold-fitting issues. Likely touching the walls in places. Still - it'll be a major, MAJOR milestone to get it done!

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other stuff:

Todo-list still mostly the same. Been buried in day-job stuff and kept to the main task of the BigRig.

• Finish the silicone filler experiment

• Refill the shop

• Proof of life on FB

• Play around more with the AI stuff

• (bonus: AI writeup and market predictions, someday)

• (also: drop a few winter kilos, as is tradition by now...)

At this rate I'll end up proof-of-life'ing with a pic from the first latex cast in a few weeks. We'll see. I'll definitely write a summary sooner or later on all it's taken to get the BigRig operational, and I reckon it'll look absolutely nuts when you view it from afar.

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Said it before, will say it again - thank you all for the support! It's taken WAY more effort than I could have ever imagined, but we're almost there now... Fingers crossed for the first latex test, ey?

For now, I'm off to grab some tantanmen and sake to celebrate! See you in a few weeks for the April update!