June joy

'Allo folks!

Retro time before I head off on the usual summer vacation (aka no post in July). Ended up pushing the facebook posting a bit already whatwith cross-country drives for work and a whole slew of stuff popping up... Yeah, it's been a week. 

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Let's compare roadmap items from the season opener (https://www.patreon.com/posts/august-aupdate-70351847) with actual outcomes:

1) Black hood restocking
Yep, happened. Went pretty well also now that I have the hang of the surface texture quality issues on smaller-scale production. It feels like I'm on the cusp of having simple black latex gear set up for proper production, albeit with some mold redesigns/reprints and small QoL-things needed. A bit better control of the thickness too - only have one fairly thick chem-mix set up at the moment, and it'd be nice to offer thinner too. 

2) Patreon drops
Did get it done, although it could have gone a lot better. Made the mistake with those of mixing the latex vat a bit incorrectly with that pigmentation, and fixing that without scrapping €500 of material wasn't really possible. Had to make do and crunch out the best I could. Overall a big stress factor, sucks to optimistically promise things and then being unable to deliver from a cascade of technical issues. Lesson learned - make first, promise after. Will have to see how I handle these things in the future.

3) Skintoned/painted for the store
Went well enough - not the lighter tones as mentioned above, but got a brown set up in 23Q1 at least. Feels like I've mostly got the hang of that design, but definitely want to improve the decorations and features more. I've got some ideas for improving the airbrushing process & stencil designs, so it's relatively low hanging fruit. 

4) New suit rig
This is the tricky one. I kind of went through two iterations of it in a fairly rapid pace, neither of which ending up past the big-picture goalposts.

•  The bellow-chamber design would be too complex with too many moving parts. Ended up scrapping that one after getting a fair bit into the build. Took a while for the complexity to hit me, mostly because of a lack of mental focus due to some intense day-job drama and the stress it caused. Was a sucky time period... but I'll save that story for another time.
  
•  The big dip-rig made it all the way to 'first test' before I disassembled it. Core concepts were proven and I learned a lot, but the mold / fillers need more work before it's viable. Since the lead time on that is going to be longer than I'd like, I disassembled the rig for now. Easy re-assembly once it's time again. I'll try to get a bit of experience with the filler design from alternative sources in the near term, e.g. hollow cast molds and such.
  
• In the end I re-assembled the "old" spray casting technology, with a few upgrades here and there. Most notably improved ventilation and lighting, bigger casting chamber and an upgraded spraying system. As it turns out, that may have been a case of "if it works, don't mess with it" too! You may recall from last post that I'd tried casting and hit some weird issues, yeah?
  My current theory for that is pretty much a big facepalm: it's because the new paint sprayer is too powerful, so it's blasting away the coagulant in areas where I instinctively hold the sprayer closer to the mold. Haven't had time to try with the old sprayer yet, but will do so next. Mostly used the failed casts to practice repairs so far (see pics).

In any case, while I figure out the next steps for "proper" production I can at least get out some fresh spray-cast lower-quality suits and poke around at the projects connected to them, ey? Might be that I can get them up to an okay enough level with this method too, although quality will definitely not match the perfect dips.

5) Company stuff
Not mentioned in the plans, but happened anyway: I kicked up a formal company for the workshop. I've got a lot more paperwork because of it, but there's a government tax deduction thing for startups in certain conditions that makes it worth it. Not free money, but effectively speaking a 60% discount on supplies and tech for the project. Considering how ridiculously capital-gear heavy this entire thing is, that's a major hallelujah. 

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All-in-all, this entire year turned out to be 100% catchup... And I reckon that was much needed. I've had quite a bit of life-stuff to deal with too. Guessing that goes for everyone, whatwith the last few years being a bit too interesting. On the upside, despite not being perfect there's been plenty of learning opportunities and I think we'll be starting off the autumn on a good note.

Summer's definitely going to be spraycasting-time, and I'll see what other bits I poke at. Biggest vacation activity is simply being able to recover, gather my thoughts and plan out the next season. There's a bit of balancing to be had. Getting the suits up to spec is of course highest on the want-list, but in order to keep that going and funded I need to keep some basic production+sales up (helps both directly and indirectly via the tax thing). I'm thinking there might be an opportunity to up the hood/mask game a bit here... 

Long story short, one of the key things that sells the look of the suits I've made is the mask expressibility. Actual facial movements. I've previously achieved that by doing tricky low-temperature foam latex casts and attaching them to the suits, but that's very tricky to do in actual production. Takes a lot of time, space and equipment for a result that is significantly more fragile than the rest of the suit. 

As I see it, I have two options;

• Pursue the 'thin latex with tech-assisted movement' angle
• Revisit foam latex now that I have better printing technology available.

I'll probably end up doing a bit of both. Hollow casting is an old rusty-trusty but the foam latex is a bit tricky. Thin-with-tech is something brand new that could end up way better, but always risky with RnD. The upside to all this is that besides being needed for the 'fanciest' suits, either would work pretty well as standalone masks too. The foam latex stuff also lets me practice hollow-casts, which I'll need for the revisiting of the suit-rig... and if we're talking standalone masks, I might as well try silicone in the same basic molds. 

There's several tricky aspects to the hollow-casting, most notably how to create the models in the first place. I'm still using Meshmixer, which is a bit sub-optimal and buggy, but I seem to have figured it out during a recent train trip (pic). Should let me make them with a shared 'base head' and just print different outer layers for different models. All in all, good practice and any results from this should help keep things funded.

Anyway, that's a sneakpeek of the autumn thinking. I'll mull it over during the summer and do the usual season opener post in august where I go into more detail on the roadmap. There's quite a bit more on the old todo-/wishlist also, but it'll be a matter of priorities.

Hope you all have a great summer, and as usual - ping me or comment if I glossed over something interesting, yeah? Your support is as always very much appreciated, and I look forward to delving deeper into the future plans!