Awalon

August "ansträngning"

...aka swedish for effort. With an AI slop cover that doesn't hit uncanny valley. Actual workshop progress now though, so consider me upbeat!

Gonna' try the in-line picture style that Patreon added support for... sometime after I began posting, but definitely longer ago than my last post :p

First of all, I survived two weeks of business trips and I've got my workshop properly back at last! Was supposed to finish mid-may, so a mid-august wrap-up is... annoying, but better late than...

July (re)juvenation

'Allo folks!

Summer's over, kind of. Ups and downs. Let's get the bad first: workshop relining (aka plumbing renovation) is STILL not done. 2 months late now. Been blocked from accessing like 90% of my gear, tools and workspaces for ages now, which is frustrating as hell whatwith having the big-rig pretty much done. Pretty much scuttled all my summer workshop plans.

On the upside, they've re-connected the "real" pipes now and are in the process of cleaning things out, so it's fin...

May meh

'Allo folks - may is upon (and mostly past) us, so here's a post!

I'm pretty frustrated. Building relining project is dragging over by a few weeks, so the workshop is still blocked. I've considered whether I could still pull the cast off the mold, but I can't get past the whole risk factor. Most of the walking space is claimed by plumbing gear, and there's temporary pipes going all over the place. I've tried to work, but it's honestly too risky. Half of my equipment is out of place and ...

April achievements

Yoooo! I'll hop straight to it: FIRST LATEX CAST is a success! Deets below, keeping it short and to the point~~

Big-rig;

• Cleaned out my pile of empty 3d printer rolls :(

• Sanded down and prepped the mold. Sounds easy enough, but yeah, ~2-3 days of grinding/sanding/... and a week of layering paint. Definitely needs a bit more work, but it'll do for a test run. Thinking I'll need some sort of better system for this in the future.

• Hooked ...

  2025-04-28 14:11:18 +0000 UTC View Post

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. WOHO...

February funtimes

'Allo folks!

Swedish lesson of the month: "vabruari". Combination of "VAB", aka 'absence from work to care for sick child' and February. Pokes fun at the huge amount of seasonal illnesses during the January/February timeperiod. Relevant because I apparently caught a SECOND seasonal illness, cold/flu/covid/…, which knocked out way too much productive workshop time. Argh, blargh, etc.

On the upside, still got a bunch of stuff done!

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Su...

2025-02-18 21:43:59 +0000 UTC View Post

January jumpstart

Heyo folks, and 'good continuation' as we say over here! A bit later of a post than I'd hoped, buuuut c'est la vie when you catch one of the seasonal illnesses. Dunno' which one it was, so let's just call it the flu. Otherwise things have been pretty good, with quite a lot of progress despite some hiccups. Let's get into it!

(misc pictures galore on this post~)

Suit news

Got the full printer array upgraded and running. With a bit of speed optimization it feels flat-out rid...

November news

'Allo folks - another month, another update!

I'll be blunt and say that it's been a slow month workshop-wise. First half of November was angsting and working on the whole day-job liability exit thing, then once that completed successfully on the 14th there's been a lot of wall-staring. Still feels weird that 7 years of stress and/or headache is over.

I do however have a decent Christmas holiday coming up this year. "Salary taker's year" with all the holidays being on weekdays, lu...

What's with the day job drama distractions?

Alright, storytime. 2017 up until now, whatthefuck is this whole day-job chaos thing I've alluded to. I'll keep the details out of this for obvious reasons, but give y'all the gist of everything.

This is quite cathartic for me, but I also feel that you deserve a bit of context to all the support you've given over the years. I'll likely delete this after a few months when I've moved on mentally from the situation and it's no longer relevant for the workshop context. For now though, y'all...

October Opdate

'Allo folks, and happy spooky season!

First of all - one piece of good "surrounding life" news, and one piece of bad news in the same category.

Good news: Finally, after 3+ years, GF got her drivers license. Means I don't need to spend half of my free time teaching her, and can instead focus the efforts on the workshop. Also means she'll have more free time to help out with things in the future!

Bad news: the "big thing" mentioned previously fell through in the last minute. ...

September stuff

Woo, another writeup-round! It's a case where simultaneously a lot and very little has happened :)

First off: suit stuff

• Lost count of the misc water-tests I've done. Main reason for lack of dramatic progress - it takes ages to set up, conduct and clean up after a full test. Water all over the testing area, parts that need to dry out, edge seals that need to be removed, etc.

• Figured out that I need to reinforce the edge clamping system, as ap...

  2024-09-30 17:14:42 +0000 UTC View Post

August anticipation

'Allo folks! Another month, another set of news. Also I've really slipped to the end of the month with updates now, will have to work my way backwards later. I blame the excessive business travel of august - which may tbh be surpassed by September as it's looking right now. Urgh. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, updates!

Suit rig:

A decent amount of progress if I may say so myself.

• Assembled and mounted the top half of the mold. Minor tolerance jank, but...

  2024-08-31 16:47:39 +0000 UTC View Post

July Jsomething

Yoooo! Exciting times!

Suit rig update:

Relatively short because of the sheer scale of this one focused thing, but good news!

• Printed and assembled the "bottom half", aka the upper body, of the mold. ~40 separate printed pieces (with naming conventions all over the place~~), ~10kg of plastic, 24/7 for nearly two weeks across two printers.

• Cleaned out the troublesome fibreglass mold from the casting area. Would've been nice, but eh, not the fir...

  2024-07-29 08:41:09 +0000 UTC View Post

June jumpstart

Bonjour folks! Another month, another set of progress. I've had most of June off from the day job, and will have a pretty relaxed work pace during July. Suit rig is getting a lot of focus, so let's jump straight to it.

Suit rig stuff

When we last left off on the rig I was about to water-test it. Well, I did. I also did a liquid latex test with it.

Upsides:

• The liquid filling/draining system worked perfectly. Will probably have a few i...

  2024-06-30 20:54:36 +0000 UTC View Post

May mnews!

'Allo folks - another month, another update!

This has been one of those months where I felt not much had happened... until I looked at the pics and what I'd actually gotten done. Turns out I'd done a lot, and it was just non-glamorous stuff that requires disproportionate amounts of time. Sneaky win!

Suit rig stuff

• Figured out the final bits of the water proofing! Took me a while, but I finally found plumbers putty! Turns out in sweden it's sold as what could...

  2024-05-26 20:19:43 +0000 UTC View Post

April aupdate

'Allo folks! Been a hectic month with way too much business travel for the day job, but there's a decent bit of progress between the train station coffees!

(pics pretty representative of my workshop life recently~)

Suit-rig newsbits

• spent a day cleaning up the edges and just making it more workable. The whole thing is still humongous and takes 30+ screws to open up, but at least now there's fewer sharp edges :)

• tried insulation liner - works pretty w...

  2024-04-24 15:33:20 +0000 UTC View Post

March mnews

'Allo folks - another month, another update! I'm also running low on alliterations... But let's dig straight into things!

(misc pics, including 'jfc it really took 2h to remove all the styro pieces' and me forgetting to wall off my suicidal shop vac)

Suitstuff

Decent progress, if I may say so myself. Looking at the todo-list from the last post;

• [X] clean up chamber pieces (as painful as it was)

• [X] mount on stand (might reinforce/rework ...

  2024-03-24 15:55:28 +0000 UTC View Post

February felicitations

Heyo - another month, another piece of progress! Besides the day-job cleanup that's nearing the finish line, I've spent the time crunchworking on the suit-rig and gotten past a few milestones. Let's start with the rig stuff, yeah?

(also: shout-out to the perfect shelves I managed to mount in the fume hood!)

Suit-rig stuff!

First of all, I figured out how to handle the casting barrier. A couple of tries with a different brand/type of epoxy resin confirmed that it's somethin...

January jumpstart!

'Allo folks, and welcome to 2024! Had a good holiday season, ey? Cover pic, view of part of my town that goes a bit nuts with the decorations.

I'm still on the whole 'clean up the day job'-journey and the store's paused, but so far so good on all of that. I'll spill the beans someday when I'm well past the 'all is sorted' threshold. Until then I'll simply say that things are going well, but even the 'good' scenario requires a lot of work.

Workshop stuff though! The holidays made t...

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 -...
  2023-11-29 14:13:08 +0000 UTC View Post

October optimism

'Eyo folks!

I'm guessing most of you saw the Facebook post about me taking a bit of a break from some stuff, e.g. weekly post and most shop stuff. It's a long story with a bunch of day job drama. On the upside it's all heading towards the "best case scenario" that'll have me coming out ahead with a good long-term solution, but it still takes a toll on the stress levels. By march next year I should have everything settled properly, and then I'll also spill (some) of the beans on what all...

September's tuff

Heyo folks! Been a slow month with the day job eating most of my energy, but progress nonetheless.

• Finished up the redesigned & strengthened pieces of the mannequin mold.
  Since I needed to re-print them for the changed posture anyway, I went all-out and upped the wall thickness and fill quite a bit. Around Twice as expensive to print, but should be worth it. Had some issues with previous thinner walls (0.8mm) where a good knock could puncture them. Going up to 1.2mm and a c...
  2023-09-25 10:28:28 +0000 UTC View Post

August auspices

'Allo folks, welcome to season 5! Doing a public patreon/fb-linked post as is the norm by now for the season starters. Lets me write with more formatting options, and ever so slightly reminds people that the Patreon exists :p

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I've spent the summer enjoying the weather, but unfortunately with too much actual work also. Long story, company drama. I reckon I'll tell stupid stories from it once things have settled down properly, but that's going ...

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 o...

May musings

Bonjour! Time flies, it's already been a month!

If you've kept an eye on the facebook page, you may recall reading I've been working on casts since the 'first test' of the big-rig. This is a mixed-bag-of-news type situation - I ended up shoving the rig back into storage and rebuilding the spray-casting chamber.

Why? A few factors that hit me during the testing...

• I need lateral stabilization of the mold too. It's pretty symmetric, but not quite enough to avoid issues f...
  2023-05-24 17:09:17 +0000 UTC View Post

April ambitions

Heyo folks - update time! A bit later in the month than I'd hoped, but for a reason...

The BigRig is construction is done and ready for testing! 

Jebus what a journey it's been. As usual with these things it ends up looking way simple, but y'all know the process has been quite a thing.

Results/status:

• The overall design holds up, and can just barely (~3cm to spare) fit in the workshop height-wise. Woopwoop!
  
• The mechan...
  2023-04-24 14:57:07 +0000 UTC View Post

March mannequin mania

'Allo folks, march ahoy! I'll jump straight into the updates :)

Bigrig update

The new mold mannequin is DONE at last! Yeah, sure, surface treatments todo still, but I'll do that when the rig carpentry won't risk ruining them.

Most importantly, the socket system works well enough. Arms/legs come off as they should and it seems like the durability is up to spec. I can finally get to work on the mounting cradle! 

It took way more sanding...

February frontpage

'Allo folks! Lots of progress all over the place, and the main focus is finally on the suit rig! Big updates, small updates, we have it all~~

Workspace

First up, the workshop finally has a good work-table!

You may recall from the previous updates that I was planning on consolidating the actual "working area" of the workshop into a single table. That table is now, after many ifs and buts, complete (barring some tiny tweaks here and there, but y'kno...

January jubilations!

Public post, so hello world! Mostly this kind of progress talk in the monthly Patreon-exclusive writeups. Consider supporting the suiting by joining? 

Pictured above: WIP from the new suit rig mold. Main diffs: modular for easy redesigns, easier to disassemble after casts, and most importantly - reinforced so it can handle horizontal casting in the new rig.

PS: "J23BR" for 10% off on suitworks.se during january! Imma' remind everyone everywhere everytime.

In any case, o...

December details!

'Allo folks! Another month, and a bit of progress! Admittedly slightly less than I'd hoped since I managed to catch covid last week, but eh, vaxed to the gills so it's mild enough. Anyway... on with the textypost! 

 [X] refill black
[X] patreon drop
[X] workshop shuffle
[ ] refill brown
[ ] resume suit rig work
([#] refill light skin)

Project catchup is still looking good. Got the brown vat sorted earlier this week, so all that's missing now...