Month: November 2017

Finally, a Vacuum!

Yes indeed; the lovely new vacuum pump I bought from Unicorn Tools seems to be working beautifully. I messed around with it for the entirety of Friday and managed to mostly degas 200mL of silicone.

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Mostly. I was having some problems with this. For one thing, I had to tinker with the levels of oil inside the vacuum pump. The oil expands when it warms up so I have to be careful how much I fill it. I can’t just dump the oil in until it hits the “FULL” line because when I turn it on and it heats up, it will sputter and spit out the exhaust port. Yuck!

The other problem I had was that there were still bubbles in the silicone after 15mins of degassing. I had already been tinkering with the silicone for awhile and I was getting dangerously close to the end of its working time. If I didn’t just bite the bullet and use it, I’d have a blob of semi-solidified garbage and the material would be wasted. So I just crossed my fingers and poured it into the moulding box.

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I don’t think you can see the air bubbles in the silicone from this shot. I was having problems taking a photo of a completely transparent object encased in a completely transparent layer of silicone. It’s a pain in the butt taking pics of a see-through object! The camera does not want to focus on it.

The green and white goo under the plastic square I’m moulding is just modelling clay. It’s there to keep the square stuck to the bottom so it won’t float and also to keep the silicone from sneaking underneath it. As you can see, I missed a spot. Oh well. That just means I’ll have to trim the silicone “flash” (extra bits of mould material that sneaked where I didn’t want it to go) when I take the mould out of the box.

Hopefully when I get to the workshop today, I will find that the air bubbles have escaped the silicone and I will have a nice solid, smooth mould to work with. Everybody cross your fingers!

I have a couple ideas as to why the silicone misbehaved. It could be that it was too old. It was very chunky and blobby when I took it out of its container. There’s also the possibility that the vacuum chamber was simply too big for this tiny amount of material. I’m going to try putting some extra stuff (plaster brick or somesuch) in the pot with the liquid I’m degassing to see if it will pull the air out faster and more efficiently. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. It’s just a little frustrating.

Before I run off to work, here’s a video of the new pump at work.

I escaped! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

So the doctor didn’t say that I couldn’t go back to work when I had my last checkup. I may have ‘accidentally’ forgotten to ask. I have been bored to tears sitting on my duff, waiting for my silly body to fight off infection and heal up properly. All I’ve wanted to do for the past three weeks is just go to the workshop and make stuff!

Yesterday, I did just that!

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The heck are you doing Ethan? That’s not a sword.

Yeah I know it’s not a sword, but here’s the thing: silicone and resin are both really expensive materials and I’m using a lot of new equipment at this point. So I realised I needed to do something small first to make sure that everything is working properly and the materials are doing what I expect them to do.

This’ll be a little sci-fi computer chip thingy that I can use as a coaster on my desk. I’m going to be testing out the silicone moulding compound, the Alumilite resin, and the resin dye that I bought. That’s right! This will be the first time I’ve done transparent resin in another colour! I’m excited. 🙂

I’d also like to take a moment to thank all of you who have been poking me for sword commissions. I’m so, so sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I’ve been struggling with this medical thing and it’s been no fun at all. I’m going to ask my doc if it’s at all possible to postpone the next surgery until the new year so I can continue working at my job for the rest of November and the month of December

I’m definitely not in danger of losing my workshop. I just want to make that clear so you don’t have to worry about that. But it would be really nice to at least be able to cover the cost of my rent with sword sales instead of taking it out of my own pockets as I’ve been doing.

I also want to reassure you that the medical thing isn’t a degenerative condition or anything. It’s just a quirky little birth defect that we’ve been working on correcting to give me a better quality of life. 🙂 The only reason I’ve had to go back for more corrections is because there were some complications with the healing. Apparently, the body took offence to the doc trying to do too much correction all at once so we’ve had to slow down and do the fixing-up in smaller steps.

That’s rather annoying for me cause it means I have to keep taking time off work for two weeks here, three weeks there to heal from each stage. As anybody who knows me well enough can tell you: I am not good at sitting around doing nothing all day.

In other news: the metro station near my house has opened up and that means I can get to and from work much more easily and much faster. Yay for less travel time! Instead of waiting for a bus, taking the bus to the nearest metro stop, taking the metro to the neighbourhood where I work, and then taking a bus from there to as close to my workshop as I can get, I can simply take the metro from home and skip the whole first bus leg of the journey.

Speaking of journeys … workshop tiiiiime! The workshop is my happy place and I can’t wait to get there and make some cool stuff! Catch ya later guys.

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