Mean Green!

Playing around with some colors.  Fun stuff.  Hopefully soon I'll have some of these up for sale in the store.

So far things are good but I've had some air bubbles and I think it's because the resin is setting up too quickly.  This doesn't really give me time to get the pressure pot up to a high enough PSI to squeeze the bubbles out.  I just ordered some new resin that takes twice as long to set.  That should give me some better results.

I made some toys!

So tonight I finally had some time to cast some toys.  I had a chance to make two castings.  The resin cures way faster than I would have thought.  On the first one I barely got it into the mold before it started to harden.  On the second casting I was much faster but even with the pressure pot I had a few bubbles, most notably on the upper machine gun tip.  But it's a learning process and I hope each will be a little nicer.  And I finally got to use my grinder to smooth off the bases.

My 3D prints have come in!

They just came in the mail and I took some pictures.  This is so exciting.  Next will be making a mold and then casting some resin toys!  Take a look at all the detail.  Just amazing.

How does a Rivet tank really work?

Last night before going to bed I got inspired by some cross-section books.  I LOVE cross-sections and just had to get this drawing started.  I can't tell you how excited I am about this piece.

Ventilation!

I was pretty scared of playing with resin in my basement.  With casting toys and painting stuff, I had nightmares of these noxious green fumes wafting up throughout the house making everyone sick.  But now I don't need to worry.  I installed a blower in my work area.  It's connected with a straight run of ducting to a dryer vent outside the house. The blower I got moves 265cfm of air so it's pretty beefy.  It'll exchange the air in a 1200 cubic foot room in under 5 minutes.  Nice!  Next I may build a hood out of cardboard to direct the flow but I'll see how it works.

  

Making Toys! Pressure Pot

I now have a pressure pot.  It's just a big pot that you can put under pressure for when you make a casting in rubber or cast resin.  It's needed to squeeze out all the air bubbles.  Mine is a modified paint pot.  I just sealed all the holes and hook it up to a compressor!  One step closer to making my own toys.  And my 3D print should be coming some day soon.  Check out the octobertoys.com forum, it's where I'm learning how to do this stuff :)

Website up!

The Rivet Wars website is up!  I'm pretty psyched because now I have a place to put stuff.  I'm planning to get the store going, and then mostly update with the blog and twitter.  The website will be more of an introduction/archive type place and store if you want to pick something up.  I still have no idea if anyone will find this cool or interesting but it gives me a place to focus my random artistic ideas.