Shop Log - 6/17/22

I’m finally back. Okay, I’ve actually been back home for about two weeks after dogsitting at my family’s place in Ohio, but I’ve been extremely busy. And I’m changing the name of these updates from “Projects Log” to “Shop Log” because it sounds better and I’m not self-conscious about ripping off the Crafsman. In fact, if you’re a fledgling crafter like me, it would be foolish not to.

When I last left you, I’d begun painting my first ever batch of resin casted retro-style bootleg action figures and while I was doing this, I realized something. I realized that the sheer multitude of air bubbles present in the castings were insurmountable no matter how much I sanded and surfaced them, and not even fully hand painting each piece could cover up all the imperfections on the surfaces (of which there were many). Plus, coating every single part in MEK, painting them, and then coating them with 2k clearcoat (which is $20-30 a can and only has a 48-hour window in which to use it all) just wasn’t a feasible option at the end of the day. It’s so much more efficient to pigment the resin with a base color and paint only the small details.

It was finally time for me to bite the bullet and buy a pressure pot for resin casting as well as a vacuum chamber for degassing the silicone used to make the molds. And yes, the pressure pot and the air compressor are the same ones I mentioned in my last update.

Oh, and ignore that blue air hose. It didn’t come with the fittings I needed nor was it the right thread size for the California Air Tools brand air compressor and pressure pot (despite the fact that it was a package deal with the air compressor when I bought it off Amazon). I found a Kobalt brand air hose kit that had everything I needed at the Lowe’s in the same plaza as the UPS store where I dropped off my Amazon return.

Now it was a matter of figuring out this equipment and not to toot my own horn or anything, but the manuals were pretty bare bones compared to the ones I put together in my day job as a technical writer and they didn’t do that great of a job covering the basics. I once again found myself enrolling in the Youtube Academy of Arts and Science to get an idea about how to properly set up and use my new gear.

I also decided to buy my flexible resin and silicone in bulk (both from Specialty Resin and Chemical). Ten gallons of Flex-It 90 resin and five gallons of Cast-a-Mold 25T, to be exact (134 pounds of material in total). It’s ultimately more cost effective to buy in bulk and, going by the quantity I was able to produce with my initial gallon of Flex-It 90, this should give me enough material to make approximately 120 action figures. Possibly even more than that, since I’m only counting the twelve finished, fully assembled figures that I initially made from the first gallon of Flex-It 90 that I ever bought and not all the reject/extra parts that I ended up with while I was still learning to work with the material.

Since the vacuum chamber and its accompanying pump arrived in the mail first, that was what I tried first, using it to degass my initial batch of Cast-a-Mold 25T silicone rubber. I’m glad I invested in a vacuum chamber as well as a pressure pot, because Cast-a-Mold 25T has a significantly higher viscosity rating than the Let’s Resin brand silicone I’d been using up until that point (it also didn’t hurt that I purchased a small bottle silicone thinner as well).

And it worked like a champ! It’s amazing to watch all the bubbles froth up to the top of the cups when the silicone is under the vacuum. I can’t help but think about how all of that air could have ended up in the final mold. Shame I didn’t get a picture of that part of the degassing process…

I had a vintage Marx cowboy figurine from the 1950’s or 60’s that is so exquisitely sculpted that I felt compelled to use it as my initial test subject, not just for the degassed Cast-a-Mold rubber but for pressure casting as well. The original figure is on the left, its mold on the right.

I didn’t want to dip into my Flex-It 90 resin quite yet (especially not for test/practice pieces), but I had a trial kit of Smooth-On Smoothcast 320 rigid urethane resin that had been sitting around since at least February of this year. Like Flex-It 90, it also had a three minute potlife and was ideal for practicing getting my resin poured, my pressure pot’s lid fully sealed, and the pot itself pressurized in time. It’s no walk in the park, but I got a little quicker and more efficient with each successive casting.

Speaking of, I was able to make three very impressive copies of the Marx cowboy before what happened with the pressure pot happened…

The pressure pot and air compressor appeared to work as well, until a few castings in I noticed that the regulator knob wasn’t working. No matter which direction and how much I turned it (and yes, I did remember to pull it out first), it was having no effect on the pressure gauge. After several attempts, the regulator knob just fell out (spring and all). Not good. Not good at all.

Thankfully, I was able to do a return/replace through Amazon and I got my replacement within a couple days (about three days prior to this update). The worst part about the whole process was sitting in traffic for an hour on my way back home from the UPS store. Thanks, road construction. It felt like the end of the world when it happened, but it turned out to just be a minor inconvenience at best.

After once again taking my time to ensure the replacement pressure pot and air compressor was properly set up and verifying that the pressure regulator knob actually worked this time (it did), I was off to the races. Here’s another pressure casting I did, my first one in Flex-It 90 after setting up the new pressure pot. The action figure torso piece on the left was made before I got a pressure pot (if you couldn’t tell from all the air bubbles) and the one on the right was pressure casted.

A marked improvement, no?

But the past couple weeks weren’t all vacuum chambers and pressure pots. There’s even more fun stuff to talk about.

Like this set of twelve horribly misshapen bootleg mini wrestlers (along with a tiny ring and a bag of random accessories that they can’t carry). When I was in Ohio, a new place opened up that basically buys up and resells Amazon’s returns at bargain prices, and I found this set for $2.

Right there and then, the idea popped into my head to customize, over-sculpt, and kitbash them until they’re completely unrecognizable, make molds of them, and then cast them in Flex-It 40 super-flexible resin to make my own Monster In My Pocket style figures. I’m told Flex-It 40 has the same kind of feel as the old school MUSCLE and Monster In My Pocket “keshi” figures (as well as a considerably longer potlife than Flex-It 90’s three minutes) and scale is about right for it when you place one of the wrestlers side-by-side with a vintage MIMP figure.

As for what I’m going to do for my MIMP-inspired series, I’m thinking of going with a kind of retro-futuristic cyberpunk theme with added influence from video games like Anarchy Reigns, Contra: Hard Corps, Let It Die, and a dash of Manhunt as well as films like Escape from New York and the Warriors. I’ve earmarked a few to start over-sculpting with Green Stuff, so we’ll see how that goes. For a name, I’m thinking of something along the lines of Mayhem In Your Pocket (MIYP). I’m still workshopping that one.

Also, I sculpted a little hazmat guy out of polymer clay (with added Green Stuff details after the fact). I know it sucks, I just wanted to get more of a feel for polymer clay before I delve into any of the “Polymer Clay for Beginners” books that I bought recently.

And because I got a wild hair and the misguided notion that I could MAYBE fit up the rough spots in the figure with some wet sanding and my dremel, I decided to make a silicone mold and three different colored hazmat guys that I pressure cast in the remaining Smooth-On 320 resin. The castings themselves came out well, because my equipment is good, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the rotten sculpting. Oh well. I kicked around the idea of painting the masks, gloves, and boots but I ultimately just threw them in the trash.

The mold I’m going to keep around to eventually chop up into chunks and use to conserve silicone in future mold pours (not that I’m in any danger of running out of silicone any time soon, but still).

I have more to report on things I’ve been working on, but I think I’ll leave things off here. As I mentioned before, I’ve been extremely busy and blogging hasn’t been too high on my list of priorities but I am trying to (once again) get back into the writing habit, so hopefully that will change in the days and weeks to come.