Shop Log 10/17/22 - 31 Days of Progress Week 2

31 Days of Progress hasn’t exactly been going to plan, as I suffered a major setback to my projects this week. Once again, my California Air Tools pressure pot needed for my resin casting has malfunctioned. I’ll spare you the technical details, but there’s something seriously wrong with the valve that the air hose attached to and not only is the pot slow to pressurize, it appears to get stuck at around 20 psi or less. I’m almost certain that it’s something to do with the valve because when I disconnect the hose and open the valve, it doesn’t vent any air and I have to depressurize the pot using the safety valve (which I don’t make a habit of using). I checked for blockages and found none. My pressure regulator knob hasn’t been adjusted (I know better than to try to mess with that thing from the first California Air Tools pressure pot I had to exchange with Amazon), so I don’t know what the problem is.

I’m thankfully still under my 12-month warranty and I’ve reached out to the manufacturer on Thursday of this week, though haven’t gotten a response as of this writing. Which is typical for California Air Tools as it took five whole business days for them to respond to me the last time I had an issue with one of their fine products. Last time, I exchanged it via Amazon and got a replacement within the week but since I’m way past the Amazon return date, I unfortunately have to go through California Air Tools to get it replaced under warranty. And not to put too fine of a point on it, but between California Air Tools’ lovely customer service and the impeccable build quality of their pressure pots, I think this company is officially out of chances with me. Depending on how this latest debacle pans out, I’m definitely going to give TCP Global’s 5-gallon pressure pot.

Either way, resin casting is off the table for the foreseeable future though I will get a new pressure pot before the end of the year. Hopefully sooner rather than later, but I’ll probably be away from my place for the entirely of November and most of December per the usual holiday stuff as well as other family-related priorities. Just don’t expect any of my current slate of projects to be finished any time soon since I refuse to cast anything without a pressure pot (maybe for an emergency test fitting or prototype here and there, where it doesn’t matter too much if a part is full of tiny air bubbles). Equipment failures aside, I can still make progress on my projects in other ways. Namely the initial sculpting phase, on which I focused over the past week (and I’m still way behind). I can also still make molds and there is ample opportunity for that.

First up is some leftover Sargent Art brand polymer clay, which wasn’t the greatest thing to sculpt with (especially for a beginner like myself) and while I later acquired some superior polymer clays like Super Sculpey Premo and Firm, I still wanted to use up the remainder of the cheap stuff. So I made some flat(ish) “planes” to serve as a base for my Mecha Burger figure’s torso to (hopefully) prevent any awkward gaps between the torso and the waist. I made a few of these just in case. 

I also created a socket for the Mecha Burger’s waist joint to go on one of these flat bases by covering the ball joint on the waist with some tin foil and building some polymer clay around it. The foil not only allowed me to remove the socket from the ball joint (because this Sargent Art stuff is incredibly sticky compared to most other brands of polymer clay that I’ve worked with) but also would help the socket maintain its shape. For the rest of the cheap clay, I ran it through my clay extruder to make French fries for the Mecha Burger’s fry cannon though I would soon realize that these fries were way too big. Still, if I ever make a Mecha Fry robot, these could come in handy.

To further illustrate what I was trying to accomplish with the flat piece and the socket, I glued the two parts together and test fitted them onto the waist joint and moved it around to confirm that I had the solid foundation that I would need to build the cheeseburger torso around.

Before I started my second attempt at a rough sculpt of Mecha Burger’s torso, I glued a piece of wooden dowel rod to the top of the socket piece as a way to not only act as an armature but also give me an idea of where the head and neck articulation will eventually go. I bulked out the middle portion of the torso (the burger patty) with some aluminum foil before I started adding Super Sculpey Premo. Pictured below is yet another rough sculpt of burger torso and once again, I was dissatisfied with the result. The buns didn’t have the right proportions compared to the reference image and I felt that at the top bun (the one on the right) didn’t stick out over the meat and cheese as much as I would have liked. Thankfully, I didn’t bake the polymer clay this time around, so nothing I sculpted here was permanent yet.

So I decided to chop off the buns with a clay cutter and bake the middle portion as a separate piece, as I was at least satisfied with the work I’ve done on that. Now the middle portion was not only a part of the foundation, but it would give me a solid base to rework and add additional detail to the buns without having to worry about squishing or deforming the middle section in the process. This also gives me another chance to sculpt each of the buns and do side-by-side comparisons and measurements to figure out the best positions to add the arm joints so that when I eventually put the entire torso together, one arm peg isn’t higher or lower than the other (at least not to a significantly noticeable degree).

I’m still working on the cheeseburger buns and I haven’t baked the one I test-fitted against the middle section, but I think they’re starting to look better already.

In my last update, I noted that I would resume sculpting the arms for my Japanese Oni figure but I ran into another problem. I always test out the joints in my custom or homemade action figures to ensure that they have full 360 degree rotation and I’m doubly careful when it comes to custom made sockets for pre-existing joints. The problem I ran into with the Oni’s arms was that the socket I was using seemed to work at a glance but when I tested it early in the arm sculpting phase, the arm kept popping off when I tried to give it the full 360 degree rotation.

Bad news is that I had to once again hit pause on sculpting the Oni’s arms. The good news is that I’ve recently acquired some vintage Simba Toys Pirate figures for my personal MOTU bootleg/knock-offs collection. This is significant because the torso and legs that I used as the base for my Oni figure came from one of these Simba Pirates figures and now I not only had feet/lower legs with the right ball joint I needed for the feet but also the arms with the right sockets I needed to perfectly fit onto the Oni’s torso.

That’s why the short, stocky fellow in the picture is missing his arms. But don’t worry, he’ll have them back after I made molds of them.

And here’s the working prototype/foundation for my Oni figure with the pirate’s arms attached (again as a test-fitting) prior to molding them. Obviously, I’m going to make my duplicates and just keep the sockets that fit over the ball joints, as the size, proportions, and overall angle of the existing arms aren’t right for what I’m going for with this figure. But they will provide the starting point for the arms. Ditto for the Oni’s feet. As you’ll see later (and in the pic below), I already made a mold and test casting of the feet/lower legs that I borrow from the Simba pirate. The plan here is to again, just keep the ball joint that attaches to the legs and sculpt a pair of Oni feet around it. This will make for a considerably shorter action figure as the “shorts” on the original sculpt are actually meant to be the Oni’s legs and will terminate at the feet with little to no ankle section between them. It’ll make more sense when I actually sculpt them, I promise.

Picking up where we left off last time with the molds I was making of the modified Mexican bootleg He-Man and Skeletor parts, I not only started molding the torsos but I wanted to try something a little different. See, I was out of silicone sealant to secure my mold surrounds (plastic cups with the bottoms cut off) to an acrylic sheet and I didn’t trust hot glue to do the job by itself. So I decided to pour a tiny bit of molten Monster Clay into the base of the cup mold to not only add an extra level of protection against the glue securing the part’s funnel/pour spout and air vents to the bottom when the Monster Clay cured, but also seal up any gaps in the hot glue seam that might cause the silicone to leak.

While the inside walls of the cup might look like a gas station bathroom stall, this was preferable to getting any Monster Clay onto the part which I took great pains to avoid, since any globs of clay that gets on the part will show up as part of the mold and subsequent castings.

After adding the layer of Monster Clay at the very bottom and letting it cool, I added some chunks of trash silicone to the empty spaces in the mold frame to help cut down on the fresh silicone that would be needed.

Once that was out of the way, I mixed and poured the silicone for each of the three molds (the modified Mexican bootleg He-Man and Skeletor torsos as well as the aforementioned mold of the Simba pirate feet). I added some modeling clay around the outside of each mold surround just in case the Monster Clay gambit didn’t pay off, but these molds were free of any leaks and this measure proved unnecessary.

Here are the original “master” parts demolded. You can see where the Monster Clay that got stuck to the walls of the cups left negative spaces in the molds but since these molds are quite thick, this had no bearing on anything other than the aesthetics of the molds themselves.

And here are the initial test castings from these modified torso molds, test-fitted to the pre-existing castings of the modified legs. The Skeletor torso fit quite well but the He-Man torso, not so much (not that you can really tell by looking at it). This most certainly came down to the hot glue/petroleum jelly method (seen in my last Shop Log) that I used to make the socket in the torso yielding inconsistent and unsatisfactory results despite the master parts fitting together quite well. Which sucks, and I’ll probably have to end up re-doing the Mexican bootleg He-Man torso mold at some point, but I’m more concerned with the Skeletor molds at the moment since my project was to make a Halloween themed Skeletor (which, again, most certainly won’t be complete by Halloween). And this was just the beginning of the troubles that I would have with these molds and this particular project.

Not only did the hot glue/petroleum jelly method fail me for the He-Man torso, but it also failed me for the heads. And to make matters worse, I once again ran into the same issue that I had with my Oni figure concerning the arms popping out of the joints when I made test castings of those for my prototypes and attempted to rotate the arms 360 degrees. I was worried that this might be a problem, but the arms could stay put on the original figure despite the unsightly gap between the arm joint on the torso and where the “head” of the joint actually connects to the socket inside of the arm. Suffice to say, this wasn’t the case with the duplicates of the arms that I cast in Flex-It 90 and attempted to fit onto the arm joints of my newly casted torsos. Maybe it’s due to the lighter material and the relative stiffness of whatever cheap plastic the original bootlegs were injected molded with, but I’m unfortunately going to have to revise the arms (possibly by creating Monster Clay duplicates from the existing molds and somehow modifying them to be a better fit for the arm pegs on my modified torsos), then make new molds of said revised arm.

But I don’t feel like doing any of that for the moment, so I’m going to set my modified bootleg MOTU molds and my Halloween Skeletor aside for the next couple days while I focus on my other projects. Who knows, the way these things usually pan out is that I discover new solutions for problems like this when I’m working on other things.

And speaking of other things, I’m going to slightly walk back what I said earlier about not taking on any new projects this month as I work to make progress on my handpicked slate of existing ones, but what I’m about to show you was just a quickie, off-the-cuff kind of thing that I had a lot of fun doing. I recently found a Trap Jaw figure based on the design from the CGI Netflix Masters of the Universe show being clearance out for about $6 as an Amazon Warehouse open-box deal. Just before this, I’d gotten the Masters of the Universe Origins First Appearance/Mini-Comic Trap Jaw figure and I thought it would be cool if I made a resin copy of the Origins Trap Jaw head, stick it on the Netflix Trap Jaw body (because I absolutely despise that head design), and paint the new head like the classic Filmation cartoon. By the way, that Origins Mini-Comic Trap Jaw is an awesome figure and I'm glad I pre-ordered it, especially since I (like so many other collectors) missed out on the earlier MOTU Origins Trap Jaw that was part of Wave 2 that came out all the way back in 2020.

If you don’t know anything about He-Man, the Origins Trap Jaw head that I recasted is the gray one and the default head is the one that looks like it has a garbage disposal for a mouth.

Once again, I used the hot glue/petroleum jelly method to fit the resin casted head onto the ball joint. Just like before, I used a brush to “paint” the ball joint with petroleum jelly before filling up the bottom of the head with hot glue. I then pressed the head onto the ball joint and rotated it as the hot glue cured. I trimmed off the excess hot glue and this time, it actually worked in creating a near perfect ball joint for the head that wasn’t originally meant for this figure’s body.

And then, like I said, I painted Trap Jaw’s head as he appears in the classic Filmation cartoon. For the helmet and jaw, I used Reaper Brilliant Red, which takes a million thin coats to cover but I think the end result looks stunning. I think I used Citadel Leadbelcher for the silver parts of his helmet and for his face, I think I mixed some Citadel Orruk Flesh with a drop of Repear Naga Green. Then I painted his eyes and his iconic black eyebrows (which are strangely missing from both of Trap Jaw’s Origins figures).

After I gave the head a protective clear coat and let it fully dry, I popped it back onto the figure and there we have it. If absolutely nothing else goes my way, this is at least one project that I was able to wrap up this month.

I know this update was a hodge podge of almost everything going wrong, but I hope to bring better tidings in my next Shop Log as the 31 Days of Progress rolls on.