Briefly Visiting My Projects

I tried. I got off of the ship back in late December and I'd managed to keep my to-do list to a bare minimum. I wanted to clean up the boat and finish the prototype thigh armor for the HALO costume. That was a very achievable list.

I failed.

The problem with a list like that is that those two very do-able things are mixed into a big pile of interesting and entertaining projects that I had to push aside (literally) in order to get at them. Along the way I kept finding all sort of other "that just needs a little bit of work" type stuff that started to find its way onto the workbench as well.

Here's the chestplate. All it needed was to have the black parts masked off and painted:
Of course, then I noticed that it would just take a moment or two to wire up the lights that need to be fitted to it, but I'd need yellow LEDs for the right look, and as long as I'm going to the electronics store I might as well build in a loudspeaker system so people could hear me while I'm talking inside the helmet and then...

Ahem.

I also received a pair of Submachinegun castings as part of a trade with another maker. They were great castings, but they really needed to be assembled and painted. I couldn't bear to just let them sit in the box all naked and undone. Here they were at the halfway point:


Somewhere along the way I did manage to make some progress on the thigh armor. The rough shapes are all there, but they still need some fairing, smoothing, and then a buttload of small details:


Unfortunately, most of the time I should've spent dedicated to finishing them ended up with me just screwing around in the test-fitting phase:


When I wasn't busy not getting things done in the shop, I was all over the place dreaming up all sorts of other things to not get done. Along the way I stumbled across a cheap pair of bookends that looked like miniature copies of Rodin's statue of "the Thinker." Starting with something like the guy on the left of this pic, I spent a sleepless night adding bits and pieces until I had a statue of Cthulhu posed as the Thinker. Or, as I prefer to call him, the "Cthinker:"



I made a mold to produce copies of the statue on the right (I'll be selling a few copies when I get back) but never got around to opening it up and making a casting.

While I was in the shop, I also noticed that my father had torn apart the little electric scooter my nephew runs around the folks' place on. While he was waiting for a replacement motor controller to arrive, I figured this was a great opportunity to do a fun little custom paintjob. Here's a "during" picture:


Sadly, the paint that I chose to use did not agree with the type of plastic that the scooter's body was made of. As a result, I'll have to strip it down and start over when I get back from the ship. The good news is that after much time spent looking at it I've decided exactly what color scheme I'm going to use.

Along the way I also bought the pieces and parts to build not one but FOUR copies of the Most Useless Machine Ever. I now have two boxes built, one set of electronics wired, and a whole host of tiny, lose-able parts floating around.

So that was the mess I made in the workshop.

As far as cleaning up the boat was concerned, I only really made steps backwards. It became mostly a place to stop, drop whatever I was carrying, and pass out unconscious at the end of the day. I did manage to replace my freshwater pump, but mostly I just left a big pile of dirty laundry in the aft cabin and a bag of random trash in the wastebasket. It's my way.

Now I'll just have to finish up all of these things and watever else I think of when I get off of the ship the next time. What I really need is to develop some discipline. I guess I'll add that to the to-do list. That, and building the rocket launcher... and starting the next costume project... and finishing the tank... and...