Genestealer Update 17: Hands, and the First Actual Setback

Alright,  not a heck of a lot to boast about since the last update.  We've started being busy in the shop, so hobby builds like this have taken a bit of a back seat.  

First off, I've demolded the hand sculpts:

The clay was a bit tough to clean out of the molds and the edges were a bit sharp, resulting in the first blood sacrifice for the Genestealer project:

Note to self: next time use more release agent.

The clay turned out to be very much a pain in the butt to get out of the epoxy mold.  Luckily, I have my assistant Tia in the shop who was all kinds of happy to pick the clay out of the molds for me:

Once the clay had pretty much all been picked out of the mold, the remaining residue had to be scrubbed out of the fiberglass mold with some detergent and gentle brushes:


Once all of the clay was scrubbed out it was time to fit the core back into the mold and see how we did.  That's where the problem came up:


It was a bit difficult to get the right hand to fit back into the mold.  It turns out the tolerance was pretty tight on the thumb side of the wrist:


So tight that it actually took a chunk out of the core:

I hadn't really realized it before, but the slightly relaxed pose of my lifecast hand meant making the mold with a slightly curved parting wall.  If I was slipcasting or rotocasting the gloves it wouldn't be a problem but since I'd be casting silicone gloves around a core, the tight tolerance meant that the cast rubber would be damaged during the demolding process.  

Oops.

So the answer now is that I have to go back and redo the lifecast with my hands in a much more rigid, flat pose like so:

This way I can make the mold with a parting line on a single plane and the gloves will demold much easier without causing any damage.

Live and learn I guess.

So that's the bad news. 

The good news is that Jeff put in a few more hours getting the lower leg forming bucks smoothed out:

They need just a bit more time and then we'll be able to vacform the lower leg parts and start rigging them onto the stilts.  In the meantime, they have a spot on the shelf:


But they'll be done soon:


Since I had my setback with the gloves, I decided to set the head sculpt somewhere it's less likely to get messed up while I re-sculpt the hands.  So it's found a place of honor on the wall in the office:

Which mostly makes me think I'll need to build a trophy mount version to hang on the wall once this project is completed.

Stay tuned...