Back in 2006 I was sailing as 3rd Mate on board a hydrographic survey ship. One afternoon we were cruising along the coast of South Korea when I came up to the pilothouse to take over as watch officer. When it came time to get an appraisal of the shipping traffic in the area, I couldn't help but notice this particularly unsettling ship in the distance:
This is Sun Cruise Resort and Yacht, a hotel designed and built to look like some implausibly horrific maritime disaster. We were in the area for a few days and I still couldn't help but be weirded out every time I turned around and saw this hotel which was clearly designed to look like something left behind by Godzilla. It was just as bad at night:
Many folks might ask why someone would build such a thing. Not me. I figure it started with some absurdly wealthy South Korean going on a cruise and getting seasick. Then they thought, "this would be great if only it would stop moving." A few years later, there it is. Problem solved.
If it was up to me, the next step would be setting it up with wheels so I could back it into downtown Seoul every month or two just to see how much destruction it could cause. It's things like this that should make the world glad I'm not a billionaire.
If you get bored, check out their website for some fascinating Engrish. Especially if you'd like to make reservations for a "romantic propose," so you can come to "the special resort for making your impressiver love confession."
Tell me that doesn't sound like a good time.
A while back I posted about making a Mark 3 Ironman helmet using my 3D printer named "Jarvis." I'm very pleased with the finished piece, but being me I couldn't be satisfied to stop there.
Since I still had some amazingly detailed digital models for the rest of the suit, I decided it was time to go ahead and build it.
Here's a "during" shot from that last post:
Of course, there's been an awful lot of progress since then:
If you'd like to see more progress pics as well as a description of the process involved in making the rest of the armor, read on...
A while back I was asked by MAKE Magazine to come out to their headquarters and teach a quick lesson as part of their Maker Camp, a virtual summer camp conducted via Google Hangouts. Each day they host a number of hangouts to discuss different projects their virtual campers are working on as well as a demonstration of various tools or techniques for making all sorts of interesting things.
My demonstration: making a couple of simple molds for prop building. You can watch the whole thing right here:
I did a detailed write-up about the one-sided mold a few days ago, but I'll also be doing an in-depth article about the two-sided mold just as soon as I get a chance to get a few more photos of the molds in progress.
Stay tuned!
A while back, the folks at MAKE Magazine asked me to do a quick moldmaking demonstration as part of their "Maker Camp," a virtual summer camp program conducted via Google+ Hangouts. I was happy to oblige. I usually have a handful of simple projects on my get-around-to-it list and this was an excuse to knock a couple of them out.
The first type of mold I demonstrated was a one-sided mold occasionally referred to as a "block mold." This is the type of mold you make when you need to replicate something with a flat side that has no details. When laid on that side, the piece has to have no significant undercuts where bubbles will be trapped.
I decided that the perfect candidate for reproduction would be a simple barbell plate. I started by carving out a quick prototype on my CNC machine:
Here it is after a light sanding:
I gave it a couple of coats of primer to seal up the surface and then it was time to set it up for molding.
First, I glued it down to a piece of cardboard so it wouldn't float away once I poured silicone over it. Then I used more cardboard to glue together a watertight wall around the plate with an approximate standoff of one inch.
Here's a shot of the painted prototype with mold box built around it:
After double-checking to be sure that the box wouldn't leak, I mixed up a batch of silicone RTV moldmaking rubber and began pouring:
When pouring the rubber, it's a good idea to start pouring into a low part of the mold. This way the rubber will flow up and over the part in the mold without trapping as many bubbles against the surface of the part.
After filling the mold box so that there was at least 1/2" of silicone over the top of the part, I left it overnight to cure. You want that half inch of rubber so that any bubbles will have a chance to rise up and away from the surface of the piece you're replicating. Any bubbles in the rubber now will become warts on the copies when it comes time to make castings.
Once the rubber had completely cured, the next step was to flip the mold over and remove the cardboard:
With the cardboard peeled off, you can peel the rubber off of the prototype:
To make a copy of the prototype, it's just a quick matter of filling the silicone mold with a lightweight casting resin or expanding foam:
Depending on the quality of the silicone rubber you use, you can get anywhere from twenty to sixty castings out of a mold like this.
While it looks just like any other 25-lb barbell plate, this particular casting weighs about 4 ounces. It makes it look like I have really strong fingers:
Since I cast this particular plate in flexible foam, it'll bounce when you throw it at someone.
Fun!
