MRX Designs: Foam

Showing posts with label Foam. Show all posts

Friday, April 20, 2018

Engraved Wooden Wand Case v1

Hot on the heels of my recent laser engraved Goetic Seals Box, I found another use for some of those pre-made wooden boxes that you find at the craft store.

This is a 7x2 inch wooden box that I have sanded and laser engraved with a design on the lid, which I had selected specifically to use in conjunction with some 6" selenite wands which I carry in my shop.

After engraving, I sealed the box with two or three coats of de-waxed shellac. Then I set about trying to install a foam and cloth lining to cradle the rather fragile selenite wand.

The foam part of the lining came together very quickly. I used 2mm craft foam and positioned it in such a way that the springiness of the foam would create a soft cradle for the wand on the bottom of the box, and also a pad on the underside of the lid would apply gentle pressure to keep the wand from moving around.

The bottom foam piece was cut extra wide and the edges and center folded down to make an M shape. The sides of the box will hold the edges in place. In order to keep the center down, I glued it down to a scrap piece of chipboard that would run along the bottom under the foam.

The short ends of the box also needed some padding to protect the tips of the wand, so I cut two pieces of 2mm foam (two for each end) to tuck into the end of the box. I had to trim the M piece a little to make room for the end padding.

BTW, pay no attention to the fact that the colors of the foam change in some of these pictures. I lined more than one box and had at least one failed attempt and I just used whatever color foam I had laying around. I knew I would be covering it with cloth anyway. Each picture may not be from the same box or stage of the project.

The cushion on the lid was just a simple piece of 2mm craft foam cut a little wide so that it would bow out a little bit from the lid. This will offer some gentle pressure to keep the wand from moving around when the lid is closed.

The foam part came together quickly, but the cloth part was a pain in the ass. I ruined at least one set of foam parts experimenting with how I was going to cover it with cloth. I originally intended to use velvet, but I thought satin would be easier to work with because it is thinner, and I knew I would be tucking the excess cloth behind the edges of the foam. Sorry, it's hard to see much detail of the cloth work because it is black.

The lid was the easier of the two sides, but even that took two tries to get an acceptable, if not perfect result. The satin cloth is spray glued to the craft foam and the ends are turned under and also tacked with spray glue. The short ends were kept a little sloppy so that the excess cloth would hide the small gap created by the bowing of the foam.

Pro tip: don't use super glue with craft foam and satin cloth. It soaks through the cloth very quickly, bonds to your fingers instantly, and dries very slowly on the foam.

The bottom side was even more problematic. At least two failed attempts were made trying to cover this assembly with cloth. Again, I used spray glue to tack down the satin to the craft foam. I had to wrap the little end pads in satin separately and just tuck them in on the ends. I tried to cover them at the same time as the main piece but that didn't work out well. Even just covering the main piece had a lot of little issues that had to be worked out. Tucking things in here, folding things under there, making sure not to impede the design of the M shape of the foam. Difficult to explain, but take my word for it. There were issues.

Anyway, it all got worked out satisfactorily. The lining wasn't quit as nice or as easy to make as I had wanted it to be, but the end product is quit a bit better than the cheap pre-fab wooden box I started with. This will up the value of the selenite wands considerably.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear

It's hard for me to believe it has been nearly four years since I finished my giant Settlers of Catan clone, Cultists of R'lyeh. I was very proud of it when it was first unveiled. And it has seen some players. It has been featured at Origins Game Fair, three times, and it has been to Groundhog Day Gaming Retreat, once. The last time I unpacked it, was for Groundhog Day Gaming Retreat, and I noticed that it was showing some significant signs of wear. I took a few pics of some of the defects that have developed and thought it would be a good idea to do a follow-up post to show readers how some of the construction techniques and materials have held up over time.

Starting with the player pieces, the roads/tunnels have held up fine. I mean, what can really go wrong with some painted MDF strips, right? But the Altars and Temples have shown some deterioration. Some of the little Cthulhu figures have come unglued from their bases. Also, the polyurethane resin that was used to close off one end of the PVC rings has started to separate from the PVC. Apparently, the two did not bond well and if you are not careful, you can easily just pop them apart. I was never really thrilled with the way they came out in the first place. It was kind of a rush job. To do it over, I would not use PVC and urethane resin for these.

The carved polystyrene foam has weathered surprisingly well. There are a few places where the paint has begun to chip off, but it could be touched up very easily. Only one of the foam pieces shows any sign of damage, and that is a mountain peak who's tip got a little crushed in transport. If you didn't know you would probably never notice.

I was a little concerned about the polyester resin that I used for the liquid at the bottom of the craters on the Pits of Despair. Its initial shrinkage upon drying made me think that it may eventually separate and pop out, but it did not. It has held up fine. If anything, the color of the resin has darkened some.

The one material that did not hold up as well as the others was the air dry clay known in crafting circles as cold porcelain. This was the first time I had ever used cold porcelain (a mixture of white glue and corn starch), and although I'm sure it has its uses, it also has its limitations. Most of the tiles that were made with the air dry clay show significant deterioration. Most of the problems seem to have been caused by the material continuing to shrink over time.

On the aforementioned Pits of Despair, there is some splitting along the sides of the craters, especially in the crevices where the clay was thin. You can now see some of the foil armature through the cracks. The crater walls still seem quite strong though, and there appears to be little to no breakage from wear. Also, the bottom edge of the crater, where it blends with the MDF tile base, has shrunk up and is separating from the MDF. They are still firmly attached to one another, but it is no longer a smooth transition from crater wall to ground. There is a definite fault line around the base of the crater. It is quite noticeable, but if you had never seen the tile before, you might think that it was supposed to be that way. It doesn't really ruin the effect, it just doesn't look as good.

There is some separating around the bases of the monoliths of the Cyclopean Ruins, as well. The monoliths themselves are fine, but where they blend into the MDF base, the air dry clay has shrunk and separated creating a visible fault line, just like around the craters of the Pits of Despair.

The tiles that show the most damage are the Ravenous Caverns. They each show the same signs of separation where the Clay blends into the MDF base, as the rest of the tiles. And they also show the same splitting over the foil armature that the Pits of Despair show. But the Caverns also show significant damage around the mouths of the caverns. The thin stalactites hanging from the cave roof have mostly broken off. Some of the outer rim of the cave mouth has cracked and broken off too. It appears that the clay used in this area was too thin, and also, the plastic cup used as the armature is too flexible. I should have made the mouth of the caves a little beefier. They were just too thin and delicate.

So there you have it. If you are planning on using any of these materials or techniques for your own projects, now you can get a glimpse as to how they will wear over time. My best advise would be to account for significant shrinkage of the air dry clay over time.

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7 - the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini

Before we get to the game pieces, like the houses and roads, we have one more board piece to look at. Though not exactly a terrain tile, the island of Catan is surrounded by various ports where one can trade commodities. Likewise, the island of R'lyeh is surrounded by portals where one can transform one commodity into another.

The portals were a challenge in that there are a lot of them, all with the same design, which in my mind instantly said silicone mold and casting resin. I designed the portal to look like a stone ring surrounded by symbols, kind of reminiscent of a Stargate. I sculpted the original out of Sculpey. I rolled a large piece of Sculpey into a long snake, connected the ends into a ring and then flattened the top of the ring with a rolling pin. Then I sliced the flattened ring with a razor blade to make it look like there were a number of carved stones laid out in a circle. I used a screw driver and a bamboo skewer as tools to carve glyphs into the tops of each segment. I made a few random gouges in the clay with a razor to make the stones look cracked and worn. After it was baked, I mounted it to a piece of hardboard and sealed it with spray paint.

Then I used silicon RTV rubber to make a mold of the original. The first casting I made was a solid piece of urethane resin plastic. Once I saw how much resin it took, I started to panic. I had to cast nine of these things, and because they were pretty big (about six inches across) they took a lot of resin. Fortunately, I am a cheap bastard, and I know a lot of tricks to make resin stretch. First, I used a lot of filler. Normally I use powdered talc as a filler. This does weaken the plastic somewhat, but these were not load bearing pieces. Another cost saving measure is to do a slush cast. This builds up the piece in layers and makes the final piece hollow. It took about five or six times longer to finish these pieces than it would have, but I did save a lot of resin by adding a little resin at a time, brushing it around to coat the mold surface, waiting for it to dry, then repeating until I had a sufficient thickness built up to demold the piece. The last cost saving measure I took was to add play sand as an additional filler material on the inner slush castings (but not the initial coat, or it would have shown on the surface of the finished piece). This added a lot of bulk to each coat of resin. The biggest down sides to doing a slush casting, was the amount of extra time it took, and the final piece had no underside (it was a one piece mold) so there was no surface to apply the glue for fastening it down to the wooden base. I had to add a strong glue in a heavy bead along the inside bottom edge of the casting with the expectation that the glue would sag downward and touch the wooden base.

The wooden bases were cut on a band saw from the same MDF as the terrain tiles. I made them a different shape and slightly smaller, to differentiate them. Before gluing the resin rings down to the wooden bases, I painted the base where the inside of the ring would be. Each color represented a different commodity that could be traded at that portal, with white being a generic portal where all commodities could be traded. The colors corresponded with the colors of the terrain tiles.

Each portal was primed with black spray paint, sponge stippled, and dry brushed with grey acrylic paint. The stones were given a florescent red inlay in their glyphs. I was pretty rushed by the time I got to the portals, so my standard of quality began slipping. I only had a day or two left to finish the project. And I still had player pieces and game cards to make.

The player pieces were problematic on a number of fronts. Again, I had to make a lot of them fairly quickly, so they had to be simple and cheap. I went through several design ideas before settling on one that would fit all my needs as well as my budgetary and time constraints. I had it in my head that I wanted to use the little plastic Cthulhu idols in the "Bag of Cthulhu" that I love so much. But scale was a concern. I needed to somehow make the small ones bigger, or the big ones smaller. I decided to put the smaller ones on a pedestal made from sliced pvc pipe to create "shrines" that would serve to replace the cities of Catan. I Also used pvc pipe slices to make the "altars" that would be analogous to the settlements in Catan.

Since pvc pipe is hollow, I needed to make it have a solid flat surface, so I poured a little plastic resin into each of the slices. I made sure to do this on a piece of hardboard covered with vinyl contact paper, as vinyl seems to be the one thing plastic resin won't stick to. Once dry, I just flipped them over, trimmed off any flash, and had a nice neat little altar top, ready for paint.

For the bases of the plastic Cthulhus I used a slightly smaller diameter pvc pipe and made thinner slices.

Then I glued the small plastic idols on top of their bases, and they too were ready for paint.

For simplicity and time concerns, I used straight cut slices of MDF to serve as roads (or rather "tunnels" in my game variant vernacular").

Painting the pieces was also problematic. The raw MDF wanted to soak up the paint like a sponge. It was hard to get a finish that didn't look like spray painted MDF. If I had more time, I could have employed some sort of sealer, I suppose. The color scheme was a challenge as well. I needed to use colors that differed from those of the color coded terrain tiles. I had already used most of the useful primary colors for those, so I decided to go with metallic colors for the game pieces. Only one problem. There are four player sets and only three easily differentiated metallic colors- silver, gold and copper. For the third one, I chose a metallic cobalt blue (largely because I hadn't used blue yet, and I happened to have some metallic blue spray paint). Even still, since the player pieces didn't have any florescence to them, it would be hard to see them in the odd lighting of our game room. The gold and the copper ended up looking too much alike, so I had to change to a darker color of copper. I also added some verdigris patina to the edges of the copper to further differentiate it. The blue was rather dark, and I was afraid it would be lost entirely in the predominantly red lighting of our room, so I dry brushed the blue pieces with a little white, which would glow purple in the black lights.

I got the pieces to be easily differentiated from one another in normal lighting, though I didn't like the way they looked. They were blocky and poorly painted, at least compared to the terrain tiles. Once I got them into the red and UV lighting of the Rogue Cthulhu game room, they were a complete mess. They were hard to see, and difficult to tell apart. I had to put up a small white light above the game board just to make it playable. I didn't even take any final pics of the completed pieces, as they frankly didn't look worth the time to photograph. The pic above of them on the painting table is pretty much how they look, at least the gold ones. Clearly, the game pieces need to be overhauled before next year.

So, since you have all been so patient following along on this rather lengthy build, I decided to put the final wrap-up pics here instead of making them another post. Here are the game terrain tiles, sans portals, all laid out on the floor.

And here they are with portals. The portals are not properly arranged in these pics, as I was in a hurry, and didn't really know how to arrange them yet (I had only played the game twice by this point and in Catan, the ports are pre-fixed in position and do not need to be placed).