Welding Helmet

Back when I worked at the tire recycling plant, I got pulled from general labor quite frequently to do maintenance work. I have posted previously about some of the projects that I worked on while I was there. I did a lot of welding and metal fabrication while I was there, and at some point, the maintenance manager got tired of me using his welding mask and decided to get me my own. He told me to put my name on it...

So put my name on it, I did. The letters and skull applique were things that I bought at the auto parts store. They are self adhesive, chrome covered, plastic, 3D appliques. The row of square studs are metal. They are the kind that you see on leather wrist bands (well, back when you used to see people wearing leather wrist bands with spikes on them- so like, the 80's, I guess). The spikes are hollow underneath, and have two little pointy tabs on the sides for poking through the leather and crimping over on the other side. I cut tiny slits in the plastic of the mask to poke these points through, and then super glued them in place. The points were not long enough to crimp over on the other side of the plastic.

When I left that job, I did not take the mask with me (though I wish that I had) because, although my boss told me it was mine and I should put my name on it, I took that to mean that it was for my use, but I still considered it company property. I wonder if whoever is wearing it now kept it on there?

I did, of course, take a few pictures of it before I left.  Maybe I'll make another one for use in my new workshop.

This was another one of those projects that is old, and I thought that I had posted it, but now I don't see it anywhere on the blog, so better late than never.

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This past several months, I have been trying hard to get this blog back on its feet. I have posted more new content in the past eight months than I did in the past three years combined. Granted, it hasn't been props or book binding, but still. I have maintained a consistent  posting schedule of a new post every 7-10 days, and I have stayed 4 to 5 posts ahead of the publishing schedule for most of that time. But lately I have hit a lull. I have one more post in the queue, and another two that are still unfinished. I have one or two old projects that I had planned on making brief posts about, and then I'm out of material. So, unless something changes in the next few weeks, there is going to be another dry spell, possibly starting as early as ten days from now (when the last finished post publishes). I have no idea how long it will last.

Mother's Little Helper

My mother is getting older, and she has diabetic neuropathy, and very little strength in her hands. I keep telling her to buy 2-liter bottles of soda instead of cans, because they are cheaper. She keeps saying that she has trouble opening them, and when she can get them open, she can't close them tight enough to keep them from going flat.

I've seen bottle grippers (and she has a few) that could help with opening and closing them, but they have their problems too. Depending on the design, they might also require some grip strength, and regardless of design, they would require her to dig out a tool whenever she wanted to open or close the bottle. People are lazy. They would rather just buy cans.

The other day, we were having this discussion for about the umpteen-millionth time, and it dawned on me that what she really needed was a better cap for the bottle. One that would be easy for her to open and close.

I took the cap from an empty 2-liter bottle of soda and embedded it in an "ergonomically" shaped chunk of polyurethane plastic. Now, she can just remove the original cap when she opens a new bottle, and replace it with this "grip cap" and leave it on there until the bottle is empty. Give the cap a rinse when the bottle is empty, and it's ready for use on the next bottle.

The initial prototype took me about 20 minutes to make. I didn't document its creation, because it was just a proof of concept prototype, but you can see it above. It is an organic shape with knobbly edges about three inches in diameter. It was made with a very quickly hand sculpted mold made from sulfur-free modeling clay, into which I poured polyurethane resin.

After the prototype was finished, I decided to refine the shape a bit, and so I made a wooden puck by drilling out six holes in a circle in a piece of 1-by lumber and then cutting out the circle with a jigsaw. I gave the puck a coat of gloss spray paint to help it not stick to the clay when making the mold.

I then flattened out some sulfur-free modeling clay (sulfur can inhibit the curing process of silicone rubber, so I only buy sulfur free plasticine-type modeling clay; hear after referred to as "clay"). Then I mold the clay around the puck, after spraying it with some silicone mold release spray. I put the clay just around the bottom and sides. The top face is left open. Then I pull the puck out the the clay, leaving the shape intact.

 To prevent resin from dripping into the cap, I mask off the underside of a used 2-liter bottle cap from my plastic parts bin. Then I stick it, bottom side up, in the center of the clay mold. Make sure you do NOT spray mold release on the cap. You want the resin to bond with the plastic cap, just not to the clay mold.

I mix up some polyurethane resin. Here, I'm using Smooth-On's Smooth-Cast Onyx, because it's what I had on hand. It's a 1 to 1 by volume mix ration of part A and part B. When it cures, it comes out glossy black. Sometimes I add a little talc powder to the mix as a filler. This resin has about a two minute work time, and can be demolded after about fifteen minutes.

I pour the resin around the cap, up to the rim. I want the finished piece to be big and chunky, and easy to manipulate with fiddly fingers- like a baby toy. 

Once the resin sets, I peel off the clay mold. I do it carefully, so I can just re-use the mold a second time without having to reshape it around the puck. Remove the masking tape, knock down any sharp corners with some rough sand paper, and give it a wash, and it's ready to go!

 I made a total of three of these, the prototype and these two from the wooden puck. That should be plenty for now. I still need to see if the resin will bond well to the plastic cap. Some plastics don't want to stick to anything. But so far they seem fine. Mom seems to like them. She says she doesn't have any problem gripping them or twisting them, and she even thinks they look cool on the soda bottle. :)

Art Deco Snack Bowls

So, at the Rogue Cthulhu Friday Night Speak Easy, at Con on the Cob, I wanted to decorate the room in an art deco style. I had just watched the Great Gatsby for inspiration, and I found some roaring 20's style decorations on eBay, but I didn't have the time or money for that, so I planned to make them myself. Unfortunately, time became a severely limiting factor and I only managed to get one art deco style decoration finished for the show.

These are large dark green salad bowls that I got at a local discount store for $1 each. I spray painted them with gloss black (on the outside only!) and then used aluminum foil tape (the kind used for furnace repair) to make a geometric line pattern on them. I kept the pattern very simple and easily repeatable. I made six of these and I used them as snack bowls and filled them with various kinds of chips and snacks. This was a very small touch that ultimately had next to no impact on the look of the room, but I thought it was a good idea.

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).

And here are a few pics of the game being played for the first time at Origins 2013.

 Thanks for following along. This was a fun and ambitious build for me. More than once I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew, but I'm glad that I pushed myself to finish it. It was a very rewarding experience and I am very proud of the final product.

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

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- Ravenous Cavern

The second terrain tile I made for the Cultists of R'lyeh game board, was the Ravenous Cavern. Long before I started sculpting the tiles, I had the idea to use part of a plastic disposable cup for the armature of my cave style hex. That is one of the reasons that I needed an air dry clay, rather than something like Sculpey, which you bake in the oven. I cut a nine ounce plastic cup in half (well, a little less than half, actually) on an angle to give me the shape I wanted. Shorter in the rear and a little taller in the front. I added a little wad of aluminum foil near the base of the cup to help with the transition. Before setting them on the tile, I smeared a layer of cold porcelain on the tile where the pieces would sit. This was to help adhere them to the tile, to help keep them from sliding around while I worked, and to pre-texture the inside of the cave floor.

 I positioned the cave entrance somewhere sort of near the center of the tile, since that would be the focal point of the terrain. That didn't leave much room for blending it down into the ground. I decided to give the thing a sort of tail that wrapped around. It would imply that the cavern wound around as it descended. It also made the whole thing look kind of like a Dune-esque sand worm coming up out of the ground, and I decided I was OK with that. I think of it as a visual double entendre. Maybe it's a cave. Maybe it's a monster. Maybe it's both!

 After laying the clay down over the cup and foil armature, I worked on the surface texture. Like the Pit of Despair, I used a pointy tool to carve lines in the surface, running from the ground up the sides and sweeping from the tail to the mouth of the cave. Again, I left the little balls of clay the formed and let them add to the texture. Getting the clay wrapped around the front edge of the cup was the hardest part. It didn't want to stick to the plastic very well. I wrapped it under as best I could, and pulled down on the edge, like with the rim of the Pits, to give it a sharp stalactite sort of look. In an effort to hide some spots where the clay had ripped away from the plastic cup, I also added a few pieces of clay, and then rolled them down into points, making much larger stalactites, which sort of look like giant sand worm teeth.

 After the whole thing was dry, I still wasn't happy with the surface texture. It was too simple and plain. It didn't look natural enough. So I decided to try the stippling technique I had planned to use on the Desolate Waste. I rolled up a ball of clay and smashed it down onto the tile surface, and then ripped it up again sharply. The effect was not as good as I had hoped, but it was all I had. It seems that the temperature and "stickyness" of the clay has a lot to do with how successful this technique is at giving me the texture I was looking for. I dabbed the clay all over the surface of the tile and over the cave, blending the two together. When that was dry, I gave the tile a coat of flat black primer.

 The color scheme for the Ravenous Cavern was going to be orange. I used four different shades of orange acrylic paint, from golden brown to neon florescent orange. I followed the same sea sponge stippling technique I used for the Pits of Despair, and which I intended to use for all the tiles. I layered the colors on with the sponge, heavier at the edge of the tile, and more sparsely towards the center. Then I dry-brushed the cave with the florescent orange to make it pop in the UV lighting.

 After the paint was dry, I coated it in a spray matte sealer. Here are the four Cavern tiles I made, sitting all together. When I made the terrain tiles, I made each tile of each type all at once, and I painted each tile of each type at once too, that way I felt I could keep the look of the terrain type more consistent across all the pieces.

Stat tuned for more board pieces!

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