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i’m finally repairing my fett helmet mold. the silicone is fine, but the jacket has a HUGE crack. i poured resin in it months ago, so that the silicone would be solid. now i’m making the new jacket.

i’m using plasti-paste from smooth-on instead of fiberglass. the fiberglass smells terrible and leaves itchy, hazardous fuzz everywhere.

plasti-paste costs about 2x as much, but has no odor, and requires no fiber sheets / mat.

so far so good… i did one coat on one side. i’ll need a second coat on that side, since i didn’t mix enough. side 2 i’ll do enough in 1 shot.

i also got some of the sonite wax paste for a release. i’m mostly interested in preventing silicone from bonding to itself, but i’ll test it out on the jacket.

fun with casting!

all this is to clear up some space, physical and mental, for the clone weapons that i’ll be casting up soon… hopefully next week.

Silly Christmas Cartoon, originally uploaded by stormtrooperguy.

Ever wonder how Santa manages to be at thousands of shopping malls all year round and STILL has time to deliver all those toys?

did they TRY to make this product look dirty?, originally uploaded by stormtrooperguy.

tear, squeeze and toss! 100% silicone! caulk singles!

Smooth-On is the company I get my silicone, resin, etc… from.

The recently launched a product called “Onyx”. It’s a black resin. It’s surprisingly hard to tint resin to really get BLACK. I usually end up with some purplish grey color. So this was pretty neat. It’s only $5 a bottle more than the white that I usually use ($89.75 I think for the Onyx).

The color is great. It really is black as can be. It kicks FAST! The pot life is 2.5 minutes. Pot life is essentially how long it is still liquid enough to pour. From the time part A and part B touch, you have just about 2 minutes to mix and pour it before it’s useless.

Needless to say I wasted a fair bit of it tonight as I learned how to use it.

I don’t think I’ll get more of it, unless I get VERY good at casting quickly with this bottle. Having to fly like that means more bubbles, voids and other things requiring cleanup.

I did get a workable clone commander pistol pull out of it. I needed that to clean up and re-mold. My first attempt at molding it (nearly a year ago now!) did not go so well. The master was trashed and the mold tore in a few places. So I made a messy cast of it, and am repairing it. A pain to be sure, but better than scratch building it again.

So, in an effort to reactivate parts of my brain that have gone dormant, I bought Batman: The Killing Joke today.

Yes, I’m reactivating the bat-brain. Woo!

I didn’t really appreciate what a disturbing book it was when I first read it. I was 12. I wasn’t exactly the most seasoned reader.

Anyway, I’m reminded now how Oracle was born.

like any good cat-parent, i got the kids some christmas presents. tucked away in my closet to save for the morning.

tonight, i see mal with something odd in his mouth.

it’s a tube about 4″ long, 3/4″ diameter, stuffed with catnip. he’s entranced with the thing.

then i think… wait… he doesn’t… did he???

go upstairs.

closet door: open
target bag: open
pack of catnip tubes: open, scattered.

so yeah, he snuck into the closet and stole his present!

For a while I stopped blogging as I had become convinced that I really had nothing to say that NEEDED to be shared with hundreds of people.

In reality, this is all about me anyway!

Seriously, I like the reminder of what I was doing. So to that end…

A few of us play the Star Wars miniatures game (Gospog, I haven’t forgotten the rancor, I just suck at post office trips!!)

I think I’ll start posting up recaps of the games. At least the good ones.

For those that don’t play, the idea is simple. You have minis, each with a stat card… effectively the character sheet. From there, you do whatever your character is capable of. Move, shoot, force push, etc… The goal being simple: kill anyone that’s not you.

The game has factions: republic, rebellion, empire, mandalorian, etc… Your team has to stay within one faction (for the most part, there are exceptions).

Each character has a point value, and your squad has a cap on points. Usually we do 200 points. So that 115 point Luke may be badass, but that’s more than 1/2 your squad shot on one piece.

Tonight we did 5 pieces, no cap on points. Basically bring out your battering rams and see what happened.

My squad was brutal. Grievous, Ventress, Durge, Jango and Dooku.

There was one moment that I loved…

My squad was, as all good Separatist leaders would be, holed up in a room, waiting for the other 3 teams to soften each other up.

Right outside a door was Obi-Wan and Darth Bane (we weren’t honoring timelines here). The door was shut. I was lining things up so that on my turn I could pop the door open and use Dooku’s force lighting on both of them.

Obi-Wan used force push to shove Bane away from him and into the door, opening it, then ran.

Well, there we go. Bane is a MONSTER, but against all those pieces he didn’t stand a chance.

The way the 3 teams all screwed each other over was just perfect.

this happens every year, but this time it took longer than usual.

a guy on the local 501st board posted some pics of an early christmas present he got from his grandmother.

my grandmother died in 1994. christmas of 1993, she insisted that she give me my presents on christmas eve, rather than christmas day. our home life was a mess at that point, so i was surprised to get anything at all. i wanted to wait until christmas morning, but she was adamant.

i remember it was a pair of newer stephen king books that i hadn’t read. she had next to no money and wasn’t even able to leave the house without help, so how/where/when she got them remains a mystery. it’s not like there was an amazon.

anyway… i went out that night, like i did every weekend, to rocky horror. i was performing that night.

when i got home, the house was full of emts. she had a heart attack.

it took a long time for me to make the connection, but when she gave me the gifts, she knew. she was probably already having pains… it was not her first, but it ended up being the worst.

my mother took down the christmas decorations that night. she was such a miserable person at that point.

my grandmother was in the hospital for 6 months, and died there. heart attack after heart attack. the entire time i visited once or twice. i was also a miserable person at that point.

so every year i’m reminded that the last thing she ever did was give me a christmas present. he passing was when the last vestiges of a civil relationship between my mother and i ended. now, over a decade later, she’s missing… run away somewhere to avoid her life.

it’s strange… i’ve moved beyond being an emotional wreck over it, but every year around christmas i get uncharacteristically sentimental.

There are still a couple of weeks in 2009, but my blogging has been seriously lacking this year. Since I have the time and inclination, here I am.

2009 in review.

January

Went to Arisia, made some maile, generally did the same old nerdy stuff as usual.

February

Mah birthday was commemorated with a new Friday the 13th movie. How thoughtful!

I picked up a badger brush, double edged safety razor and a bar of shaving soap. Good bye expensive disposables, hello shaving like they did before I was born!

We did away with our land line, moving to all cell, all the time. The only down side to date has been my inability to call my phone in the morning when I can’t find it.

March

I joined twitter. *sigh*

I went to New Orleans for the second time.

I spent over $1000 to keep my 1997 Dodge Ram on the road. In retrospect, this was Very Dumb.

April

10th wedding anniversary!!!

Met Joss Whedon!!!

Went to a zombie walk! Only one ! here. It was pretty awesome, but in a month of REALLY awesome it’s hard to keep up.

I did a presentation on vacuum forming armor at the Higgins Armory museum, and talked about how our plastic stuff relates to medieval armor.

2 weeks in Italy!!!

May

Still in Italy!!!

Not much else going on really. Nerd stuff, making armor, the usual. Pretty much talking about Italy a lot, and pulling out all sorts of “well, we had … in Italy and it was SOOO much better than this!”

June

June was big.

I got a call from a recruiter about an awesome job opportunity in Waltham. I went in, interviewed, and got an offer.

I was waffling a bit about it. It seemed like a good idea, but I was, as always, nervous about the change.

I went to work on Monday morning to talk to my boss about leaving. I still wasn’t 100% sure it was the right choice, so I was going to talk to him about my future there. See, I was brought on as the IT manager, but there wasn’t a lot of IT to manage. I was pretty bored / frustrated, but I loved the company, or at least the idea of the company.

I got laid off that morning. Yeah, really. I guess that’s one way to tell me that leaving was the right idea.

I took 2 weeks off in between to refresh my head, then started at my new place, which proved to be a fantastically good idea.

July

July was pretty uneventful on a grand reviewing the year scale. Mostly getting acclimated to my new job.

August

August marked the completion of version 1 of my animated style Captain Rex costume. I still wasn’t “done”, not by a long shot… but it was done enough to be approved by the 501st.

This was pretty exciting. I’m not much on the whole reviewing / approving bit of the clubs, but in this case, it was sort of proving the point that it could be done. There were all sorts of crazy debates over the Clone Wars style armor, and whether it could be worn by a real person. Well, there you go!

September

Blogging fail. 2 posts in LJ all month. By this point the microblogging of Twitter and Facebook are prevailing.

We finally made it out to the Loon Mountain Highland Games. VERY cool, and I definitely want to go back next year. Kilts EVERYWHERE!

October

In October we decided to cut loose the contract company we had been using for help desk work. I posted on Craigslist and got a million and one resumes. Oy! Seriously, I got something like 500 replies in the first 2 days.

I also finished the Clone Wars armor sculpt, and started production of 23 suits for my Garrison/Base. 23!!!! Ugh!!! I started this in August 2008 and finished in October 2009. BIG project. Too big. I’d like to not do that again soon!

The Woburn Halloween parade was this month, as you’d expect by the name. Much less stress this year… we scaled back our crazy prop building and just had fun.

I also trooped at a Celtics game. While not a basketball fan, it was cool being in the Garden during warm ups.

November

So, I’m pulling out of the driveway and the truck is making some pretty bad sounds in reverse. It also developed a fun issue with the brakes, where there would be no pressure in the system when the thing first started. You had to pump the pedal a few times to get the juices flowing.

Remember a few paragraphs back where I said that spending $1000 on repairs was dumb?

Well, I traded it in for $1750 toward a new 2010 Toyota Tacoma. Yeah, that was $1000 well spent. Especially after the $800 a few months before that for a new AC pump, and the new tires… Yeah.

So November. New truck. NEW truck. It had 3 miles on it when I first got behind the wheel, and 12 when I drove it off the lot.

December

I haven’t posted at all in December. Lame.

So overall a busy, fun year. I’ve let my fitness decline. I’m ending 2009 about 20 pounds heavier than I started. But I’ve been on the right track for the last couple of weeks with exercise / eating better. Still not great, but better.

Plans for 2010?

Get back into shape. I want to see that 175 mark again!

Build my vacuum table. I’ve been hashing out the hows and the whats, now I just need the whens and the $$ spent.

See where life takes me. I don’t really like to plan too far ahead. You never know what might happen to change things, so best to just go with it as it comes.