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I went into the Rollins talking show last night half asleep, feeling like a zombie. I was tired from the last few days of water, cement, moving stuff, building walls, etc…

Once the show started though… that man never fails to impress me. At almost 20 years my senior he shames me with his energy, motivation and drive to do MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE.

His stories of world travel are always awesome. I love the thought of this punk icon sitting in Sri Lanka with a teenager saying “OK, this is Iggy Pop. Listen. Learn.”

By the end of the night it was all I could do to not go home and just build something. He travels, sings, talks, etc… My obsession is building stuff. Tonight I can’t wait to go back to operation “repair the basement”.

… has been wet. Very wet.

We had a massive rain storm here in MA. The sort of thing that, had it been a month ago, would have been a blizzard.

We got very, very lucky, in large part thanks to our cat Mal.

Mal gets lonely. He can only go a few hours without some sort of attention. So, he usually wakes me up at 5am. I pet him a bit, get out of bed and feed him, then go back to sleep.

The rain started on Saturday night. When Mal woke me up Sunday morning I figured I might as well check the basement.

Oh man.

Wet wet wet.

Not too bad yet. Maybe 1/2″ across the whole floor, but coming in steadily. There were spurts of water shooting up from the floor.

Checked the Home Depot web site and saw that they opened at 8. For the next 2 hours I vacuumed up water pretty much non stop.

We got to the Depot right around opening time. They had pumps! Yay! We picked up 2 automatic pumps. They come on and off regularly to suck up any water that may happen to be around. We grabbed the hoses conveniently located right on the same table, right inside the contractor entrance to the store.

It turns out that the hoses we got did NOT work with the pumps. We needed garden hoses for ours.

I cannibalized the one we actually had for our garden while Jodi headed out to get another. By the time she got there the pumps were gone.

Had we been 30 minutes later, we would not have gotten the pumps that saved our butts. Thank you Mal!!

The remainder of the day was spent chasing water. While at the depot I had picked up some epoxy putty to plug the biggest holes. I went with this rather than hydraulic cement since we were attempting to plug things that were completely submerged, and I knew the putty would do it.

That managed to slow the creeping water a bit, keeping us from floating away.

We found that we were getting between 1 and 2 inches of water per hour, even with the 2 pumps going.

Because our basement floor is crazily out of level, there were areas where the water would pool up pretty deep, but not flow to the pump. Jodi came up with a great system of pushing the water around with push brooms to shove it into the pumps.

Now, that part about 1-2 inches per hour? The way we held it back was to do this pushing dance every hour. Around the clock. Ugh.

Oh, and we had to strip the paneling and insulation off the basement walls to get access to the leaks.

Monday I called in wet to work. I went out to the Depot again right at opening time for hydraulic cement. Now that the gushing water was gone and we were keeping the levels low, I was able to go that route. They had 8 50 pound buckets in stock. Not knowing what I needed I bought 6 of them.

The next 24 hours was pretty much cementing the perimeter of the house with this stuff that you mix up in roughly baseball sized portions. It ended up taking 2 buckets to plug all of the leaks. Yup, 100 pounds of baseballs.

Today was another no-work day, as we still had puddles everywhere, pumps running full force, and a HUGE mess to clean up.

In the interest of mold prevention I spent the day cleaning, vacuuming, replacing shelves with new metal ones on wheels, and generally making sure that there weren’t hidden puddles to fester.

Later in the evening I picked up a 5 gallon bucket of Drylok, a paint for waterproofing masonry. Imaging painting a very, very rough surface with a 4″ brush. Now imagine that you are using pancake batter as your paint. Yeah, fun.

But, I was able to do 2 coats of Drylok on the wall where the bench lives and put the insulation / paneling back. This wasn’t so much for workspace benefit as it was to get access to one of the last big puddles… right under the bench.

Now, it’s bed time. And when I wake up tomorrow I will shower and go to work like a civilized person.

First, a quick overview of thermoforming.

This is how 501sty types make our armor. You heat a sheet of plastic until it gets soft, then pull it down over a mold and use vacuum to pull the plastic down to the mold. The plastic cools quickly and retains that shape, giving you a nice copy of the original.

For the last year or so I’ve been making clone armor at a friend’s house in Lunenburg, which is about 45 minutes – 1 hour from home.

For several months now I’ve been working on my own. Well, really this started even further back when we went from a 100 amp service in the house to a 200. This stuff takes a fair bit of juice.

Tonight was the first test of the machine, and it was a resounding success!!! There are certainly some tweaks to be done, but I did 2 pulls, and both look fantastic!

There are many ways to approach this sort of a build. At a basic level your home oven, a shop vac, and a box with a bunch of holes in it will do. As those of you who know me can attest, I tend to overdo things a bit.

I went with plans and a heater available from http://www.build-stuff.com. It was a good sum of money for both, but well worth it.

This system uses an “over/under” style of heater… you raise the plastic to the heater then lower it to the mold. Another approach is the “flip flop”, where your heater and platen (forming surface) are side by side, and the plastic flips between them via a hinge. To me, over/under makes more sense… instead of the hot plastic sagging toward your heat source it sags away.

For the vacuum, I got a good pump through Craigslist for a fraction of the retail cost. The pump sells for $700, I paid $100.

This pump uses 2 10 gallon air tanks as the vacuum chambers. The pump evacuates the air from the tanks. When I’m ready to form, I can open a valve that will allow air to rush back in to the tanks, taking the plastic down with it.

I haven’t tallied up the cost, and don’t think I want to. All things included, I’d say around $1500 – $2000 for the whole thing seems to be the right ballpark.

I’ve got a ton of pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tk7602/sets/72157623135056391/

I’ll be working on captioning them better.

Last, I leave you with 2 videos. The first pull and the first chest.

The first pull is the very first time it’s all been on. The chest is the hardest part of the project, so I wanted to try that (it worked out fine!)

For now I leave you with 2 videos of the system in action.

Look at me, all coming out of the Evil Basement Lair for some blog action!

Long time no see. How have you been? Did you lose weight? You look great!

Anyway…

Tonight was the first night in I don’t know how long that I wasn’t slaving over some prop or another in the basement. I love doing that stuff, but even I need a break.

This Sunday is the infamous Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade. The 501st and Rebel Legion will be tromping through the wet streets in armor once again. Come see us if it’s not too bad out!

Tomorrow night is an NEG staff meeting. Fun fun!

Saturday is the pre-parade party. Sunday is parade time, then Sunday night: collapse!