Space Marine Army and Such

Okay.  Been a little bit since the last update.  Mostly because nothing has been going on.  I've been working mostly on building up a new Space Marine army.  Being poor, I'm also attempting to make it for as free as possible.  So the past week or so has been devoted to crafted a Rhino APC out of cardstock.  In case you were unaware, such a thing is an insanely tedious task.  Anyway, another hour or two worth of work and I'll have it assembled.  Just need to paint it after that and repeat another couple times or so and I'll have the vehicle portion of the army taken care of.

Anyway, in events regarding the armour project, I've purchased the extension pipe for the aluminum foundry.    Just need to find a hair dryer with a cool setting/deactivate the heating element in one without a cool setting and the rest is history.  Relating to that, I found some more plaster while cleaning out my garage yesterday.  With that, I'll hopefully have enough to make the mold for my rosarius, as well as remake the mold for the purity seals, which I messed up on my last attempt.

Regarding cleaning the garage, I've gotten rid of a ton of crap in it, so I'll have a nice decent space to work with out there for making the armor/creating terrain.

We've finally hit a nice dry spell after a fair amount of rain, so I'll be heading out to the river in the next day or so to start scavenging some clay from the sediment.

More news to come.

Sculpt, Mold, Press

So, at the moment I'm on the verge of considering the original plastic idea a complete bust, at least for it's orginally intended purpose.  On the other hand, I think it'll be perfect for making the second part of my purity seals.  Unfortunately, though, this means that the cost of my project is going to go up a little.  But, I may have at least a cheap solution to the problem.  Apparently, those cheap "For Sale", of "Garage Sale" signs they sell at various hardware stores are made out of certain typ eof plastic that might just be perfect for what I'm trying to do.  From my understanding, those are just a couple bucks a sheet, which shouldn't be too bad.  Still, that means I'm not going to be able to control the thickness of the sheets as I had originally hoped I was going to be able to do.  So, I have something of a solution.  Once I have the parts vacu-formed (which will be much further down the line on this project) I'll line the inside of each piece with some fiberglass.  This should make it nice and firm.  Problem being, it's going to take another price hike to accomplish this.

Another price concern is plaster.  It's not monstrously expensive, but I'm going to need a pretty large sum of it for this project.  I'm starting to get a little disappointed at how quickly my prices are going up just a couple of days into the project, but I suppose it was to be expected.  Still, I'm going to try to negate the problem by take as many other monetary short cuts as I can.

So some good news.  I've started work on the second part of my purity seals.  Finally nailed down the design I want to use, and sculpted it out yesterday.  Afterwards, I got the last bit of plaster left in my garage and made me a nice mold.  Used my plastic in it, but like a jerk, I forgot to apply my releasing agent, making it stick to the mold and become worthless.  I'll try again a little later today, hopefully with a bit more success.

Speaking of scuplting, I worked out the design for my Rosarius.  Sculpted it out this morning.  Now I just need to wait until I can get my hands on some more plaster.  In addition, to make this properly, I'm going to have to construct some new equipment.  Fortunately, this will be very much on the cheap.  To make this thing right, it's going to need to be made of metal.  As such, I'm going to be constructing an aluminum foundry.  I was really excited to find that I can get most of the parts for this completely free, since it's mostly just made out of trash.

Eventually, I'll get to posting the pictures of everything I've discussed.  My camera is a smidge more than a decade old and has next to no battery life anymore, making it really difficult to get pictures when I need them.