For a Few Sofubi More: Final Part!

Hello Woodsy! I was wondering why you hadn't published the third and final part of my Soft Vinyl adventures...

It was because I'd written it , but not sent it! So, without further ado...

(And Woodsy adds: I then went to Germany and forgot to do it! My bad! )

Having finally made a passable helmet, I used my learnings to produce a pretty decent soft vinyl hat mould.

However, getting suitable PVC Polyol proved to be a much bigger problem than expected. Australia still has a manufacturing capability with PVC moulders and material supplies actually existing. However they are uninterested in orders under the Tonne level, one actually hung up on me when I asked what a minimum order would be. Ultimately I made a $6K order through China and it wasn't ultimately very satisfying, but I digress.

Here's a usable copper hat mould. The exterior coral textured surface is the best I could do, but it wasn't a problem as the inner working surface was smooth.

Back to the Oil Bath for a more pleasant cooking experience. I'm not including the photo of me in leather apron and arm shields and the positive pressure breathing mask I bought just to avoid breathing scorched Oil fumes!

And that's a good hat! Now all I needed was a girl to wear it and it was here that I began to discover that a simple hat mould and more complex head and arm moulds were two different levels of achievability.

Here's Besset's head and arm, moulded and cast in wax, with a copper powder polish to try and increase inner surface conductivity during the Electroforming process....

The finished arm mould with it's very necessary shoulder joint that caused no end of release problems at the cooking stage.

Most of the moulds, like this body piece never made it that far....

Ultimately, it was such a labour intensive project with such a high failure rate, that I ended up abandoning the entire idea ...until I decided to try 3D printing instead.

I still don't have that lovely flexible soft vinyl texture, but at least the technical details are no longer cramping my dreams and aspirations!

Looey

OZ Base

°

You can follow the entire agonizing process on my Instagram blog

lewis morley on Instagram: "Peregrine Besset, she's your standard Ancient Egyptian time-travelling dwarf, but she's remarkably difficult to draw (for me, anyway!) As such, I'm now working on the DEFINITIVE VERSION, sculpting up a puppet which I'll us

Happy modelling, Moonbasers!