Update time! Its been a while since I've posted anything here and the project is steadily moving along as I want this sucker done from Dragon Con.
After we made ribbon cables for ourselves, there are only a few more bits and bobs needed to finish the pack side of this build. While finishing up scratch building and molding these pieces (I'll get to them in a second), I decided to do a little bit of SCIENCE! to figure out what we wanted to use as our slime. We wanted to use something that was relatively pH neutral, yet would not evaporate over time and was relatively on the thicker side of "slime". Then I remembered the making of "Alien" and how they used KY Jelly for the saliva of the Alien monster! And considering what KY is usually used for, it has to be safe for coming in contact with human skin, so it hopefully won't eat through our hosing. And since it is water based, it takes food dye really well as well, without staining the hose.
And I tested some of it in some of our hose.
Looks like this is little plan will work for our needs! Now onto those last few parts that we needed to make. . .
The last 2 parts we needed to make for the pack were the slime tank pump box and the venting nozzle for the pack. My buddy Jack and I each scratch built them and dipped them in silicone. Here are my casts from that venture:
And with those parts made and dry fit on the pack. . .
I Literally had no excuse not to paint the damn thing!
.:Skip Ahead 7 Hours:.
Now it looks something like this:
There's still a few things I'm still waiting on for the pack side of the build: sockets for the vacuum tubes Jack cast; the HGA end-cap we designed to show up in the mail; as well as my buddy Jon to finish up the labels so I can slap them on. Here's so more glamour shots so you can see how it looks so far from different angles:
Without the wand:
And one last one with the wand in its current state attached to the pack:
Now that I've hit this landmark, I guess I'm gonna move onto finishing up the wand while we wait on some things to show up in the mail, then I'm going hardcore on the electronics because I hope to have this thing done for Dragon Con.
Thanks for looking!