Hellboy Corpse Locator Scratch Build - New Light Module Pics

[hydin]

For a cleaner cast of the domes, you might try heating up the mold before pouring.

When I do castings with polyester resin, I generally pour the stuff, and then pop the mold and resin in a small oven I bought at the local thrift shop. It's a little toaster oven, put it on warm and just let it bake for a few hours.

Gets the overall curing done fairly well.

Grabbing a kit later this year. Already picked out a spot on my shelf for it

Chris

 

[madmanmoe64]

I always preheat the moulds and generally give them a quick bake after the initial curing. The main problem is that the piece shrinks (excess heat only exacerbates this problem) pulling away from the sides of the mould and creating a crinkly texture.

I think the best solution is to use clear polyurethane resin. It's more expensive, and I'd have to buy different pigment. My casting supplier doesn't even have amber polyurethane tint so I'd have to buy red and yellow and do some colour matching.
However the resultant pieces would be better casts, have less shrinkage, and be easier to sand if it did need a final polish.
I just have to decide whether it's more effort to buy new materials and refine a new product or to just spend an hour sanding each dome.

Because I don't think I'll be doing too many more of these I was leaning toward the latter.

 

[madmanmoe64]

I got some proper PCB etching bits the other day, so was able to make a neater board. Functionally it's the same, but you can actually read the writing on this one.

I wrote a whole bunch about PCB milling and this board here.

Also, as I slowly get more done on my personal build, I've been messing around with making a stand for the locator.
It's basically just a couple of pieces of acrylic to hold the locator at a slight angle, the hard bit was engraving this to clip in the front.

It's impossible to get a good picture of etched acrylic (especially at night)
But I'm happy with how it turned out, the font I originally used for the sub text (ancient script) came out really well. And the logo is still recognizable, despite a few compromises to make it millable by machine.

 

[LoneWulv]

wicked!

 

[podman]

very cool

 

[Darksyde13]

These all look fantastic.

It may be a bit late but I saw a great tip from TAP plastics on using clear resin. They use a sheet of mylar rolled down over the 1 part mold to seel off the back side. Since it is not exposed to air it cures fully and doesn't have that odd worbly pattern PR gets on the surface exposed to air.

Table Top How To Make Resin Table Top Part 2 - YouTube

Resin Jewels How to Make Jewels, Gems, Crystals, and Pendants - YouTube

 

[madmanmoe64]

It may be a bit late but I saw a great tip from TAP plastics on using clear resin. They use a sheet of mylar rolled down over the 1 part mold to seel off the back side. Since it is not exposed to air it cures fully and doesn't have that odd worbly pattern PR gets on the surface exposed to air.

Putting mylar on the back seems like a good idea, but I'm not that worried about the backs as they are easy to grind flat. My main problem is that the surface (not exposed to air) pulls away from the mould, leaving a crinkly texture as it does so.

 

[Darksyde13]

Is it platinum cure? Supposedly the Plat. cure silicone from Tap doesn't leave anything odd and claims to have the same finish as your original with polyester resin but it seemed a little expensive. I kind of assumed it was a benefit to plat. cure silicone in general but you never know.

 

[madmanmoe64]

No I'm just using generic tin cure silicone. I browsed around my usual supplies website and found a plat sil recommended for casting polyester pieces in.
Odd that I haven't found any info previously that suggested a plat sil would produce better results.
Unfortunately I don't have enough money to buy more silicone right now.

On a plus note, for all those waiting on kits, I broke out the new, new mould today and it looks good, there's one large subsurface bubble I can see, but I'll just have to live with it. It just needs some venting and then I'll be down in the shed making casts.

 

[madmanmoe64]

In anticipation of finally starting another round of kits, I've been updating the tutorial.
It's now in three parts on my blog, and can be found here.

MadManMoe: Hellboy Corpse Locator Tutorial - Part 1

It's all the stuff I posted before, but I've rewritten most of it to reflect changes in the kit, as well as added new or clearer pictures.
The last part is all the steps that I never got round to writing before. The reason I never wrote them is that my pictures for those steps were sparse (non existent).

However I have now written it all up, and I'll add pictures in as I take them (really hoping to be able to get on with my personal build soon).

I think it's all there but I've made so many of these now that I may have glossed over a part, so if something doesn't make sense, or is missing, let me know.

- Tom

 

[syborwolf]

Been working on my kit, but having a little trouble with the hinges and lid placement. Are there any hinges out there that would allow the lid to open all the way without cutting down the back edge of the lid? Was the lid done this way on the original prop so it would open all the way?

Joe

 

[madmanmoe64]

I assumed that the compass looked the same all the way round, but I can't see the hinge side in any of my reference pics.

If you could find some wider hinges that may well help. Basically you want to raise the hinge point up as far away from the body as possible. I did spend quite a while searching for hinges, but haven't looked again since I did the original run.

One solution that helps is bending the hinges, on my last two builds I fixed the hinges into the body as normal, then ,using a pair of pliers, I put about a 30 degree bend in the exposed half of the hinge, before fixing it to the lid. This allowed it to open much further.

Also it helps if you fix the hinges to the body as high up as possible (with as much of the hinge exposed as possible). But you are limited by the screws needing to fix into something, if you didn't use the screws, but instead just glued the hinge into the body, then you could fix it higher up.

I think the only other solution might be to move where the hinges fix to the body, extending the pocket to be closer to the edge of the compass, which would require a lot of routing work and probably wouldn't even make much of a difference.