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• Assembly happening now!

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 09/25/2019 at 15:56 • 4 comments

• Painting

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 09/20/2019 at 06:36 • 0 comments

  This is the last week of painting, next I have assembly and tuning.

• Done casting parts, onto finishing

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 08/09/2019 at 19:01 • 0 comments

  I finished casting all the required parts mid-July and moving onto finishing & painting. So far it's been a month of finishing all the cast parts by using metal filler and modeling primer to sand over imperfections, as well as using a rotary tool to clean up tiny details. I expect much less effort to be required for machined parts. No idea how much time painting will actually take after all the parts are primed & polished.

  In other news, I presented this project to high school students at the Pacific Northwest College of Arts:

  3D Printing to Metal Casting: Making of Elysium Exoskeleton Prop
  

• Casting chest & shin plates

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 07/01/2019 at 15:03 • 0 comments

  This weekend I made a second attempt at casting chest & shin plates. For the next one I will use thin sprues in addition to thick sprues to prevent parts of the model from breaking off with the sprues.

  Wax parts before dipping to build shells around them:

  First attempt:

  Second attempt:

  Both put together, before cleanup:

  I will make another attempt at casting the chest plate to see if I can get it even cleaner, and then redo one of the shin plates before there wasn't 100% fill.

• Exoskeleton chest plate 2-part mold

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 05/20/2019 at 22:21 • 0 comments

  The last mold required to finish this project! There are some optional parts left to make molds for that I might do if I have time left before the Wasteland Weekend.

• 3D-printed shin guards re-cast out of rubber

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 05/14/2019 at 02:30 • 0 comments

  The past three weeks have been a living hell of trying to cast two large plastic parts with complex geometry and thin edges out of rubber. Today it ends!

  I used SmoothOn Brush-On 40 to make the mold and shore 70 hardness rubber along with a black pigment to cast the parts.
  

• More parts cast, sheet metal order complete

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 04/19/2019 at 23:20 • 0 comments

  In the past 3 weeks I cast the remaining parts for the spine as well as shock plates/armor that will be attached to boots:

  Just before that I cast two extra parts I was missing before, a shoulder connector with some extreme detail and an unsightly hip connector. One of the parts here is repeated above.

  My sheet metal order of bent spine connectors and arm bracelets came in:
  

  I decided I might as well make those in 2mm stainless steel after prototyping with paper and cardboard:

• Last few molds

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 04/18/2019 at 15:35 • 0 comments

  Last week I finished two more molds for shin shockplates. The only other "required" part left is the chest plate, one of the biggest and coolest-looking parts of the exoskeleton. There are a bunch of optional parts I would like to cast as a stretch goal, notably the tiny details placed on the hands, the vacuum tube holders with light-up tubes, and some tech gribble for the face to complete the cyber ninja look.

  Fig. 1: Finished making the first part of a two-part mold with 3D-printed model suspended in clay

  Fig 2: Preparing to pour the second part of both two-part molds

  Fig 3: Resulting two-part molds I will use for casting wax positives

  Fig. 4: Resulting wax positives that will be shell-cast by adding 10 layers of ceramic shell and melting the wax out before pouring metal

• Box Casting & Sheet Metal parts

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 03/21/2019 at 21:00 • 0 comments

  I successfully cast the chest plates this fall (see Shell Casting Success), but after many casting attempts on hip bones this winter, I finally ran out of slurry. I can't order more because it would arrive frozen, resulting in permanent chemical damage.

  Issues included areas that cooled too fast, porous surface, and pieces of the mold breaking off prematurely:
  

  So, I am switching back to box casting. Here's the breakdown of the parts I have left to cast:
  

  Shell casting with SuspendaSlurry

  • Hip Left
  • Hip Right
  • Chest Base
  • Shin Snockplate Left
  • Shin Shockplate Right

  Box casting with UltraVest

  • Hip Bottom Connector
  • Spine Top
  • Spine Bottom
  • Spine Middle Left
  • Spine Middle Right
  • Foot Upper Shock Plate (2)
  • Foot Shock Plate (2)

  I also started working on polished sheet metal bracelets to attach arm bones without using elastic belts or gauze (like in the movie).

  The prototyping session:

  The parts I uploaded to RSM RapidQuote:
  

• Logging temperature and more casting attempts

  Valeriy Novytskyy • 10/25/2018 at 05:48 • 0 comments

  I have some mixed news from my attempt this weekend. I got all the data, but the act of observing the temperature and filming combined with more trouble from my regulator caused a decline in casting quality. I suspect it mostly came down to metal that got too hot, thus absorbing more gas from the atmosphere. I also had to move the camera and take laser temp readings, so I didn't remove the mold from the kiln as quickly as last time, and didn't pour as quickly.

  First three attempts on the graph was me messing with camera and lights to try and raise "production values" so I left the crucible in the kiln for too long. The last attempt the crucible was in the kiln for about the right amount of time, but the kiln was over-fed by propane.

  This week I am sick, so next week I will retry all of this and hopefully have some video worth publishing. I took some time to setup lights, and the video quality was significantly better - next time I will already have that experience so I can setup lighting quickly and before doing anything important to the casting process.

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