News/Blog

I learned the hard way not to casually accept the diameter of rebars today. Normally you have a small variations in sizes of materials, which I had accounted for in my prints. A 12mm rebar though, at least the one I bought, was more than 13mm on two sides - a fact I suspect people working in construction are familiar with. Oh, well. The problem is that while I can adjust my prints to account for that, I can’t magically make standard sizes of PVC pipes change and 13 mm happens to be the inside diameter of a 16 mm PVC pipe - it’s too tight a fit.

I’m grinding the rebars down, but this is an annoying amount of work, even with better equipment, and I can’t do this for the final product - thankfully you can order actual 12 mm smooth steel rods. I’ll have to test how if a smooth rod makes any significant difference in how firmly it will be encased in the polyurethane cast compared to a rebar, but making indentations to give it more grip is at least less work than grinding down meters upon meters of rebar.

Good news though is that there’s a new grip variation in town!

I had a great time scultping this litte lion fellow, and have subsequently either amused or annnoyed (or both) by going around with it and making cat sounds. They do say artists are eccentric, I hope I’m a a little entitled to a bit of silliness.

This prototype is to be sent to a friend in SPIFF, a HEMA club in Stockholm. Apart from the lion pommel, I have also just about finalized the flexible tip construction and tested it out at live humans. No animals were harmed in the process. I’m going to add a bit more padding on the tip for comfort, but the (for now) secret construction that gives both flexibility as well as durability while not being floppy in the least is something I’m quite proud of having designed at the moment - even though the prototype version of it is rather crude and inelegant looking with a lot of tape.

I’m looking forward to wrapping this up sometime next week, as long as there are no more unseen problems during painting them!