Reaching crescendo

For several years, I've been playing a game called OGame. It's a space ship, battle type online game which really, it's rather dull. I don't know why I play it.

I have ten planets on there, and for the last year or so I've been funneling all resources to one planet to build defences in order to make it into a super-fortress.

Now, I've switched it up and am just pumping all resources into it and letting them pile up there. At time of writing, there's about a hundred and seventy million resources on there (the game divides it up into metal, crystal and deut).

We'll see how big the pile can get before another player (or team of players) smash it in order to steal the lot. What a shame there isn't some big scene showing the awesome battle, my numbers will just change from a lot to zero.

Seventy seven point four

Just got back from two weeks running around in the heat and the dust of the woods and weighed in at 77.4kg. Bit of a loss after only ten days or so, though I suspect much of that is water weight as I sweated heaps. Was drinking loads of water (and electrolytes and eating salts with food) but I still feel mega dry - especially on the skin around my fingernails which is all retracted.

Going to take a bit of time to recover (it usually does) so I'm glad we came back in a bit early. Normally we go where it is cold and muddy rather than baking hot. The humidity didn't help either!

3D print

Well, the 3D printed coins I'd ordered back in … June … finally came in.

At 80c each, they aren't too bad. However, I can't say that I'm happy with the level of detail. I'm assuming that the printer (I used the local library) has their settings set up for maximum number of prints with minimum acceptable level of detail (they do after all charge very little, almost less than the cost of the filament as far as I can tell) so can't really complain.

However, I'm not happy with the stepped look and finish on them. If I had my own printer then I could tweak the settings for maximum resolution and just leave it printing overnight. For larger, less detail-intensive prints then it should be pretty good - but for the small, detailed items I want to make, this isn't what I'm aiming for.

I was able to pick up a bunch of plastic poker chips today dirt cheap, they average out to 10c each if I buy them new as part of a set. With these, at 80c each (more if I paint or decorate them) then they aren't really feasible. I had been hoping to get a master or two printed, then use epoxy resin to cast more from a mould. But with the stepped look that these came out with, I don't see that being viable.

The larger things like the lettering came out ok (mostly), but the stars at the top are very stepped, and the little "1" I put on there is pretty much illegible.

Looks like I'm pinning my hopes on the photosensitive film I've ordered, hoping that works with salt etching aluminium. If that works as advertised, I should be able to get the level of detail I'm after.

Hopefully.

Signature item (still)

The last thing I though of to try as a signature item was clay coins.

It would be relatively easy to make poker-chip sized coins with a good relief. The dies could be 3D printed (at the totally reasonable price of $3 an hour, so probably under $20 for a set), then use a wooden base and pusher with a metal collar to keep it all together. The collar sits on the base, the bottom face drops inside. Put in a pre-weighed blob of clay, the top die goes on top and wooden pusher squishes it all together so the clay gets mushed into the design.

That's still too expensive.

The cheapest clay to get hold of is 500g of air drying clay for about $10, which would net me about 30 coins (average 14g per coin, plus wastage). That amounts to 33c per coin, not counting the cost of the dies or paints / sealers to make the clay last longer once dried.

Considering the number of caches that are available locally, it does not look like it is going to be practicable to have a signature item to drop in. Other than just signing. It kind of takes away from the point of doing geocaching, though I guess I can just keep at it for a while until I've done the majority of the caches in the area. Which roughly speaking, seems to be about a thousand or so (roughly guesstimating) within about an hours drive - though around 30% to 45% of those are either nano sized which wouldn't take an item, or are decayed caches awaiting archival.

So looks like I might use up the plastic tokens that I ordered and leave it at that. I'll need to find some other outlet to try and be creative. On the plus side, if I swing around to using epoxy to be creative with, then I wouldn't be limited to small little coin type things.

Or I could just buy a damn 3D printer. :)

Hot Wheels custom cars

As I'm perusing the world wide weberverse, I found out about another hobby that has been doing the rounds for … oh I don't know, probably for as long as die cast cars have been around.

There are heaps of people who customise and make their own Hot Wheels (and other brand) cars, and it looks pretty nice.

I'd already seen a bunch of tutorials on how to DIY waterslide decals, so that's entirely doable. Drilling out the rivet and either gluing or tap and screwing the base back on are both things I can easily do. Stripping off the paint is likewise relatively straight forward.

The painting … that's a bit harder and not something I have much experience with. I've never used an air brush, but it looks relatively straight forward. The basic techniques at least, I'm assuming that like most things, one gets better with practice.

The down side is that a proper airbrush kit with compressor is over $150 for a basic kit. A bit out of my price range, and that's before buying paints and other things.

The good news is that if was to pick up a gravity feed air brush (as opposed to siphon type) online, they can work with relatively low air pressure - and one hack that I've seen is to use a fish tank air pump (instead of a proper compressor) and adding a 2L or 3L plastic soda bottle for a reservoir. It seems to work, and for something like painting little toy cars it could be done. Considering that we already have a spare air pump floating around, I could cobble something together to run a little $20 air brush gun.

Would the results be good? Probably not. But it could work as a first step approach, and a way to practice. I did have a hunt around to see if anybody was selling packs of old cars in bulk on the cheap, but everybody seems to think that every car is a hyper-collectible classic. Or they are pretty cheap listings but have $100+ postage due to coming from the US or England. Basic cars are only $2 from BigW, but it seems a waste to pull apart and strip a brand new car.

I might have to check out the flee markets or keep an eye out on the classifieds to see if there is anybody selling or giving away old cars.

Or not. We don't really have the spare money for me to be wasting it on frivolous things like this. I'll have to keep hunting and find something cheaper...

And the funding says no

I had my heart set on doing thingies with metal. I'll stop calling them "thingies", the proper term is signature item. But yeah, I had my heart set on making my signature item out of metal. I recon it would have been good - had a bit of weight, good 3D relief and been sufficiently interesting that people who saw it would have liked it.

But I don't think it's going to happen. Melting aluminium requires a lot of equipment that would cost a fair bit to set up, and even if I had all the gear it wouldn't have given me the level of detail that I want (sand casting requires a lot of clean up work after it's cooled down to make it look good). Fairly straightforward to do with shapes and parts, much harder on a small, coin-sized item with lettering and fine design elements.

Using pewter would have almost given me the level of detail that I want, the lower melting temperature meant that I could get by with pretty cheap tools - but the silicone moulds need to be made of special high-temperature stuff which is hard to get and expensive; plus lead-free pewter is pretty expensive. Pewter made with lead I could get pretty cheap (around $20 a kilo) but that would have been highly irresponsible of me, to put things out in the wild that unsuspecting people or kids could pick up and play with that were made of lead.

I had decided to go with casting with epoxy resin, and had found a great way of running an airbrush on the cheap (use a fish tank air pump {which we have a spare one lying around} instead of a compressor), or go even cheaper and use inks to stain the resin instead of painting it. Still out of my price range. :(

So I'm going to go with little cheap plastic tokens, with a printed inlay.

It's depressing, and I will definitely be looking at the results and thinking of what they could have been. But it's better than nothing I guess. Half the point of getting into geocaching was to have an excuse to make stuff. I could still make stuff without going out and looking for caches - but the funding would still say no.

Maybe one day...

Thingies

Apart from the options already mentioned in my last post, there is also lost wax casting. This can tie in with either pewter or aluminium casting and works well for complex shapes that won't work with a two part mould. Although the wax can be partially reclaimed and padded out with cheap candle wax (the proper wax comes in various grades, and buying softer stuff can be offset by melting in harder candle wax), it's still too expensive.

So it looks like we're back to the "custom poker chip" idea. Or something similar. I found a supplier of blank, white plastic tokens. I've ordered their smallest quantity, a ten pack, to test how well it works.

I had found a supplier of "blank" poker chips in baches of 120 chips for $12 - which amounts to 12c each. This is in line with buying the poker sets from BigW or KMart - they have 200 and 300 chip sets for $20 and $30 respectively. The ten pack of blanks cost me $3 (including postage) so that's 30c per blank, but they also have 100 packs for $16 (16c each).

That's still higher than the blank poker chips (which aren't blank, they have designs on the borders) but the poker chips have the big disadvantage that they come in sets of four colours. The white ones came out okay, the green ones looked okay, but the blue and black ones were very meh. So being able to buy all white ones makes printing designs much easier.