Batmobile Side Mech Progress

These side mechs are painstaking work. And honestly, it's no wonder this car has taken me so long to get it to where it is today. And by that, I mean "in the shop of someone who is a competent builder that is also not me."

It's a weird combination of me just being slow, a perfectionist, and also just having a hard time finding time to work on the thing. Cuz you know I have all those other pressing priorities like winning arguments on facebook and updating my blog. Wah wah. Sad_trombone.gif.

With that in mind, I have made a lot more progress in the past week on the side mechs. For those who are following along, you will recall that this type of work is literally my least favorite type of all maker work. The process of putty, sand, primer, repeat is pure madness. But let's get to it.

I spent a couple weeks working out of the model shop at Fonco Creative Services, as it was close to my place, but had to bug out as they suddenly got a big piece of work in. A simple relocation to my workshop and setting up of a spare table got me back up and running in no time.

The bat signal is always watching over me, of course. I mean, come on.

I refer to this piece as "the coffee can" and there are two of them, one for each side and they are mirrors of each other. After looking at the way the whole thing assembles together, I realized a good time saving maneuver is to plug up the open end with a disk of styrene. That will save me some time cleaning out the existing recess, and will also make the mold less complicated. It will also give a nice surface to which I can glue or bolt other parts of the side mechs.

This little gasket-looking connector piece was not originally a stand alone part. There is a piece of the side mechs that is basically like a 90 degree curved and tapered tube. You can see it in a photo below. The white part. Much like the coffee can, there is one for each side, but the ONLY difference between the two pieces is the orientation of this gasket on the tip of it. So I made the strategic and money saving decision to only mold one in it's entirety, but then mold this piece as a separate piece, thus allowing me to create the mirror version of that tube without having to make a separate mold for the entire thing.

What you're seeing here is the early phases of my clean up process. I cut a styrene disk to fit into it, glued it in with super glue gel, then laid down a coat of spot filler putty.

And here is the final product, with a little bit of love and spray primer later.

Let's jump ahead and take a look at this assembly:

See the big white part? And the tip over on the left? That's where I cut off the gasket you see me working on above. Now check out the other end. See the grey, bigger gasket sitting on the table? As originally modelled, that too was a part of the white angle tube. It was all connected. In order to make it easier to mold and cast, and to further my goal of only making one large mold for the tube, that gasket was separated and will be cast as a separate part. This gasked needed treatment similar to the smaller one shown above.

So I cut a styrene disk, glued it in.

Then started cleaning up the seam. A little putty, a little sanding, and it's all but invisible. This will make attaching the gasket to castings of the tube super easy. Previously, all it would have is a micro thin lip to attach glue to, making the bond fairly week. Now I can just bore drywall screws through it if I wanted to.

This piece is proving to be difficult to work with just because the quality of the print wasn't super good. Lots of clean up around the edges and lips.

I did two passes at it today and made a lot of progress. This is also another example of a piece that has a drivers side and passenger side version, both mirrors of each other. Much like with the tube above, I chopped off the little flange that makes the pieces unique, and will cast everything separately. So instead of two large, complex and unweildy molds, I will have one medium complexity mold that can be optimized to use the minimal amount of rubber, and then a tiny mold for the flange that can easily be flipped and attached to create the mirror versions.

This next little piece is proving to be one of the most difficult to clean up. Just lots of tiny corners to get into and perfectly cylindrical parts are always hard to get right. I had the idea of just rebuilding most of it using tube stock and my lathe, but thought better of it. It's coming along. Probably another 2 or 3 sessions with it and it will be ready for molding.

At the end of the days work, here are three parts that are ready for molding. The two gaskets, and also the little flange that I spoke about earlier.

I decided to make my mold boxes out of corrugated cardboard this time, instead of foam core, which saved me the trouble of cutting all those little slits in a strip as I had done before so that I can get a rounded shape out of it. It worked great.

See that little black sharpie mark on the inside of the box? That's my fill line. Before building out the boxes, I measure the height of the piece I am going to mold, then I add about a 1/4" to it, and I use that measurement to mark the fill line. I have never been good with eyeballing how much rubber to pour into a box, and always end up using WAY more rubber than needed, so I developed this method as a helper for my own personal shortcomings. Of which I have many, of course.

Lastly, here's all the piece super glued down to the surface. I try to give about a half inch of border around each piece. Maybe a little less. I defintely don't need more, and maybe less would be ok. I really define the height of the fill and the thickness of the borders based on the shape I am molding, and how well the mold will hold it's own shape when it is empty. It varies a lot based on the complexity of the part. Something you just get with experience, I suppose.

Ok that's all I have to show off for now. Thank you for taking the time to read it, I greatly appreciate all the good folks who are keeping up with my blog, are asking questions, and maybe are even learning a thing or two from my ramblings. Until the next time!!!

Time To Make The Donuts

When it comes to building a replica of the Keaton era Batmobile, the place that many builders stumble is on a component that is often referred to as the "Side Mechanics" or "side mechs" for short. These have proven to be the most difficult pieces to find originals of. To my knowledge, nobody has ever discovered the origin of most of the pieces that were no doubt cobbled together from discarded industrial junk. There is a piece that has been identified as a part from a hot air balloon, but that's about all I know.

It has been my goal to put together a top notch replica of the side mechs for my car. Regular readers of the blog will know that my pal Tim Neill in canada modelled the side mechs based on extensive research and reference, and they are absolutely amazing. Tim offers them for free to download on his Batberry blog. Here's a link directly to the files, should you be so inclined.

A friend printed these files for me, and I set about the task of cleaning them up. My goal is to produce them in resin and/or fiberglass. I have kicked around the idea of getting them plated, but honestly I think painting them will be good enough.

For reference, here's what they look like on a screen used Returns car:

The process of getting this right has been incredibly time consuming. Cleaning up the 3d printed parts is super labor intensive, and also intersects poorly with my anal-retentiveness when it comes to perfection. I have invested easily a couple hundred hours in puttying, sanding, primering... repeating until these things are at a point of quality that I am happy with. Cleaning 3d parts is not only an art, but it's also a tremendous hassle. The filament sands differently than putty and primer. It's very resilient. A real pain.

I finished cleaning up the part that is often referred to as "The donut" almost a year ago, and finally just got around to molding it. In this post, I will walk you through the process I used to mold. This will be a fairly technical discussion, so if you don't really care about materials and techniques, you can skip this. I found a great video by my pal Bill Doran that showed his technique for doing a brush on, jacketed mold, and this proved to be very valuable to my process. Here's a link if you'd like to check it out.

Prop: Shop - Molding & Casting 101: Brush on Molds for Helmets & Masks

I started by bulding a box for the donut, with about 1/2" of space around it. I used 1/4" foam core, which you can get at Michaels or any art supply store worth its salt. I cut slits into a strip of foam core at about every 1/4" so that I could shape it into a circle. Building a square or rectangular box for this project would have wasted a lot of rubber. I used Smooth-On's Rebound 25 for this mold, which is an expensive platinum cure silicone that is resilient and really takes the shape nicely. It's billed as a product that sticks to vertical surfaces. While true, it's not quite... accurate. More on that in a moment. I brushed on two coats of the stuff using a 1/2" chip brush from home depot. Oh, the base is made out of a scrap piece of MDF. I glued the donut to the MDF using super glue gel. No accelerant needed. Here's a pic of the donut with the first two coats of Rebound 25 on it.

The real takeaway from this photo is that the stuff isn't thickening up in all the right places. The horizontal surfaces are acquiring a nice, even and thick coat, but the vertical surfaces are not. Though thick, the rubber still tends to succumb to gravity, and only leaves behind the thinnest of layers on vertical surfaces.

And that's where a product named "Thi-Vex" comes in. It's what's known as a thixotropic agent, which basically means it thickens the stuff up while retaining all of the rubbers original properties. Ie, it doesn't effect the cure time, the pot live, the shelf life, etc. I mixed up another batch of rebound 25 and eyeballed an amount of ThiVex and went to town. You basically just add it in a little bit at a time until you get it to a consistency that you are happy with. I was going for a cake frosting level of thickness. I then applied it to the donut using a "senior" tongue depressor. Those are the big ones, mind you. Not like typical Popsicle sticks. So complicated!!! I tried to make it as smooth as possible, though I was definitely going for function over form. Here's a pic of the donut after one attack of thickened rebound.

I ended up doing another pass with thickened rebound, then a final pass of non thickened rebound. I then pulled off the box walls. I used a piece of copper tubing to bore holes in the outer lip of the mold. These will serve as keys for the rigid jacket, and hold the flexible part in place.

I brushed a ton of wax paste on to the MDF base, as it is very pourous and anything I put on top of it will probably attach to it pretty firmly. Now it's time to make the jacket. I chose Smooth-On's Plasti-Paste, which is also what Bill uses in his video. It's super easy to work with, fairly non-messy, and is really quite rigid even at thinner applications. I mixed up a batch and as with the rubber applied it with a tongue depressor. I did two coats, which was probably not necessary.

I left that to cure, and in a few hours I pulled it off the MDF base using a spatula and all was good in the world. Here's a pic of the underside of the piece.

At this point it occurred to me that a mistake had been made. In order to save time, I decided to forego making a seam down the middle, which would have allowed for easy removal of the jacket. The donut proved impossible to remove, so I ended up cutting a seam line down the middle of the jacket using a dremel tool and a big cutoff wheel. No damage to the mold or donut, but it added some complexity to the final steps, as I now have to manually align the two halves of the jacket and keep them stable while casting up a donut. Not a big deal, but if I had it all to do over again, I would have done the jacket as two separate parts.

Success was still within my grasp, and as a test I used Smooth-On's 65D to rotocast a donut in two pours. It came out EXCELLENT and with a little clean up it will be ready.

The other side mech pieces are also coming along. Here is the first pull out of the mold of one of the attachment pieces. I don't even know what the name of this piece is but who cares it looks great.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading. I'm really happy to be making progress on this build again. Maybe some day I will actually finish it.

The Ugly Work of Fiberglass

Fiberglassing is messy work, and frankly I do not like it. Fortunately for me, my man Paul on the east coast is doing a lot of this work for me on the Mattmobile. A few progress pictures to show off.

These are replacement bumperettes. Not certain I spelled that right. These are the things that go right under the front headlights, and make it impossible to drive on any road that isn't entirely flat. Great design!! There's also a mold for the front wheel hub in there, if I recall correctly. From what I am told, most modern replica cars use the same wheel hub for the front and rear, though they are in fact different sizes on the screen used cars. So now mine will have both sizes. Yay for small victories.

Paul was also kind enough to remake my dash pad for me. I didn't even know that was a real term until recently. That's the thing that you put your french fries on when you're driving home from Burger King. The part that sits horizontal. This is a pic of the newly laid up piece.

Lastly, here is the dash board being joined to the dash pad. These originally shipped as two pieces, but having them joined and all the gaps filled in will give it a lot of structural strength and will of course be entirely pretty.

In other news, there's been a lot of work on the side mechs lately, and I have started doing some pulls from the molds. Results are absolutely outstanding and I could not be more thrilled. Still a few pieces to finish cleaning up the masters of, and a lot of molds to make. I purchased another 2 gallons of RTV from SilPak, and I am hopeful that this will be enough to see the project through to completion.

If you are just discovering this blog, please be sure to visit my facebook page for this build, as I tend to update that more frequently and you can also ask questions and follow discussions on different pieces and photos.

https://www.facebook.com/RiseOfTheMattMobile/

Batmobile Side Mech Progress

The old blog has been neglected for a very long time. I have been very focused on fitness for the past year, and have made tremendous progress on that front.

But the Mattmobile project still lingers. Much has taken place. Much still to be completed. For now, here are some pictures of recent work I have done on the side mechs. Trying to get these all finished in the next two weeks.

This first picture is my workbench I've taken over at Fonco. I am not working at the Mattcave right now, but have temporarily set up shop here.

I of course brought with me a bunch of tools and supplies that I know I will need to get the job done.

I have become very particular and peculiar with my work spaces. I need to be close to my work, but also sitting in a comfortable chair. I am using this stool as my work surface.

These are some parts that I finished a while ago. Heck, probably more than a year ago. It's been a while since I have tackled these pieces. Honestly, this type of work is my least favorite. I could almost say I hate it. 3d part clean up really sucks and is no fun. Its a seemingly endless cycle of sand, putty, primer, repeat. It makes me bonkers. But for the sake of this project, I have to get it done.

I have a little painting station set up outside, and these are some of the pieces that are in flight.

I call this piece the "coffee can." At this point I have probably done three passes on it, and am getting close. These, my friends, are what we in the trade call "Famous Last Words."

Another pic of the coffee can, from later in the day.

This piece is proving hard to clean up, as it's just got so many little cuts in it. Putting all my files to good use this week, that's for sure.

The plan is to finish clean up on these pieces, mold them, and then cast them. I don't know how sturdy 3d printed parts are, nor if they can survive sitting on the side of my car. I have already seen one of them get completely ruined by sitting in the sun for about 20 minutes, so I know raw 3d printed parts are not the answer. I have started the molding process on a couple of the small connector rings.

I have started construction on a box for one of the weird looking pieces.

Laid down some rubber on the first couple of parts.

Because of the weird shapes of these two pieces, I decided to pour some rubber into the recesses on the front, thereby eliminating any possibility of an air pocket getting trapped in there. These pieces are really oddly shaped and there's loads of opportunity for air pockets. I shall proceed with great caution.

This is an assortment of parts I was working on earlier today and yesterday.

Overall things are coming along really nicely, though it's just such back breaking work.

I'm definitely getting better at stopping short of perfection. These are going to be mounted on the side of the car. They will be painted castings, which means a lot of the detail will be lost, or simply will never be seen. I'm also taking into account that there is a "back face" to these pieces which will never be seen, and am paying even less attention to those surfaces. But it's tough. The perfectionist in me struggles against the part of me that just wants it done.

Thanks for reading this post and for checking in. I will of course try to update this as things continue. Best bet is to check out the facebook page for "Rise of the Mattmobile" where I tend to post more often.

MattMobile Steering Wheel and Vac Form Table

Another great few days of productivity and much as been accomplished! Let us start off with a little show and tell.

Here is my recently acquired steering wheel for the MattMobile:

To my eye, it is perfect! I can't wait to get it installed.

While kicking around ideas for the Wonder Woman Dawn of Justice shield, which I am also blogging about, I decided it would be in my best interest to build my own vac forming table. It's something I've wanted for a long time, but never really had a great reason to build. But with this project upon me, the timing was right. I watched a few youtube videos on how they are made, and to get a good machine up and running seems surprisingly simple. I already have a shop vac, so most of the expense is already done.

I started with a piece of plywood that I had lying around the shop. I believe this is left over wood from the Tardis build. I cut a couple 26" x 26" squares. I then measured off a grid of 1"x1" squares.

The fun really began when I had to drill out all of those holes. Tedious, but really no way around it.

I then cut out the walls and glued them into place on the top piece.

A few wood screws later and it was time to attach the base.

And no, I didn't drop it.

I then used a hole boring drill bit and a set of metal files to carve out the hole for the hose. Fits like a glove!

And after a couple short hours of work, the table was complete. The next thing I need to do is build a frame for holding the plastic, and a chimney to channel the heat from the heating source. Honestly I think the hardest part of this project will be finding a good heat source. I already have a few things in mind, but the bummer is heaters are out of season right now.

Anyhow, that's it for now! I'll post again once I have some more progress.

MattMobile - Shell Separation and Cockpit Fabrication

Greetings all and welcome back.

It's been a very busy time at the workshop, and much has been accomplished. Not just that, but the work is visually pretty impressive. Let's get to it!

The big thing that happened this week was the cutting in half of the shell.

Here you can see I've made the first major cut. I did this will my skill saw and a high tooth count blade. I recall all the times I looked at other people's builds and thought to myself "What a bunch of losers! They can't even make a straight cut!" Turns out, it's really hard to be accurate!! Go figure.

Here's a little more progress on the cut. To get around the corners and into the weird spots I ended up using a variety of tools. A reciprocating saw, a hack saw blade, a coping saw blade, and even a dremel tool. Oh and a drill too.

And here's the money shot.

Kinda crazy seeing it like this. Amazing how much of my workshop is now filled up with MattMobile stuff.

This is how the main part of the car looks now. So tiny!

Look at those guts!

The second big piece of work done lately was the rebuilding of the drive shaft tunnel. Interesting fun fact. The work you see in the picture below is the result of dozens of hours of work. The rebuild, which I explain below, took about three hours total. I guess once I wrapped my head around what was required, and had it all figured out, it was far easier to do a second one.

The main problem with this first version is that it's too short. I'm a pretty tall guy, and my fear is that with that bar at the back positioned the way it is, I may very well run out of room. The goal was to rebuild it, but using the next support bar back as the anchor point.

With so many lessons learned from the first effort, cutting the stuff to length and getting it all clamped in and blocked out was pretty easy.

I use blocks of wood, stacked to the correct height, as spacers. This allows me to position everything properly, and have it held in place as I weld. The profoundest lesson I learned from version one is just how much the metal moves when you weld. It's actually kind of staggering the amount of heat that is generated from that torch, and it's no wonder that the metal warps and moves from the heat. Clamping everything down is essential, and so is doing tack welds to hold everything in place. By minimizing the heat that is transferred to the metal prior to everything being firmly affixed into place, you can control how much warping happens once you start laying down thick welds.

And here she is, all tack welded into place. I'm going to skip the full welds for now, until I have a little more of the cockpit built out. I would hate to change my mind again, and have to go back and tear the whole thing out. Again.

As you can see, definitely a very busy month for the MattMobile! I really want to focus on building out the cockpit for the next couple of weeks. The bummer is that it's very slow going, as the metal fabrication requires a lot of attention and care. The old thing about "Measure twice, cut once" is never more true than with metal work. Ok, it's probably more true with brain surgery, but that's not my thing.