Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere!

All of my tests are certainly getting me somewhere, though I'm at a point where I wish the stuff would just behave the way I had hoped it would. No sweat though, as each failure is a lesson learned.

Here is the completed two part mold for the chest backplate. I probably used way more rubber than I needed, but who cares.



I did my first pour into the chest emblem backplate mold. I just did it open faced. I'm really doing this is a "clean out" pass, to remove any junk from the mold, and to figure out any nuances of the mold that I'll need to account for when I go to make my final pour.



I did another experiment on the belt mold. This time, after I poured in the urethane, I went in after it with a popsicle stick and ran it into every little corner I could find. The theory is that this would push out any air bubbles.



After it had cured for a few hours, I mixed up a smaller batch of urethane and soaked a few lenghts of webbing, then attached it on top of the belt. This will probably turn out to be my new process for making the belts.



And look, here's a whole stack of belts! Seen on top of it is the made for production chest emblem back plate, just to give you an idea of color comparison.



I think I will also need to put some time into thinking about what I want the final pieces to look like, color wise. At the end of the day, what they looked like in person is not how they appeared on screen. There was a lot of color timing done to the final print, and I'll need to decide what I want to do. I don't think I'll ever be able to match the actual colors perfectly, so I suppose it's a moot point anyhow.