Kai's Garage Kits

(my apartment is a factory now)

Short-ish post today. Wonder Festival US is just a couple weeks away, so I’ve been focused on cranking out kits and haven’t found much time to write or take pictures.

It took me a couple of tries, but I’ve started to nail down my process for getting clean and consistent resin casts. The more comfortable I get with my casting procedures, the faster I can turn around another kit. The biggest bottleneck right now is the time spent waiting for the resin to cure. I’m using a resin with a 10-minute demold time, but I’ve been giving it a few extra minutes because some of the thin parts take a little bit longer to solidify.

Since only half of my molds can fit in the pressure pot at a time, I decided to start by casting the shirt, the pants, and the two parts of the base. I thought it might be good to hone my technique on these larger parts before moving on to the more detailed, delicate ones.

Look at all that resin! This is just half of the parts I need to produce 30 kits. Not that I’m necessarily going to stop at 30! That’s just how long it took for me to run out of the two gallons of resin I had on hand. Thankfully, it won’t take another two gallons to finish these kits off, since nothing else consumes nearly as much resin as the bases. If you count them up, you might notice that there aren’t exactly 30 of everything; I had to reject a few parts early on due to incomplete or flawed castings, but as I kept going I started getting fairly consistent results.

By the time I got through a dozen or so rounds of casting, the molds were getting quite warm! Resin heats up as it cures, and I wasn’t leaving enough time between castings for them to cool off. It’s just as well, since the molds work better when they’re warm. The heat helps the resin cure faster.

I’ve also started planning out my packaging. I arranged a set of parts together and worked out the box dimensions I’d need, then ordered some boxes and blank sticker paper to make labels. Still working on the design for those.

Anyways, that’s it for now. Like I said, short post. Next week will probably be a similar story. WonFes is right around the corner!