Built to Spec

I had the honor of helping my friend Hannah make a badge for Lauren, the  Welcome to Night Vale tour manager.  She made the kick ass art for the badge and it was up to me to actually make it work. I've made a number of glow badges before but for this one I had to incorporate some multi-colored artwork, make it glow purple and have an on/off switch. All of which I had not tackled yet, but I like a challenge from time to time.

The switch was straight forward, but making it purple is a little more difficult. Purple LEDs are available, but they're actually UV, and they're not super bright.  Using a red and a blue LED on the same power source isn"t possible like I've done with previous glow badges without current limiting resistors since the red LED has a much lower forward voltage. I overcame this limitation by adding a couple optional current limiting resistors to two independent LEDs on a custom PCB:

In the pics I have two zero ohm resistors in place. This is because this particular board was a test board that has two white LEDs on it. I tried two different strategies for getting a bright purple, two white LEDs with a filter, ane one red LED and one blue LED with different current limiting resistors to mix them appropriately. The red/blue combo turned out to be the winner (430 ohm resistor on the red LED, zero ohm on the blue). It was brighter than the two white LEDs with filter and more vibrant overall.

For the graphics, I etched the outlines of each color on to a sheet of 1/16" acrylic and used spray paint and selective masking to get the color fills I wanted. Here's a pic of the color plane after applying black and removing the masking for the gray areas  before painting them in:

If I had more time I would have gotten the graphic layer printed rather than painted it on myself (I've used some local printers to do some awesome stuff with acrylic on UV cured inkjet printers). After the graphic layer, PCB, and laser etched glow layer where completed, I attached everything with expanding push rivets. Here's a pick of the white LED and filter setup:

And here's another pic of the final red/blue badge in all it's glowy glory:

In this special Halloween update I'm sharing some of the stuff I made for the occasion. I had a bit of a skull theme going this year. It started when picked up a number of cheap skulls from some trappers at the KC renfaire and I using them for a couple projects for Halloween. First off the Halloween wreath:

It's basically just a grapevine wreath, a few artificial flowers, and a few small skulls held together with wire and hot glue. The jaws of many of the skulls were free moving so I hot glued most of the jaws in place at their base to keep them together. It might need some additional garnish (I'm thinking snakes... yeah snakes), but it looks fairly creepy so far. I really like the deer skull centerpiece.

Next we have my attempt at a new tradition in addition to the Halloween wreath, the Halloween tree:

It's basically just a fallen limb with holes drilled in it and pose-able black stems from Hobby Lobby stuck in and the bases of those stems reinforced with floral wire with a little moss thrown in. It's all stuffed in a small metal barrel we had around the space. Of course after it was assembled and posed I threw some more skulls on it for decorations:

I like the asymmetry of the whole thing. The twisted and gnarled limbs really give it some character. Hopefully I can find a place to stow the thing over the next year so I can make some nice creepy ornaments for it when I pull it out again.

Lastly, since there was already casting stuff being used in the Hammerspace monster maker classes and I needed a welding mask, I threw this together:

On the right is a failed cast, from which I learned that Alumilite, at least in reasonable volume, is not good of slush casting as it sets up almost instantaneously. The base design was done by my friend Hannah:

From there I blended the design a bit with a coyote skull. Here's a pick of the sculpt in progress:

It's meant to incorporate a pair of welding goggles and have space for a respirator so I can wear it while watching the plasma cutter work. Here's the latex mold with plaster jacket after the clay's been removed and a couple pours have been done (thanks to Dave at Hammerspace for helping me make the mold and do the pour):

I originally had the goggles in the sculpt but I messed the threads up on the first pour so I cut them out on the second pour and glued an extra set I had in place:

Here's a pick of the test fit (cast in Smooth-Cast 320) before painting:

Here's some pics with the respirator in place after Brandon Mohn airbrushed it up:

I threw this on together in a couple days so there's a few things that need to be fixed so I'll probably get another pull off the current mold and keep it around for when I actually want to fix it up. The goggle components actually threaded into place with the first pour so I'm optimistic about incorporating goggles into future sculpts. For now I'll probably just add a second elastic band a bit higher up from the goggles to help keep it from sliding down my face when not using a respirator, but other than that it's pretty usable in it's current condition.