hey it's sean from Tested coming to you from my home workshop during our shelter
at home time in the Bay Area we're all good my family's fine this is kind of
almost normal for me because I usually work from home so not leaving the
apartment for a week is not abnormal which is kind of sad I guess but
regardless we're okay everything's going fine so I thought I'd check in show you
some stuff from working on maybe give you some ideas of stuff to watch or do
to occupy your time so first off we're actually doing something very useful and
putting my 3d printing skills use in we are doing some PPE gear these are
headbands a design from Sweden for face shields and it's great that we are able
to do this as a maker community I would just say make sure that you are vetting
items that you're going to produce there are some things particularly 3d printed
respirators which are not safe or responsible to print in my opinion the
the face shields are pretty easy to do and are definitely acceptable these
orders came directly from a hospital so I feel pretty good about doing those
there's another really good design from our friends at preusse of research that
they did a really nice face shield design as well we'll try the post links
for all that stuff and I'd recommend trying to work through a hub I'm working
through matter hackers which is a local 3d printing company fabric supply and
retailer in the in the California area and they've been doing a fantastic job
at coordinating between the medical facilities and fabricators and I've been
doing that and has been working out really well so I'd suggest you try to do
the same thing so if you can make stuff do it help out when you can so fun stuff
that we've been working on is all kinds of all kinds of projects so number one
I've been continuing to fix movie cameras these are some 16 millimeter
Arius cameras that are from Germany I just happen to have two people send
these in one actually the whole way from Germany surprisingly couldn't find
someone in Germany to fix it so I'm working on these they're still making 16
millimeter motion picture film I still fix these for CalArts so I'm
glad to see these things going still it's awesome and they're fun to work on
the other thing I've been doing is we have a new Ghostbusters film coming out
hopefully this summer still and I've been working on a lot of Ghostbusters
stuff you may know that Jeremy Williams and I did a 3d printed indesign ghost
trap a few years ago he did the all the electronics I did the mechanical design
and it is fully functional we had a lot of fun doing this we actually released
the files for it on Thingiverse so you can print out your own if you want
something to do during the quarantine but I've been working on doing
simplifications to it like instead of 3d printing these giant flat panels that
are on the top and bottom I've been trying to fabricate them out of 3d laser
cut acrylic instead it's a little more expensive material wise but it saves a
lot of time on the fabrication and finishing because it's already nice and
smooth so not too much sanding or cleanup and do I can just kind of spray
paint it and I'm done so upgrades upgrades on on our original
but I've also been getting a lot of requests for upgrades for the the Spirit
Halloween trap so spirit Halloween has been putting these out they run thirty
to fifty dollars and overall they're like the right general shape and design
and everything they actually have some nice little function so it's a nice
cheap alternative and not everybody wants to tackle a big build like like my
original so the problem with this is it's not that accurate and so I've been
doing 3d printed and laser cut upgrade so like
we you know added the missing plate we add an accurate knob more accurate
vector plate in the missing foster connector that's back here and just kind
of overall doing some like visual improvements knobs wheels etc so that's
been fun I've been plugging away at that if you're into the spirit wrap I'd
highly recommend checking out our friend bill Duran of punished props did an
excellent upgrade and reprint paint of a spirit trap and there's some really good
tips and techniques in there so check that out as well and hopefully I'll have
some parts out there soon that you can check out continuing the Ghostbusters
craze we go to these guys what could these be well it is dr. Venkman zsp
negative reinforcement machine I love it my friend Jordan found this at a flea
market he instantly knew what it was picked it up and he gifted it to me I
this is like the best fine ever I love it and because I have a problem I found
another one on eBay that I also had to pick up so I did a few upgrades here the
original window that was on this was all yellowed and clouded and I think I think
it's acetate and basically kinda just melted so I made a new window that I put
in there the original meter on mine was square like this guy and that's not
movie accurate you need a round one so I found a round meter that I installed on
it to kind of make it a little more accurate to the screen-used one but
originally these are pH meters apparently and they had a whole bunch of
batteries inside which I'll show you yeah old Lantern batteries summoned just
cardboard sleeves but amazingly they didn't really leak so that's kind of
cool and I love this little compartment down here and i theorize that dr.
Venkman may have a little something stashed down there so I added that too
for fun so I also did the the ESP cards so these are actually called Zener cards
they're often used in magic shows and I couldn't find the large ones I
recognized the back as bicycle playing cards and you can get large bicycle
playing cards like the regular playing cards but I couldn't find the Zener
cards so I use these excellent Avery vinyl shipping labels and I made
my own so I just did these in Illustrator printed them out put them on
and then just trim them with an exacto and it worked great and they worked
particularly well because these are shipping labels they are meant to block
out labels behind it so you didn't get any bleed through from the the actual
printed card so these turned out well I just need to get the electrodes and I
love to get a fake little piece of gum with like a drool puddle around to put
on top there so yeah the ESP negative reinforcement device okay so that's it
for for Ghostbuster stuff but we have some recommendations for projects for
you at home I have this embarrassingly large stack
of Bandai Star Wars models we've built these a ton on tested they are
absolutely fantastic I highly recommend them they run anywhere from from 20
bucks up to maybe like 40 or more for the bigger ones like the Falcon and the
a dat but they're they're fantastically detailed and they are all snapped
together no paint required because they mold them and all the correct colors as
you can see from the shore trooper here and the detail is just absolutely
fantastic on these and the figures are great I'll get some focus here there we
go the figures are great because they're
also jointed so we have c-3po oh no his arms fell off this is embarrassing but
they are all jointed with these little rubber gaskets
that really hold the position well really detailed good stuff Threepio was
a little shiny for my taste so I hit them with a little bit of fine
steel wool was given that kind of like mellowed look that you expect from him
in most of the movies if you're not into Star Wars you can go to the Bandai
standard which was the all the Gundams they are in a variety of scales and
designs whole way up to like 12 inch giant ones so it just kind of depends on
your budget on how much you want to spend but the Bandai models highly
recommended for a good project and finally if you need some quarantine
viewing you know you might be running out of things to binge I'd highly
recommend a little program on tested called bits to atoms you may have heard
of it it was Jeremy Williams and I show on fabrication we did a lot of fun
projects such as the ghost trap star-lords which was our cave cabinet
build that we did with software developer other ocean here in Emeryville
most of them are up on youtube so you can check them out there are a few that
are still premium content on the tested website but there's a lot of fun stuff
in there things I think you'll enjoy and we even released files for some of the
projects so you can kind of tackle them at home if you want so check them out
but now than that I hope you and your family are doing okay I hope you're
staying safe you know follow all the safety protocols so we can get through
this in one piece together and we'll be back to our regular schedule at the
tested studio and you know back at Adams cave and all that stuff and bringing you
more fun projects so until then this is Sean from tested tuning out
you