today's q a is about shop infrastructure and i've got some shop q a questions here um
uh leprechaun leprechaun with a kh where you would expect to see asks the question of consumables and
storing them has been covered extensively here but how often do you find yourself going through
and checking if things have gone bad or dried out it doesn't seem fun to discover you need a new
glue you need a glue paint the moment you need it just to find it being uh dried out but constantly
checking things also seems tedious yeah this is an issue here um because while i utilize a lot of
processes i don't utilize a lot of processes with the same regularity as each other uh
so this this has been coming up to me specifically in the casting materials department
because i don't do a lot of casting and mold making here i frequently farm it
out if i have to because i'm not awesome at it um and my results are frequently
substandard for me um but i can do it if i have to but the fact that i usually farm it out and don't
do it here means that my casting materials are the things that deteriorate and really specifically
um my instacast presence my urethane resins um these resins come uh you can you can buy them as
foams you can buy them as solid resins odorless you can buy translucent you can some that you
can add color to um but the issue they all have is if water or even air moisture gets into them they
start behaving really poorly and i think i have an example of this so one of the places i like to get
cheap plastic stock from is by taking instacast and pouring it into a pvc pipe mold like
hold on like this
the thing about pvc pipe is is extruded which means it's perfectly straight on the inside so
if i glue this to a piece of cardboard like i actually did recently and then fill it full of
instacast when the instacast sets i pop this out and i end up with a big chunk of plastic that i
can machine and it's really inexpensive and this is roughly what it looks like
however what might not be really clear is how crappy this is this is the result of instacast
that has moisture that has infected it and so you get all these little tiny air bubbles
and here let's see if you can see yeah it's oh do you want a close-up camera i want to try the
close-up camera um you can see all these little air bubbles and it's just a it's a horror show
i am aware that they make a nitrogen spread i have never used that because i've never seen the need
but a couple months ago i needed instacasting i made up some of this stuff to use as plastic
stock and i got boned so now i need to get that nitrogen stuff and so what you do is when you
use the instacast before you cap it you spray this nitrogen spray inside it replaces the air
and keeps moisture out of your insta cast so yeah i i do have to deal with it um
i wish it were otherwise uh i just did a piece i just did a a tool tip on cyanoacrylate glues
because they're the most common glue that i use and the the most common size that i buy is this
because it's the most readily available this is two and a half ounces two and a quarter ounces
64 grams but i don't like this size because this size dries out for me
i prefer the little one ounce tiny bottles but i have found those to sometimes be hard to locate
it's funny because in the beginning you think oh wow i can buy crazy glue and these big
vats and you don't want it in the big nuts you want it in a tiny bottle so that you don't end up
letting it dry out um and cyanoacrylate glue fails or it dries out and it really it just
gets a little thicker and a little harder to kick and a little thicker and a little harder
to kick and you don't want to throw it away but it compromises your work and then you've got this
big thing and you don't want to throw it away and so you keep on kind of grinding away at it
because you invested in the beginning this is a terrible cycle give it to me in little tiny bumps
um okay uh phil popp or poppy wants to know how do you deal with paint spray paint overspray
routinely you just seem to mount a piece and spray away doesn't the over spray
just get all over everything yep and it kind of has forever um yeah i've always i don't let
it get on other props but yeah sure it does get all over the place um i know i'm a very very uh
my painting techniques lack discipline right i think that's i think that's pretty clear
um and i do get paint spray over spray which means i get dust all over the place so
uh i i it's the dusty shop i've recently done some dust retrieval
improvements which will we haven't released those yet right i've done some dust retrieval uh
modifications here in the cave and some improvements and the dust has gotten better
but for paint spray over spray it's always going to happen um the difficulty i would
love a little spray booth but the permitting for spray booths is a freaking nightmare um
so it yeah it's it's a whole thing i'm just be happy that i'm wearing a mask every time i spray
now that's we're going in increment overspray i'm just you know someday i might have a shop that
actually has a dedicated spray boost nothing would make me happier just a little five by five foot
space in the corner of the shop where i can go and i can know that it's going to be sacrosanct i can
spray it down with a spritz bottle and let the dust all settle before doing some kind
of beautiful candy coat on something like r2d2 yeah i want that but i don't currently
have it so i have to work with what i've got um christopher amritsch asks a great question
when setting up a small workshop any ideas about how to use the vertical space
more effectively um i love this because one of my guiding life axioms is there is always more space
on the z-axis for storage if you're paying attention the z-axis is of course up and down
and as you can see behind me i'm making great gangbuster use of the z-axis
and i still have i still have pockets in this shop where i can see room for me to expand
into the z-axis um my advice is i don't have any like broad pieces of advice that everyone can
follow because every shop is totally unique and everybody's work process is also totally unique
but my advice would be to watch and monitor your work process
to make sure that the spaces you're making in your shop
reflect the utility of what you put in those spaces and by that i mean the stuff that goes on
the highest shelf ought to be the stuff you need the least the next shelf down should be the stuff
you use a little bit more than that and the shelf in which you can just walk up and grab something
that's the shelf that should have the stuff you use all the time
that's how i do it that's what i do i'm always looking around and seeing is this accessible to
me in a way that is useful to me uh and there are times look i get totally enamored of like
a new tool or a new process and i'll build a rack for it i'll put it right central in the shop and
then i won't touch it for two whole years um so it requires a kind of repetitive monitoring of
your process do my sanding discs really need to be that accessible i only use them every two months
maybe i should put the sandiness behind that thing and i'll put something else where that is
so yeah i think my advice is the z-axis your vertical axis is one of the most important
ones for storage in a shop and i see lots of shops and maker spaces where there's like
nothing in the shop above the 32 inch mark which is the height of all the workbenches
the fact is you have so much room up there but you've got to use it wisely don't just
buy 12 inch deep shelves and go all the way to the ceiling because you put stuff behind stuff
and you're effectively when you put something on a shelf that's behind another thing you're
effectively throwing it away so yeah my other advice is make your shelves shallower make them
purpose-built for one thing at a time um so all of my shelves here are like
10 inches deep and that's because that's what i determine gives me the maximum amount of like
shelf space for the thing i'm putting on but not enough to put something behind it
um george faron wants to know have you figured out a good system for storing slash organizing cables
i have so many boxes in my life that go back three decades of cables i believe
somewhere in storage i have a box of scuzzy cables from the early line of
power books those big freaking square scuzzy cables with like the 35 contact points um
i do have a cable storage system um it is not here because i don't do a lot of av stuff in here
my cable storage system is tested cable storage system when i need stuff we we pull it out of
the tested stock but at home um i did the thing which i really like and i don't have a picture
to show you of this right now and i just wish i did um the closets in the house we moved into
uh here in the mission uh were done by like one of those californian closet places right so it's
like this modular system of shelves and cubbies and things and there are these six cubbies that
were all the exact same size in my office closet and what i did was i went to tap plastics and
i had a set of acrylic boxes made that fit those cubbies exactly i mean with a you know
quarter inch here and there um so i had acrylic boxes made that i turned upside down and use as
shelves in those cubbies and then i label them i have camera i have audio i have everything usb
which is the most crowded drawer then i have iphone ipod stuff i have eyes and ears because i
wear glasses and hearing aids so my medical stuff goes in one of them um but the fact that they are
quarter inch that clear acrylic boxes and this is not the inexpensive way to go you know these
i think i paid like 50 or 60 bucks a piece for these things i mean i had them custom made a tap
it was a while back anyway the fact that they're clear is so useful and it's easy to build acrylic
boxes yourself i just back then i was making the show full time so i hired tap to do it
um but the clear boxes make it so much easier to not get lost in the weeds with the cabling um
and i i go through my cables every probably every couple years not as often as i would like but
every couple of years i go through and get rid of some of the really old stuff
that i know i'll never need like the old serial cables and things like that um
yeah when i go through those cables i attempt to bundle them and like keep them with each other
like i try and categorize but it's a bear man cable management is a nightmare