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Starting on Etsy

Friday, September 5th, 2014

Prices for horns have now been updated across my FA, Weasyl and DeviantArt galleries as well as my homepage compact price list.

As I may have mentioned, I’m aiming to move to an Etsy-based business setup selling horns I have already made rather than making them on demand.

The shop is located here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/StarborneWorks

While I will still take customised orders as well, I’m hopeful this arrangement will get more orders out, faster, and reduce the amount of micro-management I found myself doing.

As an aside, during my preparation for Etsy selling I thought it best that I tidy up my spreadsheet of casting recipes, which also holds my costing calculations. While doing so, I found a mistake that’s been buried there for a couple of years, effecting all my costing calculations in that trickle-down way only spreadsheet formulae can.

Without wanting to go into details, it can be summed up with; “Oh, so that’s where all the money’s been leaking away.”

The horn pricing was being adjusted to more sustainable levels anyway, but the larger horns have gone up a little more than originally intended to account for the corrected costings and difficulty producing successful castings in those shapes and sizes.

With a view to providing buyers with clear information, I’ve also produced a “datasheet” for the first type of horns I’ve listed on Etsy, the #10 Springbok.

#10 datasheet

I will be adding horns to Etsy in type-batches like this as I need 6 pairs in the various colour and effect combinations to photograph together for each datasheet.

Which ones do you think should come next?

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Progress report

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Maybe I should do these weekly? What do you think?

Anyway it’s warmed up a little. Workshop’s averaging about 10c when I get down there. Done a couple of test-casts and they look alright.

Will be casting up some from the still-intact moulds tomorrow with a view to ship on Saturday. Others are in progress.
The first couple of layers of filler have gone down to get the new moulds sorted. Another couple of days of that and they should be built up and finished enough to start laying on fresh silicone. After that I make up the new fibreglass jackets. So all being well, should able to cast the full range again by the end of next week.
Only potential delay I’m aware of will be if I run short on silicone or fibreglass resin. Should have enough of all regular resins and foam to fill current orders.

That said I know I’ll need more silicone to account for some more new items, but I don’t want to do piecemeal orders and get charged a tonne on separate shipping. Since TOMPS can get it to you in 2 days, it’s not worth it. I can just find other things to do in the meantime.

Webshop prep has stalled a bit again, but I’m aware we may be loosing internet here for a short while near the end of the month as our phoneline has to be physically dug up and replaced. Launching only to be unable to receive orders would not be good, so it’s not a huge concern. I would still like it to tie in nicely with a complete set of new moulds though, plus some stock on hand.

New soldering station also arrived on Monday, so with the donated oscilloscope and a repaired multimeter, I’m good to start work on the mecha-ears project again, as well as a few other ideas people may be interested in.

Also a complete fluke-find has gifted me with a LOT of leather in a texture that’s almost identical to vinyl leather I’ve previously used for texturing paw-pads. There’s enough I should be able to revamp the whole range and keep the distinctive look as well as push the foam-filled prototypes to a standard item.

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Expo’s over..

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

..and I took 24hrs out to rest up.

I’ll have some pics up in the next day or so of the new horns, but in all the rush to get things ready in time for Expo I let some existing orders slip behind. Most of them should be taken care of shortly however.

Someone give me a kick up the bum if I don’t get pics up soon.

Boy, I’ve really got to sort out these post categories too.

But anyway, Expo went okay and I got to meet up with some great people, new and old. Next time I hope there won’t be such a mad preparation-rush though.

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Expo’s a week away!

Saturday, October 22nd, 2011

If you follow my personal twitter you’ll know the last few weeks have been hectic. Family crisis, deadlines, financial issues and a whole bunch more. The final deadline is now MCM Expo in a weeks time, where I’ll be manning a dealers table for Fatkraken while she costumes. In repayment, I get to sell some of my own items on the table.

It’s Halloween, so I’m selling horns.

Presuming the roto-caster I’ve built in the last week starts working again, I should have a number of each. Some of the first final tests came out today.

Yes, there’s a lot of black there. I was testing some calculations for bulk-casting. Meant mixing up a lot of resin in one colour and black shows any defects better. The two “beige” unicorns horns though actually contain UV and GlowInTheDark powder.

The unicorn horns are cast from a hand-made master. These long ones are 8.5″ long and the shorter ones are 3.5″ long. I’ll be making them up in a host of *co-pony-ough* colours, with the fleece at the bottom either black, white or grey as it’s all I have to hand. They’re a shell casting that’s infilled with rigid PU foam. Will likely be putting them on simple elasticated headbands.

These horns are made in the same way but the moulds are taken from real animal horns. These ones are some breed of goat I believe (of the 8 I got, only 6 had a specific species noted). There’s more coming from Jacob, Heriden and Dalesbred breeds of sheep, but the fibreglass mould-jackets are being tricky. This variety will mostly be mounted on headbands and barrettes, though I may also make a few up in foam rubber.

Once Expo’s over I’ll be selling them directly as loose castings for people to use as they will.

Well after after-Expo, when I wake up from the coma.

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New resin storage (at last)

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

I’ve been holding off buying more casting supplies, because I was in dire need of a better way of storing them. The old fridge-freezer I’d been using was simply too small, and particularly in this damp weather I want somewhere dry and warm to be able to store the supplies where they’ll last longer.

Two weeks ago I managed to grab a large commercial display fridge off ebay, and after a lot of problems with the local garage and our van we managed to collect it.

Well actually we got within 0.7miles of collecting it before the van fuel-pump failed (which we’d repeatedly asked the garage to check, but they knew best & instead changed the distributor cap & leads. Not going back there now.). Thankfully the seller brought it down to our van in their car, so we got to get towed home with it in the back.

Today I finally managed to get it moved into the workshop.

It’s a big square insulated box. The glass door is a small concern, but I suppose it’ll get me to keep the place tidier.

I got the wiring tidied up and moved around. The refrigeration still works, and I’ll be seeing if it’s possible to use it as a dehumidifier. As you can see in the quick cameraphone pic, the oil-filled radiaitor currently takes up a lot of space, so I’ll be seeing it I can improve that, possibly by changing it for a filament heater (though I’m concerned about fire risk). Will be adding a couple of fixed temperature sensors at some point to trigger the fan and try and keep the temp evenly distributed.

There’s a hole at the top that also needs plugging, where the neon lamp used to be. Silly bit of design, but easier enough to work around.

Tomorrow I start work on moving everything I shifted to the other side of the workshop back again, so I can actually use the place and get on with the current orders.

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Fun at Expo

Monday, May 30th, 2011

I was out at MCM Expo on Saturday stall-sitting. Karen of Kraken Kritters kindly let me sell some of my Ferret shirts on the table too, so there’s some money in the coffers again now! Just in time, as I need new materials.

The prototype horns I wore also got a lot of attention, so I’ll be pushing on with them. I just need to rig up a roto-moulding machine to get even hollow castings.

Gallery is still down, I know. In the intervening time I’ve had to reinstall this computer. On the upside though it’s running much faster now and I’ve found a lot of archive photos I thought had been lost. So new pics should be up soon. Likewise some lovely new example pieces.

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Gallery down

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Fixing the internal gallery is going to take a bit longer than anticipated. I’m already reorganising the layout, but there’s quite a few items I never got around to putting on it and a few hundred master images to sift through. And once the new and better quality images are up I’ll have to go back through all the previous blog entries and correct image links.

Might be a day or two.

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Eye-blank developements

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

I’m glad to say there’s finally some good news on the eye-blank front. A few recent castings have been coming out crystal clear! The new epoxy resin is starting to work out.

It’s crystal clear, without the yellowy tone of the eurethane clear-cast and without the blue hint of the noxious styrene resin.

The only issue is that it’s rather harsh on the silicone moulds, clinging to them very tightly. Mould-release has helped a bit but has also left the blanks with a slightly “frosted” surface.

I have some test blanks currently curing in hardier urethane-rubber based moulds, which hopefully will not require mould release. If they come out as well as I hope, I should be able to start production proper within the next fortnight.

A urethane mould curing

The experiments continue. More updates should soon follow. For science!

PS: Site gallery and previous post images may not respond correctly for a while as I shall be making alterations to the gallery plugin the site uses.

Posted in Developments, Prototypes | 1 Comment »

Starborne Works Facebook page

Friday, October 8th, 2010

I’ve created a fan-page for Starborne Works on Facebook. Any website updates or news should be automatically cross-posted to it, so please declare yourself a fan if you want instant updates!

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Development news

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Things have been a little all over the place lately, but I have a number of new products in the pipeline. I also finally have a nice photographic lightbox, so I’ll be re-photographing my demo products. I’ve also had some wonderful help from some volunteer models in getting very impressive “action shots” of some of the T-shirts in use.

This is all part of a big push to finally get the webshop populated and operating, as I acknowledge I’ve let that slip while working on custom orders instead. It’ll be nice to have enough standard items available that I might be able to relax a little more around here!

At request I’ve been working on getting blank resin eyes manufactured. After a couple of non-starters I think I’ve finally found a nice water-clear epoxy. There’s still some residue issues to work out, but I think it’s a minor contamination thing. I hope to have it resolved in the next few days.

It’s also been suggested that I work on some steampunk-styled filigree, to provide a more repeatable and lighter option than sewing bits of scrap metal to your clothes. These are fairly simple, but I’m experimenting with metallic pigments and filler powders to give the best realistic appearance I can. I’m fussy like that.

I’m also trying to find a good balance between personal and professional blogging. I now have my personal blogs running through a core website (www.sci-fi-fox.com) with automatic crossposting thanks to WordPress plugins.
What I will be attempting is to have this website crosspost into my personal one, but not visa-versa. A one-way flow. My business is part of my life, but my life should not be part of my business (unless I break my neck or something. That might delay orders a bit.). Hopefully this will enable me to blog about all my creative works, but for those interested to filter with ease.

And speaking of creative works, tomorrow I will be taking delivery of a milling machine. This will be my first, as I do not count the vertical slide I purchased for the lathe an adequate substitute. While a rather homebrew unit, it has ample machining room, so will be of great use. It should allow me to develop the Bonsai Repstrap concept further as well as make the aluminium moulds required for the small injection moulding machine I already own.
These have both been previously mentioned in personal blogs, and in retrospect are probably things more suited to blogging on this site instead. I’ll try and get the crossposting fixed up once I’ve spent a few more hours in the workshop today.

Ta-ta!

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