Pauldron Progress and Setbacks (day 19)

Day 18 I pretty much just fell asleep. It’s not crucial that I always succeed in making progress on the project every day but of course that’s what I’m aiming for, so it’s a bit disappointing when I don’t.
Anyway today I focused on refining the edges of the pauldron, using measurements from the centerline to determine where to add or remove material. I also adjusted the position of the side spike and made an unfortunate discovery about the front spike…


Using this method to check symmetry of the part edges, I made adjustments to the part edges, adding or removing material to make the measurements match. Unfortunately because of the way the part has been built up iteratively, the different layers of epoxy putty are prone to separating when work is done….

The alignment of the side spike has been a problem – on previous visual checks I’ve noticed that it often appears to be off-angle and off-center relative to the midline. So I tore it out again and reset it, hopefully correctly this time…

Generally I feel that the approach I took to creating this build of the pauldron (that is, using the templates to position and align the spike fringes, and building up the rest of the shape around that) has served me quite well: But unfortunately I didn’t get it quite right when I made the templates, so I had to use visual checks and iterative adjustments to improve the position and alignment of the spikes… As these adjustments have taken me increasingly far from the original alignment of the templates, the benefits of the templates have decreased to the point I can’t rely on them any more. I think from this point I pretty much just have to rely on visual checks and other measurement methods to get the front and rear spikes to match. Unfortunately while checking the alignment of the repositioned side spike, I found a significant problem with the front spike – it’s clearly not at the same angle as the rear spike.

It’s kind of frustrating to identify a problem like this at this stage. I feel like there are a number of earlier steps in this build that introduced some small errors – like the templates weren’t as good as they should have been, the recast spike fringe parts didn’t have uniform thickness, and so I’ve made all these improvised adjustments based on visual checks – unfortunately it’s made a mess of the original effort to use the guides to place the spikes. It’s frustrating because I’ve spent almost 20 days on this one part and it’s still not aligned correctly. I’ll just have to keep at it, I guess, and try to learn from all this.