Let’s try that again (day 13)

If I were superstitious, I should have stuck to my daily routine for the 100 day challenge yeaterday and skipped it today. Fortunately I am not prone to that particular brand of foolishness.


While working to check and correct the alignment of the spike fringe parts I made an unfortunate discovery: the recast spike fringe parts have an uneven base. In other words, correctly angling the bottom surface of the part does not correctly angle the top surface of the part, because the spike fringe part itself is crooked. I considered removing all three spike fringes, correcting the mismatch between those two surfaces, and re-seating them… But I decided that I could probably align them sufficiently with the part as it is – so I only removed the front spike fringe, and the one for the side spike.
It’s hard to check the positioning and angle of the spike fringe parts. The difference between “good enough” and “not good enough” is hard (for me, at least) to check with any of the tools I can think of that could reasonably do the job – contour gauge, or maybe a protractor somehow… I’m not even sure what else might work. One method I use sometimes is to put styrene rods into the spike mounting holes, to get a read on which way they are pointing and whether they’re located correctly. But this isn’t super-reliable for various reasons (the rod may curve, or the hole in the spike fringe might be crooked, etc.) To just eyeball the position of these things is also tough because, when you eyeball something, you tend to look at it in terms of its surroundings… And in this case, the surroundings (the surface of the pauldron around the spike fringes) are still irregular and crooked because the whole thing was free-sculpted using a couple cross-section guides (and the spike fringe pieces, located via those guides) as the starting point. I think it’s been a good approach but there’s still more refinement work to be done…. And it doesn’t really make sense to use the pauldron sculpt to verify the position of the spike fringes, when the spike fringes were used to establish the shape of the pauldron…
So far the most useful approach has been to take pictures of the part using the centerline guides as a point of reference. The resulting images can then be rotated such that the centerline of the part matches the paint program’s vertical axis, and then I can trace lines parallel to the horizontal axis and check how well things line up. I used this approach a little bit last time, and I’m pleased to see this time that the spike fringes seem to be aligning better than before.