Ink Demon Update, also..ONE MILLION SUBSCRIBERS!!

We hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube! Hard to believe we've come this far since starting a little side project in our garage, but here we are! Somehow it still feels every morning like we're just getting started...I hope that never fades away, so let's do this!

The Ink Demon project is going fairly well so far, we've hit a couple of big obstacles but so far we've been able to overcome them as always!

We completed the steel frame but immediately ran into problem #1: the small cylinder at the waist was not up to snuff and couldn't lift the body!

To fix this we had to rip it all out and put in a significantly larger cylinder (3/4" upgraded to 1.5") which worked great but its WAY BIGGER which meant needing to deal with expanding the waist area to fit it all.

After that we were able to test the animation which was great. But while trying to get the waist to work I had turned the PSI on the air compressor way up and forgot to turn it back down when testing the arms and ended up busting the elbow joint welds. 😬 Luckily I was able to hammer it back into place and re-weld it without any major damage but yikes.

This pneumatic stuff is kind of dangerous! Luckily we were out of the way.

Once the frame and joints were good to go, we started wrapping in foam, wire armature, tin foil, and duct tape!

 Every project has what we call the awkward phase, and we are squarely in it right now haha. It just looks so strange, but you just gotta keep going and push through to the other side! Once the tin foil is done, the spray foam goes on next. That's today's plan.

I also was able to complete the 3D printed head and I'm working my way through printing the teeth. Also had to make hinges for the jaw and start to figure out how to animate it.

Oh, and one other fun thing I did was build the control board for it! This guy has 5 cylinders so I needed to daisy chain two prop controllers for it. Figured it would be fun to put a really nice looking board together:

There's one solenoid for each cylinder, two prop controllers, an air regulator, and a trigger button. It was super satisfying to build this and I'm really happy with how it turned out!

As always, so much more to do but we're getting there slow and sure.

Have an awesome week! 🤘🤘

~Jay