Week 4 has arrived. I feel like this semester is flying by; we’re already a quarter through! There’s plenty of work to keep me busy in the meantime though.
Soaking Update Again
To start off the week again, it’s time for another soaking update. I received the parts from Shannon last week and reassembled Matoro and Hahli after letting them dry off. When I had put them together last week, the whitening process was less than impressive, but after coming back to them this week…
They turned out pretty well, for the most part. The photos make it hard to tell (for which I apologize; I don’t know how to use a camera to great extent), but Matoro is just about fully whitened on the surface. Unfortunately, parts such as his forearms and pelvis have yellow spots stuck in their crevices, and the same is true for the pin connectors in Hahli’s joints. But overall, I am very pleased with this.
Moreover, I was particularly worried about Matoro’s mask as, after removing it from the initial peroxide bath, it ended up being slightly sticky. Being rubber, I was almost certain I had destroyed its protection and caused it to start melting back into oils like rubber tends to do.
To my amazement, however, after drying it and leaving it on him over the weekend, it has turned out nearly pristine! It’s amazingly white and cleaner than I ever thought it would be. It’s worked so well, I may end up putting the rest of the masks in another bath for the same treatment.
In the future I may end up replacing the still yellowed parts on Matoro if I am unable to clean them any further, but we have plenty of time to find out if that’s the case or not.
As a note too: I adjusted both Matoro and Hahli’s poses, and I believe this is generally what I will stick with for the final display.
New Stuff
Now, with that out of the way (again), we can move on to the big announcement.
The supplies Cartland ordered last week have come in! This means we can start finally making some tangible progress on the display base. Before that though, there is something I’ve been dying to do for years now.
A Quick Distraction
You may have noticed that on top of each Inika’s canister is a gray axle that has been keeping the Zamor spheres in place. This is not part of the original sets and was added by me, because without it, the Zamor spheres just sit loose in the magazine. To remedy this, I had Cartland order some Blu Tack that I’ll use to stick the spheres together and keep them in place (hopefully) no matter what pose the Inika are in.
Fun fact – Inika play features
I’m not sure I had mentioned it up to this point, but the Zamor launchers have a physical play feature where, upon pressing the rubber launch mechanism, a Zamor sphere will be fired out of the launcher. This was the source of many Zamor spheres becoming lost, as with any projectile.
Looking at it all, I definitely got way too much for just this project, and the Amazon photos made me think it was transparent in color, but it does get the job done.
Looking at it now, the Amazon photos made it look like the packets were way smaller than they actually are, and that the color of the Tack itself was transparent, which is less than ideal, but it does get the job done.
I also have a bit of a concern with how long the spheres will stay in place, but I can work on messing with this stuff as the project continues. I’m sure I can find an alternative if needed.
I (meticulously) applied Blu Tack to the rest of the Inika’s Zamor spheres and removed the contraption originally holding them in place.
I refined my process as I went along, and kept redoing the Blu Tack until I was satisfied with it. I found it easiest to stick the Tack to the Zamor launcher and magazine itself, and then attach the spheres, while modifying the shape and amount of Tack. The ideal size seems to be about no bigger than the top of a Lego stud (aka, microscopic).
I also stuck the loaded sphere to the launcher, and the top 3 spheres to the magazine. It seemed to make hiding the Tack easier, and it was just my preferred method. I don’t think there would be any issues with sticking each sphere together and attaching them to the launcher only.
Furthermore, I also opted to put Tack on each sphere, but you could probably get away with only applying tack to the top-most and loaded spheres, leaving the middle two loose. I knew it would bother me if I didn’t do that though.
Fun fact – Zamor Sphere colors
The various colors of the Zamor spheres are (mostly) not just a style choice, they actually have unique effects when a target is struck with them! The spheres themselves are actually hollow crystals that can then be filled with various substances to produce effects.
For example, the Piraka all have yellow-green spheres that contain an Antidermis that bends a target’s will when they are hit with it. They used these spheres to enslave the Matoran of Voya Nui and forced them to construct their stronghold. Jaller also has this color loaded into his launcher currently.
The Inika’s “sea green”, blue, and yellow-red spheres contained Energized Protodermis that would reverse the effects of the Piraka’s Antidermis virus. Hahli has the proper sea green color in her launcher.
There also existed silver, black, and gold variants found in a booster box that all had their own effects!
Also, despite Toa Jovan sharing the same sphere color as Hewkii and Nuparu, his Zamor spheres would instead nullify the effects of a target’s weapon.
This was a very long, slow, and tiring process. I had figured it would only take a few minutes, but I ended up spending 3 hours dealing with it. And I may end up coming back to poke and prod at it all in the future. Not to say it wasn’t fun overall though.
It’s left me with an absurd amount of Blu Tack though, as I only used about 1/8th of a single strip. There are four strips per package, and two packages total. Needless to say, I’ll be donating the unopened pack to the DKC. As for the opened one though, I’ll find some uses for it… maybe to remove some dust?
Placing Blocks and Stuff
With that rather long detour taken care of, it’s time to start measuring the foam.
My idea was to put the current blocks I had, and the Toa, in various configurations to see which one appealed to me the most. It turns out though, having the two 12″x15″ blocks together gave a pretty good result!
I’m having a bit of trouble with the composition of the team together though. I decided to take the same formation from the Inika commercial I keep referencing, where, from left to right, is Hahli, Kongu, Nuparu, Matoro, Hewkii, and Jaller.
My main concern is that Nuparu and Matoro are competing for the same viewing space. I want Matoro to be at the main forefront due to his iconic story relevance, but I also don’t want Nuparu to be in the back as I feel that’s where he tends to end up when all of the Inika are together. Not to mention his color scheme might blend in with the background I’m planning to add.
I’ll toy around with them as we continue onwards and see what I can do.
While doing all of this too, I noticed that Nuparu and Hewkii had some pretty loose joints which made it frustrating to set them up correctly. This is a problem I will tackle later on in this post.
Creating a Glue
I expected the measurements to take a lot longer than they did, so I hadn’t really thought ahead to what I would do next, honestly, so it’s all improv from here.
Since we now know that the full 12×15 boards will be enough room on their own, I suppose we can go ahead and stick them together so that they’re ready to be modified.
But before anything else, I decided to mark an outline of where the Toa are standing currently, so that I can put them back in their positions when done.
Surprisingly, a pencil works really well for this. I expected I was going to need a sharpie.
Now that I won’t forget where exactly the Toa are placed, it’s time to create the glue. For this, I’ll be referring back to the Beginner’s Guide to XPS Foam YouTube video I had mentioned in my previous post.
The video mentions that HT glue and contact adhesive are better options than PVA glue due to their faster drying times, but since I only have PVA glue and don’t want to wait another week for glue to arrive, we’ll make it work.
The video also mentioned using something to keep the pieces in place while they dried. While I probably don’t need to do that since my pieces are going to be flat on the ground, I’ll feel a lot better if I did. I found some wooden skewers that I’ll “borrow” from the DKC to serve this purpose (if I’m ever able to remove the skewers, I’ll return them back to their baggy, but we all know that is almost definitely not happening).
I started by making holes in both sides of the boards with the skewers. I did not do this accurately it ended up being a huge pain to really get them both aligned with each other. I’m not really sure how you’d go about doing this properly.
When I finally got them properly lined up, I applied glue on one side and tried spreading it out with a popsicle stick. I ended up having to put more glue on so I’m not sure spreading it really helped.
Finally, I put the blocks together and made sure I saw some glue getting squeezed out. While doing this though, I realized that I should leave them to set standing up as seen in the photo, otherwise glue would spill on to the table, and gravity would also help keep the seam as thin as possible.
Getting the Slay On
While the boards are left to set, this gives some time to deal with an issue I had brought up earlier.
Some of the Toa have some pretty loose joints, which is to be expected given the nearly 20 years they’ve been sitting around. Notably, Hewkii’s feet, Nuparu’s feet and legs, and just about every joint on Kongu all are much too sensitive and move at the slightest push. This make posing them a hassle.
Thankfully though, this is a very easy fix. It simply just requires some transparent nail polish, and a bit of patience.
I just picked up the first nail polish I saw from the grocery store. I don’t think any brand makes a difference.
The idea is to apply some of the polish on the ball joints so that it gives a bit more surface area and friction to the loose socket joints.
I applied polish to Hewkii’s ankles, Nuparu’s ankles and pelvis, and Kongu’s left shoulder, left wrist, right ankle, knees, and left hip. I tried to keep the application thin and even all over the joints.
I cannot stress this enough; they MUST sit overnight after being painted. If you try to attach the sockets too early, you will damage the ball joint. Learn from my mistake and make sure the nail polish dries entirely.
I’ll leave both the Toa and XPS boards to dry overnight, and hopefully they won’t need more glue or anything.
The Next Day
As of me writing this section, it has been one full day since I set out the parts to dry with the nailpolish. I reassembled the Toa without incident.
I did a pretty poor job with keeping the layers properly even on Kongu. His knees are still pretty loose, and his foot is so tight that I was worried I would snap off the joint.
Nuparu ended up a little better, but still somewhat tight.
Hewkii definitely turned out the best. He’s easily poseable but also won’t fall over anymore.
In any case, I’m more confident now that the Toa will keep their shape a little better now, so it was a success overall.
Starting with the LEDs
My original plan for the day was to paint the XPS boards, but I had some troubles in borrowing the paint from my friend, so that will have to wait for another time.
To pass the time, I decided to start working on getting the LEDs set up, and getting some practice with the Arduino Uno R4 that I decided to use as the control board.
I’ve had some experience with getting LEDs to turn on, but that’s all I’m coming into this section with. I’ve never once even touched a Raspberry Pi or Arduino before, so that will be a learning curve to overcome.
I first started by relying on the official Arduino docs to get myself set up and prepared to work with it (found here).
After getting the IDE set up, I followed this guide to learn how to power LEDs with the Arduino (which also happened to give some good starting experience for Arduino overall).
I was a little worried about not having components such as resistors, but thankfully there’s more than enough all around the DKC due to past projects!
I toyed around with the setup to figure out how it all works and it was going amazingly. Having experience in repairing some electronics absolutely helped a lot with my understanding of this stuff.
And after a lot of jury rigging and some finagling…
A working prototype is produced! I’ll have to refine the technique I’m using to connect the wires to the LED, and find a way to hide those same wires for the display, but this is a start.
The next place I want to take this is by setting up LEDs for each of the Inika. Through some testing, specifically blue LED lights don’t like to play along with green and reds, so it’ll take some experimentation.
I also found this webpage that was particularly useful as it has the same breadboard and Arduino set up in the provided images, while also providing more information on how to set up multiple LEDs.
One consideration I needed to make while working with these LEDs is that they will burn out eventually. No matter how well I take care of them or what methods I use to help them, there will be a time that I have to replace them.
One major thing I can do to help this though is to add resistors, so that the LEDs are dimmed and don’t take as much power, increasing how long they can stay on for.
Now, despite my basic understanding of how electronics work and their components, I have a severe lack of knowledge of voltage and electrical currents. So while resistors do have codes that inform you how much power they resist, I am unable to make any real sense of it. So instead, I just kept plugging in resistors linking to LEDs until I got an appropriate brightness.
The idea doesn’t sound terrible in principle, I just don’t use the color codes that don’t give me the brightness I want, however…
The variety that the DKC provides will become my downfall. It took me a good while of just switching resistors around (not even to mention how green, red, and blue LEDs all needed different strengths), but eventually, I was able to get this setup:
I spent another few hours attaching one of the lights to Hewkii so I could brainstorm ideas on how I would eventually make the lights look pretty, and hide the wires.
My two biggest considerations with this were repairability and keeping things as unmodified as possible. I don’t want to damage or stress the plastic at all, and I want to make it easy enough to replace any faulty parts in the lights when it comes time to.
Ultimately, I think the best option would be to either replicate the light units that originally came with the Inika, or just reusing them entirely. They were, after all, designed specifically for the swords.
It would be much, much easier to reuse them, but my preservation side just won’t let me do that yet. It wouldn’t be very difficult, as it would only require me to desolder some spots on the motherboard, which also means I could put them back together just as easily. I just hate the idea of ruining something so vintage, even if there’s hundreds of these things available. I’ll take some time to think it over and look into options; there’s still plenty else to keep me occupied for awhile anyway.
Furthermore, I also learned from Hewkii that there may not be another option to run wires into the sword casing other than by drilling holes. I’m strangely less adverse to this option but again, I will consider options.
All in all, my mind is very scattered right now and I think it’s best to leave things here while I refresh for the weekend.
Next Steps
Next week, I want to start painting the XPS boards at last. It’s going to take a lot of time to figure out how to paint them properly, and I’m very nervous about it, but I’ll do my best.
Regarding the LEDs, I just want to put them away and not think about them for awhile. Trying to string together cables, dig through resistors, fit them in the swords… It’s just been too much for me and has made me frustrated.
For now, I need a break.