Do you know how long it takes to cut and melt a hole in 400 spoons? Apparently 10 fricken hours. I sat at a table outside from 1pm until 11pm. Fricken hell that was painful. My joints are still feeling it.
I decided to change the design of the scales a little bit. I was having issues getting the lacing down, so I decided to do them scale maille style instead. That involves one giant hole in the middle instead of several small holes.
Looks simple, right? Not as simple as I thought.
So I did look into how much it would cost to buy metal scales, just to see. SO for 800 spoons I paid $12. For 1 giant spool of wire I spent $7. For metal snips to cut rings I paid $5. So total, assuming I only need 800 scales, it has cost me $24. Plus the time I put in.
Metal scales all have a pointed tip, and I need them rounded to look like fish scales instead of dragon scales. So the cheapest I found them, pointed not rounded, are $7 for 100. So scales alone, with no rings and not exactly what I want, would be $56. If I wanted to get them rounded I could, but that would be considered custom, so I would be looking at $5 for 10. Yeah, that is completely out of price range. Not even doing the math n that one.
And then rings. Rings are mainly 7mm. After playing around I learned I need 12mm rings. I could not find 12mm rings anywhere. In fact, it was difficult most places to determine the size of the ring sold. They tell you the guage of wire, but not the size of the actual ring. That is extremely frustrating. It might be ok if I were to pay for prefabbed metal scales, but as I can't afford that, I get to make my own rings as well. Fortunately that is not that difficult.
So...as I said, last Friday I spent all fricken afternoon and evening cutting spoons. And I only got halfway through all I needed. I still have 400 left to cut.
The part that was tedious was the hole. I swapped out the knife tip for a punch tip. The punch tip was way too small, so I also used the large end to melt the hole. The biggest issue was the melted material. When I was cutting, I was removing unmelted material. That was easy. When punching the holes, I had a ton of melted material. And it just didn't easily scrape off the tool. I had to sit and wait for it to drip off it. And if I didn't wait long enough, it would deposit the excess plastic onto the next spoon. It was so fricken difficult. I did not get any pictures of that part of the process.
But the next phase was to prime them. A while back I was gifted an air brush unit. One of the small ones used for painting minis. I had a 3 oz bottle of black air brush primer, so I used that. I got through all of the front, and the majority of the backs. I need more primer.