Ironman and Loose Ends cover

Sitrep:
I just sent Loose Ends to Rea last night. I know a couple of the betas are still outstanding on their feedback, hopefully they get me their 2 cents before it goes to Goodlifeguide.com for publishing. :)

Here is the cover:

Loose Ends is a Tales of the Founding of the Federation book. It is the last in that series as far as I know. Any more stories I write for that time period will be tucked away in a Multiverse book from now on.

In other news, I am nearly into act III of PRI 2. I still haven't nailed a name for it yet. I've got 3 in mind. Act 3 is all blocked out as are the 2 partially written chapters left in act 2. I'm hopefully going to be able to finish it within the next 2 weeks.

Yesterday sucked. Big time. I do chores on Friday... and well, the mailman came just as I was finishing mopping the floor at 11am. Like an idiot (or a dog, take your pick) when he rang the doorbell with a package 5 minutes later I hopped up and went to get it. I knew the floor was wet, I took 1 cautious step, okay, I can do this... and the second and down I went! (I use one of those knock off wetjet things and usually it's dry in 15 minutes)
I scraped my right forearm up, and I've got a lot of aches and pains on my left side from my shoulder to my hip to the top of my foot. Ice helps a bit. :P
Nothing broken except my pride as I've been telling the family.

Now, about Ironman...
I've been having issues with my printers. I tried swapping hot ends to an all metal one and it didn't work out for me. (I need to go back if I'm going to try printing PETG though) I finally broke down and bought a hot end from Creality instead of the 3 clones that screwed me up. Everything worked suddenly. Wow! What a difference!

So, to test it, I went and dug up a model I've wanted to print for a while. I actually wanted to print the Hulkbuster, but it would have taken really long prints... and I don't have room in my curio cabinet for him. GRR.
Anyway, I printed the parts, everything came out good so I switched back to printing droid parts and then put this guy together in between writing and dad working on his models. (usually doing stuff in the evening after supper, just before dark)

When the family went to AZ again to visit the brat pack, it was nice and cool here so I pounced on him to finish him off.
I had a few issues with him, the CA glue made some of the parts drift on me. That was annoying. But I got him wired up and he's cool. I know some really detailed people could do 100x better.

He has a 3MM white LED in his chest and another in his head. I added a bit of glow paint to his palm and to the cylinder walls for the arc reactor. I considered wiring a light pipe (using clear PLA filament) to his left palm. Now I'm glad I didn't try. I even considered drilling holes and adding micro arc reactors with the same process but decided against it.

 

For some of you who are wondering, the modeler who made it blended the Mark 42 and 43 armors. I tried to blend both paint schemes the best I could with my limited skills. Just getting that red was a pain.

 

Because of the CA drift he doesn't line up as he should. I've come to terms with that. Still looks cool. :)

Oh! First time I EVER tried an airbrush! I tried it on the top of the base, adding detail. Mixed results. It really doesn't like cheap Walmart Acrylic. I had to mix it 75% Windex to 20% paint and 5% water. Even after mixing it a lot with a stick it still spattered as it came out. And cleaning the airbrush was a pain! Easier than the gravity one I think. (I have both the jar and gravity, I tried the jar) Oh, and I found out the cheap generic jars I bought extras of won't work with my airbrush. Specifically the lid stems are 5mm too long. GRR.

I'll start posting snippets of Loose Ends sometime in the next day or so.