Molded parts on Friday!!

We will own the first official DreamLover 2000 molded plastic enclosures on Friday!

Jason's off to Beijing for his Confucianism lesson (we still think he's got a girlfriend). His assistant will help translate foreigner Mandarin to native Cantonese and his workers will load the mold into the injection machine and shoot out some parts. What an emotion. It seems like yesterday that we were looking for non waterproof square boxes on the net and making holes with a hand drill.

And on Friday a million dollar injection molding machine with our ton and a half custom carved and polished mold loaded inside will be pumping out Male Management paraphernalia for the first time ever on planet earth.

That's not all. We'll be able to test 3 different dyes which will be mixed with the polycarbonate plastic. These will give the plastic a slight tint. The limit of 3 comes from the fact that the mold needs to be washed after each tint is loaded and because it's heavier than an automobile it's something that takes time to accomplish.

These dyes are only useful if we do not spray paint the receiver.

We've chosen three colors:

- black: because it should give the product the nice outline of the spray painted parts while retaining transparency

- white: because it should diffuse the LED light enough to blend the colors well and hopefully spread the color throughout the enclosure

- purple: because it's just an awesome color and it's part of our "corporate" color scheme



How tints will affect the LED remains to be seen. The tint has to be strong enough to hopefully make the product look more finished and attractive, but light enough to allow the LED to shine through without blocking out some colors. It should also be light enough for you to be able to see if any water went inside.

These tints should work very well with the 3D shape of the receiver; depth is different in different areas, and this produces a nice effect near edges (flat areas are a lot lighter, thicker areas have more intense color).

We wish we could try out all pantone colors but it would cost us a million bucks :) So for now let us rejoice about this monumental step forward and enjoy whatever colors we're allowed to test.

A few more curiosities. We've asked Jason about putting TWO color dyes in the mold (or chunks of one color), to create some unique non-repeatable color streaks and patterns. He said this would be hard to control. We will take a chance on Friday to try to add a dye without washing the mold and see what happens. Honestly we've got no clue whatsoever how these machines are operated. It may not be as easy as throwing powder in like in a washing machine :)

Also, the molded parts on Friday will still not be 100% final; the mold will undergo yet another polishing phase at another location to make it mirror-like and perfectly smooth. It should still already be much smoother than our machined parts though.

We still have the option of adding texture after that, but it's a one way thing (the mold is carved with some chemicals). To undo the texture the mold needs to be re-polished and that will add 0.1 mm thickness or so.

As for the remote and DL2K-LINK enclosure, you probably already know that those will be sprayed black. Unless the purple remote with the black overlays looks mighty cool which it should.

Can't wait for Friday!

Comments

By slavecowie at 2010-07-29 04:39:09 Reply

Mistress agrees, purple is just cool color :)

By dreamloverlabs at 2010-07-29 08:34:38 Reply

Samples delayed until Monday - mold's not polished well enough to even try, and the colors take a few days to arrive.