Make do with what you have

As the title implies, I hope this blog inspires you to always do your best, and make amazing things with little supplies. 

That was one of my goals with starting this blog.I distinctly remember Bill, a co-worker, explaining to me that he felt a strange sense of empowerment when I brought in the Tesla Coil to MakeShift, and a Ruben's Tube the next, and even a Fire Cannon the next month! I guess the best I can describe it was that by making these "magical" devices, and breaking them down, revealing the process empowered people. I'm babbling now.

So why the pink "Home Depot" foam? I talked with Frankie this week, panicking actually, about how I was going to piece together the project bike again, and if I would even be able to find parts for it! He responded in true Flood fashion, "What do you mean you need to buy handlebars{and parts} for it? Your going to make them!"

Thanks for that boost of confidence, I need that from time to time.

I first started by hacking up some foam 8" wide and giving the tail a slight curvature.

The classic cafe seat is very minimalistic form. For this seat I am imagining sculpting a seat like the 1965 Ducati GP that I previously posted. To give the slight bump I added 5" of XPS foam, we will see how this turns out.

I read somewhere on the internet that Gorilla Glue works for the Games Workshop guys and gals who make miniature terrain maps so it will work for me. I previously used normal wood glue for my foam sculpting but found near the center of my forms the glue would take days(sometimes weeks) to dry.

I still left this form in addition to one other to dry overnight before sculpting.

Flash forward to Sunday morning, I woke up and went straight to sculpting.

It took awhile to start taking the form down to the forms desired exclusively using a file.

Occasionally as I was working I would find myself picking up the saw again to give the form more of a taper.

There we go! The form is coming along.

Once I got the foam to the desired form, I opened up a gallon of spackling paste used for drywalling, and liberally applied paste to the foam. Think of it like icing a cake. 

Now just to dry. The drywall paste is on fairly thick and will take awhile to dry completely and be sanded. I found after just a few hours today it was still very wet.

In the meantime, I cleaned up the pink foam particles that got EVERYWHERE (Im still finding pink foam in my pockets!)

All done (at least for now)! I will be coming back and sanding, re-applying more paste, and repeating this process until the form is symmetrical and a perfect fit for the bike.

Stay tuned to see how the seat evolves next week!