Category: Design

Here’s an update on the dealer badge project I’ve had going for the last couple of months. When I last updated, I had poured a tin mold into silicone several times with limited success. Tin heats up fast and cools quickly, which makes it hard to pour into a mold—especially a mold with lots of detail—easily. So what I got was inconsistent and lumpy.

So tried resin. I was concerned mainly about the effect of heat on the material I was using, so I looked for high heat resin. This took a couple of weeks to arrive from the UK. Mixing it up and pouring into the same mold I used with the tin, I got a decent first poor, but the resin was full of bubbles and very soft and malleable. I was concerned that it wouldn’t hold up to heat if I stuck it onto the body of my truck in the hot sun, so I researched hard resin.

I found a kit on Amazon, and it only took a couple of days to get here. For the first pour, I tried was following the directions with a 1-1 ratio of the two components. The pour went fine, and after a few days of curing the final peace was very hard, to the point of being brittle. So much so that I wound up cracking off the D and U in the middle of filing it down.

I then mixed up another batch at a 3/4-1 ratio. This yielded a good final piece, but with a lot more malleability than I wanted, and the mold was really showing the wear and tear—there was a lot of dremel and trimming work required to make it look decent.

This week I came back to the project and restarted by pouring a new silicone mold. I was more careful about how I prepared everything and only poured as much silicone as I needed. After letting that cure for two days, I carefully removed the 3D print from the silicone, making sure not to cut out any detail, and came away with a cleaner, more intact mold to work from.

Using the second resin, I poured a 1-1 mixture and then added a little bit of the base to give it a slight amount of flexibility. Curing it overnight on a heating pad, I pulled it from the mold this morning and was very pleased with the results. There’s a lot more detail in this final piece, I had to do a lot less trimming and will barely need to do any Dremel work to clean it up. Basically, all that’s going to need is some light sanding, and if it hardens as it cures with a little bit of flexibility, this should be good to go.

So the next step, if this new piece works, will be to pour a few more, trying to make sure I fill the comma and period on the bottom. Then I can use some 3M auto adhesive tape to stick them onto each of the trucks.

Interesting. I guess all good things come around again.

“After more than 120 years, we are choosing to return to our roots as International,” said Tobias Glitterstam, chief strategy and transformation officer.

[Incorrect curly quotes are taken directly from the website.]

As the employee of an NGO for over 10 years, I am so sick of the word transformation and all of its variants.

I can see the bones of the old International logo here in this new one, but somebody decided they needed to get clever with the A and the N, moving from a traditional grotesk typeface to something with a more “modern” look. I’m not completely opposed to it, but I think it’s going to be dated in 10 years.

I’ve been working quietly away on some Scout II designs for the Threadless store. Once I got the basic pattern down it’s been relatively simple to add variants, so there are three different side decal models, with additions like wagon wheels, side chrome, or a roof rack. There’s also a topless version for guys like me.

A couple of weeks ago, Bennett let the local Scout group know that there was a celebration of life scheduled for our friend Alan, and I was sure to put it on the calendar. We met up at a seafood restaurant outside of Laurel and I walked in about two minutes before him. Alan’s family had a private room set up in back and we introduced ourselves to his sister and brother in law, who were lovely and introduced us around. We were joined by John B. and his wife, and later Ray and his family stopped in; we spent the next two hours swapping stories and catching up. I met Alan’s dad and told him the story of when I first got Peer Pressure and couldn’t sort out the throttle linkage: Alan immediately contacted me to tell me the part I had was for an automatic, and sent me the correct part that week. I said that only Alan would know that, and only Alan would have the part sitting in his stash. His dad seemed to appreciate that story, because he got a little misty. On the wall behind us a slideshow was playing, full of pictures from his early life and a bunch of scouting adventures. There were a few pictures where we realized that several of the subjects were gone, and that was a little sobering. We’re not getting any younger.

As usual, the Scout guys were the last to leave. I said my goodbyes and fired up the truck; the heat blew warm and the engine was full of life. I said some quiet thanks to the Sky Pilot and pointed toward home.

Spurred on by an Instagram post by another Scouter/designer, I got off my ass on Tuesday and finished building out a set of Scout II grille designs I started sometime last year. I put them up on Wednesday and got the highest number of likes on any post all year. It hasn’t translated to millions yet, but I’m hopeful that when I post the second set—Scout 80/800 grilles—I’ll get some more eyeballs, and maybe some more sales.

I saw this picture in a series from a parts truck listing online and grabbed it. The typeface is perfect; everything about this is perfect, except for the extra apostrophe.

 

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A post shared by Bill Dugan (@idiotking) on Aug 17, 2019 at 7:06pm PDT

Two years ago, I designed a shirt using the face of the transfer case shift knob, and thought about printing some T-shirts to sell. I had a test print made and wore it to Nationals last year. A Scout vendor who attended the same show released a version of that shirt on their Instagram feed this spring. I’d also designed a series showing the grille faces from all iterations of the Scout II and set it aside because…life; they released a similar T-shirt design this summer.

For some reason, this really got to me. I should be making some money on my ideas. Several things were holding me back: I didn’t have anyplace to host the designs (I didn’t want them on my personal sites), I’m wary of the copyright issues around the IH trademark, and I didn’t want to be seen as a copycat. But it stuck in my craw.

The other night I saw a post by another Scout owner in Austin selling her own T-shirt designs and decided I just needed to pull the trigger: if they can do it so can I, and I figure my designs will look better. I bought the domain Oldlinestatebinders.com for $7 and I’ll be using that for a website and an Instagram feed, and I’ll use one of the T-shirt fulfillment vendors online for a while and see how things go. So far I’ve got the 4-wheel drive design, the T-19 shift pattern, the Oldlinestatebinders logo, and a series of grille designs almost ready to go. I figure some careful social media work might generate a little extra cash.

So Tesla unveiled their Cybertruck last night, to the resounding shock of, well, pretty much everybody. While the specs sound fantastic (more towing capacity than a F150, better ground clearance, etc.) the whole thing is wrapped up in a body that looks like lousy origami or a first-year automotive design student’s initial study. When compared to the graceful curves of the Model S or 3, this looks unfinished. And there are practical considerations ignored that look like they never studied how real people use real trucks: that tailgate will be rendered useless after one trip to the Home Depot.

And what a terrible fucking name.