I have read a million movie reviewers telling me why Star Wars sucks but none of them mentioned that Darth Vader's helmet was asymmetrical

I'm in the part of my latest mold making/resin casting project where I start running into problems and things don't come out right and I go all crazy but I figure it out. I've learned that mold making is really tough and to do it well requires engineering talent, which isn't something that my uneducated brown trash mind has in much abundance. It's funny because the guy who sells me my supplies has this motto, "If you can bake a cake you can do resin casting". I know he said that to encourage me and keep me motivated, but holy hell I have wedding cake dreams but only a cupcake skill level.

Don't try this in space

In a nutshell, some things went wrong and I screwed up the mold and this will complicate things down the road. Describing particulars is technical and boring, but the point is I should have known how to avoid this mold design problem based on my past molding experience. It pisses me off because once I saw my mistake I had a Ben Kenobi moment where I thought, "Wait a minute. How did this happen? I'm smarter than this." It's a pain in the butt but I'm going to keep going with my crappy mold. If there's one thing I like about myself it's that I don't let notions of doing a quality job get in the way of getting crap done.

Aside from the mold design dissapointment, I've had other little OCD type aggravations throughout this project. The biggest one is the very slightly noticeable asymmetry of the tetrajet sculpt. If you look at the little spaceship head on in just the right way, you can tell it's not perfectly symmetrical. It bothers me but it's not worth starting over or quitting the project. It's hopefully not even that big of a deal and when all is said and done nobody will notice it. But in the back of my mind it really bothers me that I don't have a computer brain and robot hands and laserbeam eyes so I could do precision sculpting of my clay cartoon spaceships.

When I'm feeling bad about my limited resin casting abilities I like to think about the guys that made the Darth Vader and Stormtrooper helmets for the very first Star Wars. They used a somewhat similar process to what I use for my little figures and those first helmets had symmetry issues, too. Although I never noticed that kind of stuff as a kid and Star Wars was still a huge success, I know there was probably a costume maker who had a hard time watching Star Wars because he knew he fucked up the mold and he made Darth Vader's left eye 2 millimeters wider than the right one.


The point is that when it came time to do a Darth Vader costume for Revenge of the Sith, they didn't use the old ones that they knew were a little off. If you check out this article, seven paragraphs down they talk about how the new Darth Vader helmet was done with computers even though nobody in the audience gives a crap. I UNDERSTAND YOUR PAIN, DARTH VADER HELMET MAKER.