Hi guys, welcome back aboard good old Spiffy. This week is all about getting us over the finish line on our DIY 10 mm bent acrylic windows—because if we can pull this off, we’re saving roughly $15,000. After weeks of building and tuning the big 6,000 W oven, I learned the hard way that cold molds give me that annoying “cold spot” in the middle where the acrylic won’t form properly, but hot molds make the acrylic pick up every tiny surface flaw. So I attacked it from two angles: I added heating elements to the lid to heat the acrylic faster without baking the molds, and I tried sealing the plaster molds with sodium silicate to get that “glass-like” surface. Of course Captain Dum Dum showed up (I dropped a mold), so I made a new one using Hydrocal FGR95, vacuum-degassed the face coat, and reinforced the bulk with chopped fiberglass. The sodium silicate experiment was… weird: the undiluted coat looked amazing at first, then started flaking off and leaving specks. But the big win is that the top heaters worked—no more raised center line, and the acrylic captured the curvature perfectly. In between oven tests, we tackled a not-so-glamorous Athena job: replacing the head hose to the holding tank and swapping the macerator assembly (and joker valves). After a day of wrestling hoses, the flush is now at least twice as fast, and we can finally strike that item off the list. Next step: full-scale window testing, starting with the most curved middle window—because if we nail that one, the rest should be smooth sailing.