A little while back, I asked my friend, Jacob, if he would make me a crucible and some tongs for my metal casting setup. His Snap-On welder is far superior to my Home Depot Special (which claims that it can weld up to 3/16th” steel, but I think that must be in a perfect laboratory setting because it struggles with anything over 1/8″) and I didn’t want to take any chances where flesh and phalanges are at stake. He not only made me a crucible and tongs, but actually surprised me with another, taller crucible as well. These things are made from 3″ OD, 1/4″ thick pipe and are built like brick ScheißHäuser! He really did a great job on them and smoothed out all of the welds and sandblasted them so you can barely tell there is even a seam on the bottom endcaps. Here are some pics of the crucibles, tongs and my casting supply cart with my propane tank, Petro-bond sand, and the cool, heavy-duty flask I scored recently that was built in 1965 (it’s overkill for most things I’ll be casting, but I got a good deal on it)!
Thanks, Jacob!
Here’s some engraving I did recently on the LCD border for The Clacker PC I’m sure any “real” engraver would laugh at this method, but I think it’s a great trick for the hobbyist to add some eye-candy to a piece of polished metal.
(The brass still needs to be repolished in these photos)
All you do is lay a piece of sign vinyl or clear, thick packing tape onto a piece of polished metal, draw out a design, cut it with an Exacto knife, weed out the tape from any areas you want etched, then run over it with a sandblaster (I just use a Harbor Freight handheld sandblaster gun, no cabinet. Grit goes everywhere but it works).
Here’s an interview I did a little while ago for the Copper Development Association that I never got around to publicizing all that much, so I thought I’d share it here. Jake vonSlatt and his etched Ada Lovelace Altoid tins are featured as well.
Here’s something I stumbled across the other day while setting up my Youtube membership. Camille Villagonza used one of my keyboards and monitors as the inspiration for a school midterm project in 3D Studio Max. Very cool!
Don’t you hate how tool companies change the design of the batteries on their cordless power tools every 2-3 years, forcing you to buy entirely new tools because they’ve discontinued your old batteries? Yeah me too. Instead of throwing away perfectly good tools every few years, I like to save them in my scrap box for use in future projects. Power drills in particular are a great source of very strong electric motors (with transmissions) with tons of uses in robotics and hobby electronics projects. One of the things I’ve had sitting in my junk box for a while is a very small cordless circular saw that has adjustable depth and cut angle. Often in my line of work, I have a need to make very small cuts and miters on tiny moldings and other small bits of wood, so I thought it would be really cool to turn it into a mini table saw.
Click “More” for a lot more pics and build details Read more »
Hey everybody, Last week I had a film crew from Germany’s ZDF/3sat network come to the house to film a segment for Neues, a popular tech show. They wanted a day-in-the-life-of sort of approach so I took them down to my friends’ shop, Advanced Waterjet in Anaheim, to get a part cut, then brought it home and installed it on my in-progress new PC build, “The Clacker” (which should hopefully be finished and on the main site in a month or two). The devices on the table in the intro portion came from www.clockworker.de, a German steampunk blog.
To roughly paraphrase the interview portions, since I’m dubbed-over in German, in the first segment I said something similar to the text on my Computational Engine page, which is basically “Most other influential technological devices like the steam engine, radio, or television had the privilege of a “novelty period” shortly after their creation, where they were honored with ornate housings that borrowed some of the most beautiful architectural details from banks, churches, and decorative cabinetry, but the modern PC, which changed the world more than most of those inventions put together, was just stuffed into a purely functional beige cube and stuffed under a desk. I’m trying to retroactively honor the PC by giving it its day in the sun”.
In the second part, while driving down the freeway, I said, “I make most of my parts by hand, but for anything that needs a very precise fit and in particular anything that spins and needs to be perfectly centered, I have it cut on a waterjet machine”
In the third segment, in back of the Clacker projector, I can’t really make out or remember what I said, but it was probably something like, “I built a 1910s-20s Bell & Howell projector into the back of the LCD to give the impression that the projector is actually reverse-projecting the images onto the front of the screen”. Then I probably said something about design psychology and how a good design makes an artistic device look technologically feasible, and “…making it look like an actual piece of period equipment.”
I tried to shoehorn references to as many people as I could into the video but a lot of it got cut out. I shouted out Jake vonSlatt, Brass Goggles, Steampunk Magazine, and they actually shot about 5 minutes of me sitting there, listening to Vernian Process and Abney Park out of the phono horn speakers, but they cut the sound out of the shot (the scene with the visualizations on the LCD). I think you can actually hear about 2 seconds of Stigmata Martyr at the very end of the video though.
Thanks, and I hope you enjoy watching the video as much as I did making it.
-~Doc~-
Here are some quick snapshots of my new PC, “The Clacker”, named in honor of the “clacker” characters in the Bruce Sterling/William Gibson novel, The Difference Engine. I had hoped to finish this PC in time for the Oxford Steampunk show but I ran into several production delays with outsourced parts, so I sent some smaller stuff instead like the Steampunk Laptop and the Warehouse 13 Sojourner. Anywho, I don’t want to give too much away too soon, but here are some teaser pics. Enjoy!
Hello everyone, the poster below says just about everything so I won’t retype it all, but the one thing it doesn’t say is that I’ll be showing a large new project, a full PC/ LCD/ Keyboard/Mouse combo like the Archbishop….but cooler and with more spinney brass things!
Please visit http://www.steampunkmuseumexhibition.blogspot.com/ or click the image for more info and current updates.
Hello fellow tinkerers, I recently needed to rabbet a thin groove into a piece of wood to sink a piece of glass into. On a straight cut this is a very simple task that can be achieved with a table saw or router, but in this case, the groove was on a swooping, curved piece and needed to track the outside edge of the wood perfectly. Here is a simple jig I devised for the task (note: I am by no means an experienced, “pro” woodworker so there may actually be a tool out there I don’t know about to do this exact task, but this is my quick-n-dirty method using tools I already have). It’s basically a peg sticking up out of a board, but spaced an exact distance away from the router blade so that it acts as a “round fence” that will let you swing your workpiece around it in order to get into those inside and outside curves.
I watched Warehouse 13 the other night and thought the show was rather good! If I had to describe it, I guess I’d say it’s “X-Files mixed with the old Friday the 13th TV series, with a splash of Eureka”. Some of the character backgrounds were introduced a bit ham-handedly but that’s to be expected with a pilot episode. They have a very short amount of time to introduce the characters, flesh them out, lay out the general storyline of the series, weave the episode plot, show off as many props and effects as they can while still making it funny and interesting and I think they managed to strike a decent balance with it.
I’ve been overwhelmed by the positive responses from the steampunk and sci-fi community and am quite flattered by how many people were out there cheering for me. Thanks so much, everyone!
I found some great screen captures of the keyboard in action on notcot.com. Click the photo below to see the original post and some larger images.
Saul Rubinek as "Artie" using the Sojourner keyboard
Click “More” for a lot more pics and build details
