Tinkering Geeks: Steampunk

Yesterday's Rose, full of crazy stuff, and sales that day... apparently.

So I sat down with several fellow DC Geekers (Geekians? Geekos...) a month or so ago, drumming up some ideas for fun projects we could get in to.  We decided, hey, you know what?  It was hella fun to take things a part when we were younger.  Let's buy a bunch of stuff, take it a part and make other stuff.  Like laser guns and monster trucks.  Hmm, and what's one of the more recent nerd obsessions?  How about... ooh!  Let's make some steampunk stuff! Set a limit on the whole thing to $20 per person for the whole project.  So we took that fat sack of cash and hiked over to Yesterday's Rose in Fairfax, VA to shuffle through their stuff.  

First thoughts through my head, "Holy crap, so this store has a pretty decent selection of stuff."  Most if it not useful for this project.  But more than a few gems.  We snatched them up like Cthulhu gobbling up sanity. Nom. The main highlights are the awesome sewing machine and clock Lauren got, and the spice holder Roberto picked up.  Things looked pretty exciting from the get go.

Let's take a look at each of the projects.  By the end of the weekend we'd made good progress, but... yeah one weekend among a bunch of geeks who like hanging out with each other... We were like hyperactive ferrets taking things apart.  The rebuilding process took longer than I imagined.  Good progress, but by the end we were still working on things.  Here's the state of things.

The sewing machine was shared, but, wow, lovely guts.

1Lauren had some of the best grabs from the thrift store.  Yes, that's a brass old style clock.  It's guts were amazing.  Crazier than that, I had no idea a sewing machine had so many interesting gears, levers and such inside of it.  Before we event went to the thrift store Lauren was pretty sold on the idea of doing some sort of mask.  She used the most choice pieces from the clock combined with pieces from the sewing machine. The main focus she's going for is celestial diarama of sorts, well in mask form.  Here's what we're talking about.

The saddest part here is, I almost wanted this as.. as spice rack

Next up we have Roberto's piece. We missed out on getting a picture of one of Roberto's bigger finds.  He found this old ink jet printer the size of two bred boxes and a Pikachu.  Combining parts from that and the leavings of some of our other stuff he thought up the idea of a crazy steampunk laser rifle.  I mean, look at the spice rack, it just screams intimidating gun.  Taking a part the printer took longer than we imagined.  Next time we do this we really need to bring a more varied set of tools rather than trying to jury rig an... allen wrench of all things. By the end he had all of his pieces laid out to be joined together, I can't wait to see where it finally ends up.

I hope he writes a fanfic about someone wearing this.

When I first talked to Dave about what he was planning on doing, he spoke about building something that was  a functional device, not just a show piece.  The direction his project took was one of the bigger surprises for me.  For the most part he picked up some vintage cameras, show rack hooks, some lesser gem stones, and some fabric.  I have no idea where the idea for the end product came from, but wow.  So he decided to go with a steampunk mystic gauntlet.  The idea being the gemstones draw power unto a focusing lens that I believe will be eventually in the palm of the gauntlet.  This lens was one of the main focal units from a camera.  I really like where he decided to take this.  I have a big place in my heart for fantasy steampunk. I rather glad he spun his project in this direction.

First rejected name was CD-3PO

Let's take a look at what I went with.  From the store I had a small boombox, a large amp, and an African tribal mask.  The first day or so was me taking a part the boom box and amplifier.  What my original idea was, was to drill into the amp and install the guts from the boom box into it, to make a steampunk sort of cd playing deck.  Yeah, while I like tinkering, my abilities in taking things apart far exceed my ability to put something back together again.  That combined with the amp having NOTHING BUT FIBERGLASS on the inside didn't help.  Huge let down.  I don't know what I was expecting to find inside... gold, the one ring, or the Sword of Gryffendor.  No idea.  I didn't find it regardless.  Instead I found a porch now full of scattered fiberglass, wood chips from when I discovered the only way to that thing's guts was by hammer and sweat (although, smashing things does contain a certain degree of satisfaction :) ).  I don't know what I was smoking with the mask though.  Maybe... the top of the cd player?  Hey I like the mask.  I still do.  So given that I had the guts of a cd player, and the more I looked at it as I was taking it apart the more I thought it looked like the face of a robot.  So after a quick trip to the local hobby store I picked up some metalic paint and metal/plastic glue.  Then I grabbed the parts of the more heavy duty insides of the sewing machine and the printer.  Turns out the first Transformers movie was right, you can turn random objects into robots.  I'm very happy with the way it ended up coming out, most of the joints are mobile even after I ended up gluing the chassis and limbs to the chassis.  I may have to end up adding more wire to prevent the arms from dragging on the ground though and it still needs to be painted(copper / brass of course).  I think it's a pretty good stopping point though.

We all had a lot of fun doing this, although it's going to take a bit of work on each of our parts to really finish it up, more than half of the fun was taking things apart in the first place.  It seems to satisfy some inner childish need.  Made me giddy. We originally started this off to see if we could make steampunk pieces for under $20 in a weekend.  What we've found out is, yes we could have done that, but it wouldn't have been as much as what we ended up doing and we wouldn't have been as satisfied with where we got.  Trying to jam everything into one weekend was also a mistake most likely.  To get that done we would have had to have worked on a collaborative project or a lot less time intensive pieces.  Most important of all, we got to break things in ways that they will never recover from, and cackle while doing it.  What more can you ask for?

We're talking about having another session of our Tinkerers focused on Cyberpunk.  I want to take a lot of the lessons learned from this experience and push it into the next project.  That and... well I need to paint my robot.  I still haven't come up with a name, suggestions?