A quick peek into the lab…

Here’s a sneak peek at the latest dementia to come from the lab of Ævil Mike… (Oh great, I’m talking about myself in the third person, that’s never good) The Dimensional Analysis Engine. Following in the footsteps of “The Dream”, this creepy piece of steampunk art explores the fusion of biology and machinery.

I really wanted to have this piece finished in time to send to Dr. Grymm for the Steampunk Bizarre last year, but things just weren’t going my way time-wise, so I decided not to rush it and just finish it at a more natural pace. Well, now I’ve got another show coming up in Vermont in a few months at the Shelburne Museum, and I want to send this along for that show, so it’s time to get cranking!

This photo just shows the top in a semi-finished state. The major soldering is done, and now it’s time to replace the ‘stunt’ skulls with the really-nice-far-more-realistic ones I bought recently, and begin to add the smaller pipes, wires, and such that will bring the piece to life. This piece will have it’s own base, which in itself will be very elaborate, with lots of tubing, etc.. Overall the piece stands almost 6 feet tall. I believe I will build it so the top can be removed to make moving and shipping easier.

The green glass globe on the top is a plasma ball, and when it’s turned on, it glows with a creepy orange glow.. I’m super-excited to see this piece come to life over the next couple months, and I’m sure I’ll be posting more photos as it progresses!

Stay Ævil…
Mike

It’s getting Steamy in Here!

Here are the speakers I built to match the Steam Amp. I originally had planned to build the rear chambers out of clear glass domes, but all of the glass domes I could find were a bit on the thin side for me, and I was nervous of them breaking. I then decided on Acrylic tubes, but eventually landed on just building copper cans. All in all I’m pretty happy with the end result, but I can’t seem to shake the desire to see them built from some clear material with some inner-workings in there showing through.. maybe next time! I’m not nearly finished chasing the rabbit down the audio hole, so there will be many more amps as well as speakers to go with them in the future.

My only regret with these is that of driver choice. I used these drivers because they look like they’re made of copper. They look really cool, but are certainly not Hi-Fi drivers by any stretch. They can’t come close to doing justice to the quality of the sound coming from the tube amp they’re connected to. That being said… they sound pretty darned good considering they’re 4-inch, full-range drivers in a copper can, and they do get quite loud, which earns them points in the drunken party arena.

My next speaker project will be a true audiophile dream-build, if all goes according to plan. Of course they’ll cost an order of magnitude more to build, but you have to sacrifice for your art, right?

These pieces are on their way to Connecticut as I’m typing this to be shown in the Steampunk Bizarre 2011 show. I hope everyone likes them! I had a blast building ‘em.

Cheers!
Mike

Go ahead and get your Blue Ball jokes out of the way right now.

Here’s a little something I threw together from scraps one day. It’s just a copper fitting soldered to a round copper disk with a coil of 6 gauge copper wire wrapped around it. A wooden base from the center of the Boiler Speakers front panel, a 1 watt UV LED, a Quartz ball, and VOILA!… a.. um… thing-a-ma-jiggy.

This is a cool little thing that you just plug in and sit on a shelf.. it glows with blacklight goodness, and that’s enough for me!

Get your goggles ready!

I tell you.. when Dr. Grymm contacted me last year about this show, I thought.. GREAT! Cool! I can get all sorts of good stuff built by then! Well, as fate would have it, I did manage to finish up two rather cool pieces in that time, the Aether Reactor, and the Steam Amp. Not nearly the huge push I’d hoped for, but I’ll take what I can get at this point. I started a really awesome piece with the intention of getting it finished in time for the show, but that just didn’t happen, which is unfortunate because it really fits the theme of this year’s event. That’s OK though, I really hate rushing through things, and I’d rather not send work that’s half-ass.

As it is, I’m sending 4 pieces to this event: Oculus, The Dream, The Steam Amp with speakers (photos coming very soon), and the little Aether Ball gizzy (Photos also on the way). I REALLY wanted to send the Aether Reactor, but when I found out how much it would cost to freight that piece to Connecticut from Key West, I had a hard decision to make.. get that piece out there so people could see it, or eat for the next month.. haha. Needless to say, my stomach won that battle.

I had a frantic month of final prep to get the pieces ready. The Steam amp was finished, but I’d only built one of the speakers for it, so the second one was a crash build.. many a long night ensued to make that project come together, and many a brain cell was damaged from over-indulgance in dark rum, but all for a good cause.

I really hope I can manage to get up to Connecticut for this event before it ends in January! I’m very excited to have my pieces in this show; it’s the first time they’ve ever been shown publicly! Who knows, I may even get really lucky and sell one so I can fund some more projects.. copper definitely ain’t cheap!

Photos of the Boiler Speakers and the Aether Ball are forthcoming. Also look for an actual Copeprsteam Labs website to be up in the next couple weeks. Don’t worry, this blog will still be accessible from the main page… I just need to get a more polished presence up on the web for my work.

For more info on the show, etc.. please visit:
Dr. Grymm Loboratories
The Mark Twain House & Museum

Until next time, Cheers!

Mike

Here’s a few final shots of that skull I made for my friend John’s motorscooter a while back.

Anyways

This is my latest project, a tube amplifier (or valve amp if you’re a brit). I’ve always wanted to build a tube amp, and it’s been a long road to get here. I think I began this obsession almost two years ago, but just haven’t had the chance to get to it until now. What I really want to do is build a HUUUUUGE direct-wired tube amp, but I figured it’s probably wise to start small with new things.

This is a simple kit to build that I bought from Tube Depot. It’s an 8 watt stereo job, the K-12G model. It wasn’t too terribly expensive either, and considering how freaking amazing it sounds, I’d say it’s well worth the money. Of course the kit didn’t come with a case, so I built my own.. that’s half the fun right!?

I won’t bore everyone with too many details, I think the photos are pretty self explanatory, but a few little notes:

It took perhaps an hour to construct the kit, anyone with a little soldering experience could build this thing. I mounted all the components other than the tube sockets on the underside of the board so I could mount it to the underside of the 1/8″ copper plate.

I actually broke down and bought a full set of forstner wood bits for this project. They are pure bliss, I highly recommend them if you like clean holes in your wood. Also I bought metal knock-out punches for making nice holes in metal, no way you’re getting holes that large in metal that thick without them.. well worth the money.

The glowey-rods in the round glass window are 1/4″ blue ultra violet acrylic. I bought a 6 foot length of the stuff on line for about 10 bucks I think, it really lights up with the UV LED’s I put under each one. It’s a very cool effect. God I love black light.

The LED’s run off a separate transformer attached underneath. It was a sony power brick type, and a very stable 12 volts I might have to pick up a few more of those, as most 12v wall warts actually put out between 13 and 15 volts.. you can seriously tax your LED’s unless you adjust your resistance accordingly. My LED’s had the resisters and leads pre-soldered, so I needed to make sure I wasn’t over 12v.

I’m building speakers to go with this, they hopefully will be done soon, and of course I’ll post pix here when they are.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop a line!

Cheers,
Aevil

This isn’t really steampunk…

But it’s cool so I figured I’d post it here anyways. Maybe it’s Dieselpunk.. who knows. At any rate almost a year and a half ago my friend John asked me if I would sculpt a skull onto his motorcycle fender for him. Sure! No problem! Of course like most things I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into.

It’s was a long, long journey, but I have to admit it was close to 9 months before I actually started on this project from the time he gave me the fender, so all in all I’d say I spent 6 months start to finish on this thing. I’m happy it’s done now because it means I can go back to creating my evil steampunk creations, which is where my true bliss lies.

It all started with a mold of the fender

Plaster bandage fender mold	Plaster of Paris in the mold	Peeling the bandages off

I started by building a plaster positive of the fender to sculpt the skull on. I wrapped the fender in saran wrap and built up a few layers of plaster bandages. When they set up, I popped it off the fender and used more bandages to close off the open back side of the mold, then filled the mold with Plaster of Paris. I built it up to a thickness of about an inch and a half. When it was all set up, I peeled the bandages off and gave it a light scuff with some sandpaper to clean it up a bit. A couple of coats of clear lacquer to seal it and it was ready for the clay!

The finished plaster fender	Finished clay sculpture	BOO!

The next stage involved lots of cussing and drinking as the form of the skull took shape in the clay. I used Roma Plastilina clay #2 because it never dries out, and good thing too.. I think I spent close to three months total before I was happy with the sculpture. I’d work on it.. let it sit for a week or so, then change it.. let it sit.. then change it again..

The mold wall in place	Brushing on the silicone	Silicone mold material in place

When I finally had the sculpture where I wanted it, I built up a mold wall around it and poured silicone mold material all over it. Fun stuff silicone.. and well worth the investment if you need to pull a rigid final positive.

Fiberglass outer shell	Dig that clay outta there!	Ready for fiberglass

When the silicone was set up the next day, I covered it with a layer of fiberglass. When that was set up, I popped the whole shebang off the plaster fender and dug the clay out of the mold.. voila! Almost done! NOT!

The first gel-coat	Finally fiberglass!	First shaping

Finally I was getting somewhere.. I broke out the fiberglass again and poured a couple gell coats into the mold before building up about 4 layers of fiberglass cloth inside the mold. After that long, tedious, messy process I finally pulled a finished fiberglass positive from the mold.. now on to the fitting phase.

Fitting to a fiberglass base	View from the bottom	Ready to Attach!

I sanded, trimmed, and sanded some more until the fiberglass matched the curve of the fender as good as it was going to, then covered the fender with saran wrap once again and put a layer of fiberglass cloth over it to ‘seat’ the skull to the curvature. I wanted as much ‘purchase’ area as possible when I glued the skull to the fender, and setting the skull into a layer of fiberglass wrapped around the fender allowed me to build a good inch of surface area under the skull to get a good glue joint. I trimmed and sanded some more, and built up the fiberglass inside the skull to mate it to the new base. Then came the moment of truth.. time to really attach it.

And it’s glued on finally	Final sanding begins	Filler, primer, filler, primer

I got out the fiberglass for what I hoped would be the last time, and slathered it on the fender, then plopped the skull home and held it in place ’till it set up. Then it was time for sanding, sanding, sanding. I used an automotive high-build sanding primer, and spot putty to finish out the transition between the fiberglass and the fender. I ran a small wire through the hole in the fender and through one eye hole on the skull before gluing it down, so I could pull an electrical wire through for the lights later on.

Final spot putty coat	And there it is, eyes aglow!	From the side

After days of sanding, puttying, sanding, priming, sanding, ad nauseum, it was finished. I fished a wire through the skull, wired the LED’s for the lights and popped them into their holes! AHHHHH… finally done. Now I’ll ship it to John and he’ll take it to someone to get painted. I can’t wait to see the final product. I’ll post a photo or two here when I get some.

This was a really fun project, but I have to say never again.. haha. The next post will be more steampunk, I promise!

Mike

A couple final shots of the SteamHat.

I am for the most part happy with this project. However, there are many things I wish that I’d had time to do better. I’d like to have more going on inside the portholes, I’d like to have cleaner solder joints, and perhaps some small tubing running along the outside between the ports.. Just more detail in general. Unfortunately the timeline I assigned myself didn’t allow for all of that. I’m planning on building a V.2 SteamHat in the future, and hopefully I can address all of my nit-picky issues then. But all in all.. not bad for a couple weeks of harried construction.

I’d never built anything meant to be worn before. But Halloween was on it’s way and I had a grand vision of a costume in my head. A steampunk airship pirate! ARRRRRrrr!  The costume in my head is far more involved than just a hat, and I knew it would probably take me a few years to get all the pieces together, but you have to start somewhere, right? Might as well start at the top..

I began with a victorian top hat from the village hat shop, a cool online store that sells all sorts of neat hats. My head is rather large (7 1/2 hat size) and I wanted to be able to wear a bandanna on my head under this thing so I bought the 7 5/8 size hat. After seeing how big it was on my head when I got it in the mail, I probably should have just ordered the correct size, but eh.. it was too late to send it back and get another in time to finish this project before Halloween, so I just forged on.

The victim, er patient before surgery	Paper hat band	Transfered pattern to copper

I removed the satin band from around the hat and wrapped a strip of paper around the hat so I could get the correct curvature and shape for the copper band. After a lot of fussing about, measuring, trimming, etc.. I had a paper shape that fit snugly around the hat, and conformed to the slight rise around the brim from front to back. I traced this shape onto my copper sheet and cut it out with my trusty tin-snips.

Copper hat band	Beginning to take shape!	The clasp

After hammering flat and filing down the edges to smooth them out a bit, I began shaping the copper band into  a circle. When I had it to the correct shape I built a clasp out of some more copper sheet that would let me snug the band to the hat with a couple 1/4-20 brass bolts. I soldered this clasp to the ends of the band, and had a small victory jig since I had managed to NOT burn the hat or myself with the blow torch!

The band assembled	Figuring out the porthole shapes	The porthole pattern

Once that phase was finished it was time to build the little portholes that I wanted to rim the hat. I decided on 6 of them, but in hindsight I should have stuck with just two in front considering the tight timeframe I had to put this thing together. I wound up having to skimp a bit on details just to get the thing done, and I hate doing that.

For the portholes I applied the same principle as I did for the hat band, I used paper that I shaped into a 2″ pipe and taped together. I then went about the fussy business of finding the right curvature so that the back edge of the tube would follow the multiple contours of the hat band.. what a pain, but it worked. I laid the template out on my copper sheet, traced it and trimmed out 6 of these porthole shapes.

First porthole in place!	Ready for some gears!	Adding all the little details

I formed the flat pieces into tubes, and soldered an overlap at the bottom, then soldered them to the hat band. At this point I should have pre-drilled holes in the band for the LED’s, but I wasn’t thinking and moved straight to filling my portholes with gears.

The electronic tea light	LED removed from tea light	Ready for Lenses to be soldered on!

I’d bought a box of 12 little battery powered flickering tea lights online for about a 18 bucks. I figured I’d ruin a few in the process, and I was right.. out of the 12 original lights, I wound up with just 6 that worked. Between trying to solder directly to the PC board and frying the IC, and wrestling these assemblies into place, I killed 6 of them. I was getting a bit nervous there at the end that I was going to have to scrap the lights altogether. But.. perseverance and patience paid off and I was able to attach a LED to the backside of each gear assembly inside the portholes. I ran the wires through the band and wired them all together on the backside.

As I said, I should have planned better and made better accommodations for the lights, as I had quite a time trying to drill the holes from the back side of the assembled band. Oh well.. next time I’ll know better.

I soldered the 2″ lenses in place and ran the wires through a small hole in the hat to a 2x AA battery pack glued to the inside top. I added a small switch to the circuit, and voila! Flickery Steampunk Top Hat! It really does look like there’s a small fire inside the hat.. all the LED’s flicker at different intervals, so it looks like a flame dancing about in there.. I got lucky for sure on much of this project. I was hurried and there are a great many things I’d rather have done differently, but all in all I’m pretty happy with this one. I think at some point in the future I’ll do another variation on this and really take my time and do it right.

I’ll post finished pix in the next post.

Cheers!
Mike