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My little Steampunk hobby continues
May 28, 2008 by Adam in Adam's Projects
 My little Steampunk hobby continues. I decided to do something a bit more practical, buying some nice glass jars for my bathroom, painting the tops, and putting fun labels on them.
For the less scientific among you, "Follicle Restraining Gelatine" is hair gel and "Photonic Resistance Cream" is sunscreen. They're way more cool with the new names, though.
Jamie did the calligraphy, which I'm hoping is a sign of acceptance, if not actual enthusiasm. She hardly complained about my paper aging via soaking in tea bags.
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I'm going to declare the Audioscope finished
May 26, 2008 by Adam in Adam's Projects
 I'm going to declare the Audioscope finished. As with most of my hardware projects, there's a comedy of errors that resulted in me having to redo things again. I'd fix one issue, only to have another pop up. The most recent was that one of the speakers stopped working due to a broken connection when I bent the headphone wire to make the mp3 player fit. I also lost one of my fake rivets from the front part.
Still, a bit of soldering and glue later, everything seems to work and it looks appropriately Steampunkish. The speakers aren't as loud as I want, but I'm quite happy with the paint job on the mp3 player. That went fast and worked the best of all my experiments.
It might be fun to do another Steampunk project, but I think I'd stick to something simpler and practical. On the plus side, my office got cleaned up and looks very nice. I really like the dark wood and bare metal look. Plus it helped that I made Sam move all his Legos and other stuff.
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My little Steampunk MP3 player continues to c...
May 18, 2008 by Adam in Adam's Projects
 My little Steampunk MP3 player continues to come along nicely. I discovered some great gold/brass spray paint that we had. I love the way it looks and it was pretty easy to apply. The hard part was carefully disassembling the plastic case so I didn't break anything horribly. After that I masked off the plastic screen and sprayed away.
I took some black paint, diluted it, and smeared it around to give it the "aged metal" look. Later I took some tinfoil to make the faceplate, sprayed it, and glued it on. To complete the look, I cut the tops off tiny brass nails and glued them on as rivets.
I'd like to add some lettering to the buttons to the right. If I can find some good stamps, I'll probably write on them with a Sharpie and then apply it that way. There's some crazier techniques that involve printing from a computer onto plastic, and then applying that before the ink dries. I'll probably try that as a last resort.
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I'm getting a little obsessive about my Audio...
May 15, 2008 by Adam in Adam's Projects
 I'm getting a little obsessive about my Audioscope thingie. I had forgotten about how much time hardware takes and what a big mess it makes.
The speakers are glued in and work fine. If you close the box, it looks and works great. Yesterday I added a light that turns on when you open it. I had it working and looking great, and then this morning it mysteriously stopped working. Now I've got to go through and trace the connections to figure out which is bad.
Sam keeps giving me high praise for my contraption, though, which helps me carry on.
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For those of you who don't follow every obscu...
May 12, 2008 by Adam in Adam's Projects
 For those of you who don't follow every obscure subculture, you might want to familiarize yourself with steampunk. It's basically a romantic combination of Victorian style with modern technology, or at least what high technology might have been like. It goes nicely with my obsessions about antiques and period furniture. Without even thinking about it, I suppose my brass and wood computer is an early version of steampunk.
I woke up at four this morning, with an unsleeping Emma. I wasn't able to get back to bed as I lay next to her, so I dreamed up this wacky device called an Audioscope. It's basically a modern music box, with tiny speakers hooked up to an mp3 player in its heart.
It works, in the sense that it plays music, but it still needs a bit more fiddling. The speakers have to be screwed in. I have a cool light that causes a tube full of fluorescent dye to glow, but it's not hooked in. I'd like to make the mp3 player itself less plastic looking, perhaps covering it in leather.
Sam thinks it's immensely cool and even Jamie hasn't made her usual level of fun of my little obsession. Hopefully it'll work out and be a vaguely practical art object.
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