Bruce writes:

Hi Jake,

Attached are a couple current images of my 20 sector Wimshurst machine based on your construction article, with changes made as needed to suit locally available materials and to resolve some issues that showed up after the initial construction. 

Click through to the full set of pictures, this is a very elegant machine and some of Bruce's innovations make it superior to my own!

Another Wimshurst Machine is finished! This is the third complete one I've seen and one of at least half a dozen in process.  If you're working on a Wimshurst by all means send along some photos!

I am fascinated by the individual modification to the basic design people are coming up with.  Rick, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Maker Faire 2009, used a second set of closet pole hangers for the tops of his Leyden jars which I'm sure made the electrode supports significantly sturdier than mine.  I also really like his use of copper instead of aluminum for the sectors.  Great work! (Click through for a bigger picture)

 UPDATE: Plans for my Wimshurst Machine are now available here!

Hi Everyone!

I had the distinct pleasure of joining Mark Frauenfelder and Gareth Branwyn of Make: Magazine for the first ever Make:Talk live on Friday at 12 noon PST!

We talked about Make: #17 - The Lost Knowledge Issue:

MAKE Volume 17 goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene, makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations.

Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine, an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts, a "Florentine Flask" siphon coffee brewer, and a tea cup-powered Stirling Engine. The section will also cover watchmaking, letterpress, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th century technologies.

Our guest is Gareth Branwyn, who edited this volume's special section. We'll also talk with Jake von Slatt, creator of the Victorian-era Wimshurst Spark Generator that appears on the cover of our current issue.

More information is here and you can listen via the widget on this page.

UPDATE: Plans for my Wimshurst Machine are now available here!

Look what I found in my mailbox today!

Sometime during Maker Faire last year Gareth Branwyn mentioned to me that he would be editing a "Lost Knowledge" issue of Make: Magazine and that I should consider writing an article. Of course, I immediately replied: "Dude! count me in!"

UPDATE: Plans for my Wimshurst Machine are now available here!

My profile is finally up at Makezine.tv! I had a wonderful (though slightly grueling) time taping this segment with Emily Goldberg and her crew back in August. We were extremely lucky that a whole bunch of things all seemed to happen at once and we were able to pack a huge amount into the segment! I particularly want to thank the Steampunks from The Mass_Steam LJ Community who drove out to the Groton Public Library to see my talk there and to do interviews with Make:TV - you guys totally make the piece!  I also want to thank two of the most awesome people I have ever met, Holly and Matt of H U M A N W I N E  who you see perform at the end of the segment. Now watch!

Just three more days until Episode 103 featuring the Steampunk Workshop!

Make:TV first contacted me nearly two years ago to talk about doing a segment in and around my bus project.  I was enthusiastic, but after a couple of months of emailing back and forth, the producers I had been talking too stopped responding.  It was a bit of a mystery until Maker Faire last year where I had the delightful experience of being seated across from Dale Dougherty at breakfast!  Dale turns out to be a friendly and interesting chap who I very much enjoyed talking with - but be warned if you engage with Dale you WILL walk away from that conversation with action items regardless of whether or not you work for his organization!  ;-)

So, it seems that the original incarnation of Make:TV was to be produced by a company that does a lot of video for cable and they were very much more interested in un-making then Making, and by that I mean blowing stuff up.  The O'Reilly organization deserves HUGE props for pulling the plug and rebooting the show with Twin Cities Public Television. Speaking of TPT; what a wonderful group of folks!  I met the executive producer Richard Hudson, at a meet-and-greet for Public Television buyers at our local PBS station WGBH, and found him to be a very sharp guy with a Maker's soul. In fact, everyone I've met from TPT has been just exactly the sort that you would love to have tell your story.

Make:TV is airing on many PBS stations already and will air on even more (include our own WGBH) in a few months.  In the meantime you can watch it at the Make:TV website, iTunes, and on YouTube.

Here's a dead simple cell phone charging station I installed next to our main entrance.  It's just a pair of hangers of the sort you'd use in the garage to store a shovel or a rake.  If your wall isn't made of barn-board like ours, you can screw the hangers into a block of wood and use regular drywall anchors to attach it.

[Bigger pics behind the cut]

Make:TV is going to be so awesome!

Continuing the tale of my long and busy weekend . . .

So a crew from PBS's new show Make:TV spent the weekend with me in the shop filming me at work.  I re-created a couple of projects and made a coach lamp for the car, start to finish.  That turned out to be really hard as I was creating from scrap brass and found objects a whole new piece that needed to be completed while the crew was still there.

When Make:TV was blocking out the schedule for their visit to Boston they asked me if there were more 'steampunk' people in the area doing big projects.  I pointed them in the direction of M@ (Matt) and Holly and HUMANWINE.

. . .