Steampunk Archive

Steampunk Car Project – Dashboard, Wiring, Lights

Author: | Categories: Projects, Steampunk 1 Comment
  Dashboard, Wiring, Lights This car sat out in the weather for many years, as a result the interior is shot, the side panels and carpet are terribly mildewed and the spores have been giving me a headache so I put on the powered respirator and stripped it all

Molly ‘Porkshanks’ Friedrich’s Dieselpunk Headphone Mod

Author: | Categories: Favorites, Projects, Steampunk 1 Comment
Guest artist Molly porkshanks Friedrich shows us how to update a pair of vintage headphones for use with an iPod or MP3 player. Greetings strangers and friends alike! I was emailed by Jake a little while back asking me if I would be interested in taking a turn as

A Victorian RV

Author: | Categories: Favorites, Projects, Steampunk 3 Comments
Bus Tour: In 1982 I was a sophomore at a small college in the Midwest. It was the beginning of second term and I was again standing in line at the on-campus book store waiting to pay for a too-heavy stack of text books. The line was not moving

A Victorian RV – Construction

Author: | Categories: Projects, Steampunk No comments
  Construction: Step one is the removal of all of the seats.  I invited a bunch of friends over for a mid-winter barbeque and we finished in a couple of hours.  An angle-grinder with a cut-off disk made short work of the rusted and frozen bolts and let us get the seats out

Steampunk Car Project – Initial Survey

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Late in 2007 I spotted this car on eBay with a "Buy it Now" price of $1500 and, well, bought it then.  Its a 1929 Mercedes Gazelle SSK replica made by Classic Motor Carriages. CMC made these cars in the late '70s and early '80s. In fact, I remember

Jake’s Hollywood Adventure and Etching an iPod

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OK, I was reckless. I went ahead and etched my iPod without doing extensive tests on electrolytic etching of stainless steel. But you see, I had a deadline – a flight to Los Angeles to be on television and I wanted the iPod done for the show. I began

Steampunk Flat-Panel LCD Mod

Author: | Categories: Favorites, Projects, Steampunk 3 Comments
The Steampunk Keyboard looked terribly anachronistic sitting in front of my Dell 1907FP flat panel monitor and while I hesitated to tear open a $300 monitor that was still under warrantee, art must be served.   Inside I found that the whole thing was encased in steel sheet.  I

Telegraph Clacks out RSS Feeds

Author: | Categories: Favorites, Projects, Steampunk 6 Comments
When I was a boy my father brought home from work a telegraph sounder replica kit.  He was the director of the library for a local college and the sounder kit was one of several museum quality reproductions of 19th Century technology the library had acquired.  The lovely brass

Copper Plating and Etching Altoids Tins

Author: | Categories: Art, Favorites, Projects, Steampunk 15 Comments
UPDATE: There's some great information on this page and it's comments, but I've recently published a far more comprehensive article here: Etching Tins with Salt Water and Electricity  With this project I wanted to try a number of new things: Magazine pages as cheap toner transfer media Copper electroplating Etching

Electrolytic Machining of Brass – Part II:

Author: | Categories: Art, Favorites, Projects, Steampunk No comments
After the perhaps overly optimistic attempt at electrolytic machining in Part I, I decided to try etching parts from thinner sheets of brass.  Sheet with thicknesses of .010 and .015" were chosen and I used the advanced image search feature of Google to search for black and white appropriately steampunk images.