Brass Archive

Orrery (kit?) from Japan

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I am not quite sure what is going on here, but as near as I can tell this is an offer for a beautiful brass orrery kit. An orrery is a mechanical simulacrum of the Solar System with clockwork designed such that the planets of the orrery move in

Whitechapel Ltd.

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No, not that Whitechapel! Whitechapel Ltd. is a supplier of an incredible variety of brass hardware, findings, and finials.  They have just about anything you can imagine that is cast from brass. Prices range from a few dollars each for the feet I used on the Victorian all-in-one to

Lyra’s Lamp

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We have a new puppy in the house, and while this is a wonderful thing in general, it means I sometimes have to get up in the middle of the night to let him out.  The problem is I don't have a bedside lamp so I end up stumbling

Finds: Brass Lanterns

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Found this pair of brass lanterns on my way to work yesterday – I used the old "shoelace tie" trick to carry them with me on my bike. It absolutely kills me how many of these I have in my collection – close to 20 now, I think.  Invariably

Jules Vernian Analog Synthesizer

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It makes me happy when people write me about things they’ve made, and when they’ve been inspired or have adopted techniques they’ve learned from the Steampunk Workshop it makes me very happy indeed! Peter wrote me a while back with some pictures of his latest project, a Jules Verne

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

Electrolytic Machining of Brass – Part II:

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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.

Electrolytic Machining of Brass, a Clockwork Trilobite

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I have been having great success etching brass plate with a solution of copper sulfate and an electrical current.  The depth, quality, and speed of the etchings have been quite controllable and it seemed to me that I might be able to etch completely through a piece of brass.  This capability

Swing-arm Kerosene Wall Lamp

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Here’s another real quick project, the two donor lamps are below, both came from our town dump this past weekend.  This will be my first lamp with a glass font.  Furthermore, this font has a hole in the bottom so I will be making liberal use of the non-traditional

Brass Kerosene Sconce Lamp

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This is a lamp for my bus conversion project, most likely it will go in the bathroom. Total project time was about an hour.   Above you’ll see one of the donor lamps, this lamp contributed one of it’s arms.  The other parts you see laid out above and