Part two in my foundry furnace project, click through for more details.

[Yes, I do have a Persian rug in my workshop. What of it?]

This past Monday I finally got started on my foundry project!  I've been collecting material for some time so I was ready to roll once Maker Faire '09 concluded.  The goal is to built a foundry furnace capable of melting brass and perhape iron, if I'm lucky.  

I'm using Dave Gingery's Building a Gas Fired Crucible Furnace as a general guide, but I intend to fuel my furnace with gasoline and waste oil (both veggie and motor) rather than propane (that would be far too easy!).  The main reason for the use of this dangerous fuel is to gain experience with petrol burners for application in a future steam car project.

More after the cut . . . 

A Steampunk guitar amp to go with the Steampunk Strat!

I just finished this project for Nathaniel Johnstone of Abney Park and you will get to see its debut with Nathan and several other musicians and performers including the Deshret Dance Company at the Carnivale Mechanique at this year's Maker Faire!  

Meredith and I will be there as well and I'll be presenting the Wimshurst Machine project I built for Make: Magazine volume #17 and giving a talk on the main stage.  Rich "Datamancer" Nagy will be there along with Bay Area artist Suzanne Forbes, editors Libby Bulloff and Magpie Ratt of Steampunk Magazine and a panoply of Steampunk artifacts that you can make your very own from the Etsy SteamTeam!

All at the Carnivale Mechanique! Look for us by the West Gate.

. . . and Click on through for the full amplifier build log . . . 

This thing is amazing, but seeing as how this is a family-friendly website, I have the full post over at my personal blog, ladycartoonist.com.

I started this project quite some time ago, in fact some of you may have seen it at Maker Faire back in May.  Originally, this was intended to be an example of 'how to steampunkify an object.'  The idea being that by removing the casing and exposing the interesting insides of the phone you can make it more exciting and attractive.

I guess it kind of worked, but to be honest I'm not that pleased with the results.  In any case, it will make a fine telephone for the workshop.

. . .

Oh hey! I just came across this video from TechieDiva where Nathaniel Johnstone from Abney Park shows off my phone at Maker Faire - what's so cool is that he gets it just right and this video was likely filmed with in hours of the time when Nathan and I first met in person!

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 across the bedroom to turn on the overhead lamp so I can find the leash as well as my robe and shoes. Needless to say this does not please The Lady. So, my next project had to be a new bedside lamp.

Like most of my lamp projects this one started with a visit to the junk bins.  At right you see part of an antique student lamp I rescued from the metal recycling bin before the ban on picking at our local dump went into effect.  It's quite nicely made, but this is all I was able to retrieve.  The other parts are from various more mundane fixtures and the bulb at left is a reproduction Aerolux glow lamp. 

. . .

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]

Like towels, a hard-cover sketchbook is a most wholly useful object to have-  they're good for killing obnoxious mosquitoes, trapping bits of paper and tickets in a single place (and not in the laundry), keeping track of who has offered you a couch and a hot meal, impromptu tables...the list goes on. Plus, you can draw in them.

Selecting a sketchbook/journal is a sensitive thing. I can spend many hours in an art store pouring over the book minutia. This time, I got out in about 2 hours after selecting a plain, black-leather bound sketchbook.However, the sketchbook industry hasn't quite caught up with my tastes in book dressings (do I want them to, really?).

..and we can't have the co-senior sub-editor of SteampunkWorkshop.com running around with a new looking book, now can we?

No, we can not.

More photos and construction info after the jump.

The plan, or at least, what I had been calling a plan, pretty much had ended here: the three metal parts had been designed and cut, with great thanks to the water-jet friend.  They fit together, but really weren't a machine, yet- rough and already rusty, it was time to figure out how to make this thing go.

Under the jump is the full story. I generally don't like jumps, but I figure it would be best not to completely bump my boss off the front page of his own site.

(image: Espie eyes up the cam follower)

I'll say right now where my machine expertise lies: old, beated down, barely working things that I can fix or at least mutate into some other whirling, spinning thing. Bicycles, covered in grease, hacked apart and put back together. Old Volkswagens. Unidentifiable hunks of wires and gears. Ethereal computer magic-box art making? Not so much.

When it comes to 2D art, I seldom work in the computer. If at all, I work only in photoshop, which i am rather good at. But never illustrator.

So when I had this idea of using rapid prototyping machines to make MY machine, I was simultaneously excited and dreading the point where i would have to be working on the computer. Im a ink flinger, a grease monkey, a wrench head- not a mouse jockey. Or a tablet jockey, in this case.

(image: the completed cam follower, with the cam. They rust like this about 5 seconds out of the waterjet)

More behind the jump- go on, read it. Everyone is doing it.