On Saturday May 3, Cap'n Robert of Abney Park, Libby Bulloff of SteamPunk Magazine and I will be on  The Heather Gold Show which will be streamed live from the main stage at Maker Faire.  From Heather's site:

The inexorable march of technology has rendered my 4:3 aspect ratio 19" LCD mod and my pump-less water cooled PC obsolete, so when I saw a 24" wide screen monitor on sale for $299.00 I grabbed it with the intent on making a Steampunk All-in-One PC.

I am happy to announce that The Steampunk Workshop will be making a grand appearance at this years Maker Faire! For those of you not acquainted with it; "Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things." Make magazine, sponsor of the event, has been very kind to SPWS and given us a space to create for you what we have named the Contraptors Lounge. It will be a space for Steampunk Makers, admirers, and the unaffiliated or uninitiated to meet, greet, fraternize, and otherwise hobnob with each other and us as well as see some awesome projects!

Appearing at the lounge will be the inimitable Datamancer (of steampunk laptop fame), The Legion Fantastique, Magpie and Libby Bulloff of Steampunk Magazine, Molly 'Porkshanks' Friedrich - whose work has been featured here on SPWS - as well as a several other travellers and Makers including yours truly, Meredith Scheff, and our esteemed proprietor Jake von Slatt.

Maker Faire is held in San Mateo, Ca, on the weekend of May 3rd and 4th. In addition to our humble encampment, there will be all manner of machinery, crafts, lectures, thing-a-ma-bobs, whatchamajigs, and whosawatsits to peruse at your leisure. In other words, if at all humanly possible, you should drag your bustled bootie out there and have yourself one hell of a good time!

So you probably all saw Merlin Mann's Steampunk DIY video blog monologue on Boing Boing yesterday, well I thought he was being a little bit mean and I happen to know a couple of things about the future of SteamPunk . . .

Work on the Steampunk car continues.  Here I remove the rotted seats and mildewed interior. Rebuild and rewire the dash as well as replace the VW tail lights with reproduction Model A lamps.

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 at all so I put my books down on the floor and started flipping through the coffee table books on display. The book I chose to pick up first was titled Rolling Homes - Handmade House on Wheels by Jane Lidz. Thus the seed was planted.

This project was first published on vonslatt.com but I recently put together this video so I thought I'd collect some of the best images from the original build log and re-publish it here since was really the first  steampunkish project I did.

Here is a brief summary of the construction of my school bus RV. Most of this images were originally publish at www.vonslatt.com.

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 seeing advertisements for the kits in the back of Popular Science magazine when I was younger and thinking they looked pretty cool. I later came to realize their intrinsic cheesiness; but that makes them all the more hackable as I won't be getting email from all over hell-and-gone telling me I've ruined a collectible car!

If you've visited here before you know that one of my long term projects is to built a fully road-able steam powered automobile.  In addition to requiring a great deal of research, such a project requires tools.  I will need machine tools such as a lathe and a milling machine.  I'll also need a flat bed trailer, initially to bring home the machine tools, but also to fetch the donor car that I'll base my vehicle on.