Wandering through the industrial neighborhood of West Oakland, You'll find more than a few warehouse art studios, each one filled to the brim with all manner of projects; from giant robots to huge metal art - and of course steam machines.

A few days ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited into the studio of one of the artists that reside there; a fine chap by the name of Tom Sepe. After sending out a call for willing subjects (aka, interview-ees), Tom contacted me and, with but a few words, lured me into his studio. Those words were simply: "Want to come see my electric-steam hybrid motorcycle?". He calls it the Whirlygig Emoto.

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.