MRX Designs

Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.4)

2012-01-01T13:52:00.001-05:00

So now that the tank assembly is finished (see part 3), I needed to attach it to the main helmet. To do that, I had to modify some brass L brackets. I bent them 90 degrees so that one side would lay flat against the cowl, and the other would stick out so that the bottles could attach to it.

I attached the L brackets to the cowl with machine screws (keeping the heads on the side of the wearer (for comfort). I was originally intending to attach the bottles with sheet metal screws from the back of the cowl straight into the bottles, but I quickly realized that was not going to be strong enough. The side of the bottle is too thin and flimsy. The neck, however, is quite stiff and strong. I cut a notch in the neck of the bottle, where the cap screws on, for the L bracket to fit into. Then I ran a small wooden dowel (a piece of a bamboo skewer) through the pre-drilled hole and coated it liberally with epoxy (but not until final assembly of course). I would then also use a sheet metal screw down at the bottom edge of the cowl into the side of the bottle. This would keep the bottles attached to the cowl and firmly held in place with minimal wiggling or flexing.

Here they are being finally assembled, after everything is painted and ready. But lets not get too far ahead of ourselves.

With the dome, the cowl and the tanks constructed, the rest is mostly little details that will make it all come together as a steampunk helmet. I got a good start on that with the details of the tank assembly, but I needed to extend that to the whole helmet. My design remained very fluid throughout the build, which is to say, that I kind of knew what I wanted to do, but didn't really have it worked out until I was piecing things together and test fitting them.

The front of the cowl (chest area) would need more than just the two tap lights I had planned for it. It needed a centerpiece, like IronMan. Something steampunk. One tap light in the center was just too lame, so I needed to design something else. What I came up with was basically just a mish-mash of parts from my plastic parts bin. It started with a piece of a twist-tie roll dispenser. It looks like a round cage, and was the perfect size for the chest. As it turns out, it was also the perfect height to fit over one of those tap lights (when disassembled).

Those gray cylinders in the pic above will also become details later on. They were made from pieces of pvc pipe with the ends capped off with chipboard. Bamboo skewers were stuck into the ends as mounting points for tubing, and one of them had some silver wire wrapped around it for effect.

Now back to the centerpiece. It's construction was a bit complicated, but once I saw the plastic cage of the twist-tie dispenser in place, I knew I had to use it. I trimmed off a few unneeded bits and painted the whole thing black. I also decided on my orientation, and filled in two of the open side sections with chipboard so that I could attach tubing to it. On the chipboard panels I glued a hex nut for the tubing to fit into. I was fortunate that the size of tubing I was using fit perfectly over a bamboo skewer and fit perfectly into a hex nut (I don't know the size). I used both of these extensively as connectors, both aesthetically and functionally. Below are some pics of me test fitting the centerpiece and some tubing. Again, I used wire coat hanger inserted into the tubing to keep its shape, and painted it copper. It had to be bent and fitted before painting, because if it was bent after painting, the paint would crack and peal off. Some lessons you learn the hard way.

I added some of this tubing in the back too. I wanted most of the systems to be connected (chest piece, tanks, box, helmet, etc). So I tried to use tubing to tie them all together, one piece running into another. Over the shoulders I ran some of that cheap corrugated tubing I mentioned earlier. I tied it down with copper plumbing straps. The straps will later be glued in place with epoxy and topped off with a fake screw head cast from resin.

You'll also notice there are now two large male adapters (pvc pipe fittings) screwed into the back of the helmet. These are where the hoses from the tanks will connect.

For the detailing of the centerpiece, I knew I wanted to incorporate that small tap light, and I wanted some color. Since the cage had open sides, I needed to close them in, and I wanted something that was translucent and would diffuse the light from the tap light, so I used a sheet of velum. I cut a strip to run around the sides (which was more difficult to fit properly than one would think it should be), and a cut disk of velum for the front. The velum was very flimsy, so I also cut a piece of clear Plexiglas for the front. To the plexi and the velum disk, I taped pieces of colored cellophane cut into wedge shapes the same size as the holes in the front of the cage. I used different colors and random spacing. There will eventually be a knob in the center that will allow the plexi

With almost all of the parts ready, I needed to do some more fine tuning of the helmet before final paint, so back to the spot putty and sanding. The original shell was so lumpy that I had no illusions of it ever being smooth, but after this (I think it was about my 7th or 8th bondo and sanding treatment) it was actually getting close.

The results were pretty inpressive after giving it one last coat of primer. I actually used a good quality primer this time, instead of cheap flat black spray paint. The results are undeniable, but I can't justify spending 5 times the amount for good primer for most projects.

Then, finally, gold spray paint for the brass finish.

The lumps and pits (much smaller now) gave it a hand hammered look that I quite like. The gold paint was too bright though. It looked fake. I softened it up with some antiquing which I accomplished by applying flat black acrylic paint and then rubbing it off with a cloth. Getting the timing right was critical. Wipe it off too soon and it would all come off, leaving no antiquing. Wipe it off too late, and too much of it would dry and not enough would come off, making it look too dirty. In a couple of spots, I had to compensate for having too much antiquing by giving it a little dry brush with gold acrylic paint to brighten it up again.

Here is a pic with the bottom half antiqued and the top half not, so you can see the contrast.

And now the whole thing. I was afraid of antiquing it at first, because I was intending it to be a "new" piece, not an old one, as the LARP it was being made for would be set in the 1880's. But after a day or too of looking at it bright gold like that, and I decided it had to be done. Now it looks more like real brass, and less like fake gold.

Now, short of final assembly, there was only one major piece that needed to be fabricated. The porthole covers. The porthole covers gave me a bit of consternation. I had to think about them for quite a while before and during construction to get them right. I started with several rings cut from chipboard. And three discs cut from clear Plexiglas.

I glued two rings together face to face to double their thickness. then I sealed them with mod podge and primed them with black spray paint. Then I gave them a very quick coat of bondo to even them out and give them a slightly harder and smoother surface. Then of course I had to sand them, and prime them again. This I did for each of the three porthole covers.

Those silver rods you see below will eventually become the cage that protects the glass. I had originally intended on using brass brazing rod for that, but since the wire mesh on my vents was chrome, I decided to stick with chrome for all the wire accents. I had to search the hardware store for the right size wire. Eventually I settled on cutting the parts I needed from those wire sign posts that people put in there yards when they have an apartment for rent or a garage sale or something. They were the right thickness, and the right stiffness, and the right color, and they were already straight pieces that would be easy to work with.

After sanding and painting my chipboard rings, I carefully glued the plexi disk in place. Then I added one more chipboard ring (also prepped with bondo and spray paint) to the top of the pile. So that makes three layers of chipboard (two on bottom, one on top) and one layer of plexiglas sandwiched together. Next I had to mask off the plexi to protect it. Then I ran more bondo around the outer edge to smooth it out and even up all the layers. Then more sanding an priming. You can see a test fit on the helmet below.

The placement of the wire cage over the porthole cover was tricky. I started by making a paper template to figure out exactly where the wires needed to go. I also had to do most of the finish painting to the rings before the wires were added. I didn't want to have to mask the wires or paint around them. I used a hammered black/grey metallic spray paint as my finish color, and then I dry brushed it with a pewter metal effect paint to make it look like blackened iron.

I had already spent a good deal of time and effort making sure each of the wire pieces was cut and bent to the exact same length. Each piece was bent at 90 degrees on each end to make it stand out from the plexi. These bent tabs would be inserted into holes drilled through the flange (outer ring). I used a small drill press to drill the holes because they needed to be perfectly placed, perfectly straight, and all the exact same depth (I didn't want to drill all the way through, but I needed to drill through the first layer of chipboard and the plexi for strength). But since one set of wires would cross over the other, I had to make two of the wires for each cover longer than the other two, on the downward tab that is. That way one pair would set up higher from the face of the cover by the same amount as the thickness of the other pair if wires. All the wires, after test fitting to make sure they fit perfectly, were glued into their holes with epoxy. This all had to be done very neatly and carefully, since the final painting for these pieces had already been done.

Between the wires I added some fake screw heads to the flange, to make it look like that is how the porthole cover is bolted to the helmet. I made these screw heads by taking a real screw and punching the head into a flattened out piece of clay. I made sure to use a screw with a standard head, not phillips, because that would look wrong for the period. I used this as a temporary mold and cast it with resin. I would use these screw heads as finishing touches in several places around the helmet, so I made a bunch. By this time I was becoming pressed for time, so my work started to get a little sloppy.

I removed the masking tape from the plexiglas and positioned the porthole covers over their respective portholes. The fit wasn't perfect, so I used E6000 to glue them on. E6000 has the benefit of being somewhat flexible, even when dry, but very strong. And it is thick and gel like, so it fills gaps in uneven surfaces. I use it in place of epoxy, when the situation calls for it.

Almost finished! Isn't she looking good? Nothing left now but final assembly of all the little do-dads that will make it steampunk. Tune in next time for the final product. See you soon!

See Also:
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.1) WIP
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.2)
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.3)

Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.3)

2011-12-04T20:57:00.001-05:00

Wow, It's hard to believe it has been over a month since my last post! I'm still working 60 hours a week at my new job, so I have very little time to craft or blog. But on the up-side, the issues with my hands have almost completely subsided. Just a little stiffness in the mornings now. I just finished editing the last of the photographs for the Space Helmet, so let's have an update, shall we.

When last we left off, I had just finished a crap load of sanding and bondo to smooth out the helmet. Once the sanding was finished, I gave it another coat of flat black spray paint (which I use as primer), then I began working on the trim on the breast plate.

I cut out a strip about an inch and a half wide, from chipboard, and glued it to the edge of the breast plate. I used clothespins to clamp it in place while the glue dried so that it conformed to the curves. As usual, the chipboard was sealed with Mod Podge so that it takes the paint better. Then I studded it all the way around with rivet heads cast from resin.

With the main body of the helmet done, it's time to work on some of the steampunk features and additions. Gears and sprockets are too cliché and would serve no rational purpose on a space helmet, so they were out. But hoses, conduits and unidentifiable thingamabobs, those are the stuff of steampunk dreams!

I knew I would need some ventilation, so I searched around the shop for a suitable vent cover. I looked all through my plastic parts bin and found nothing useful. I tried out a couple of plastic bottle caps, but couldn't find anything that looked right. Then, I noticed something that had been sitting on my worktable the whole time. I had always intended on adding some of those cheap l.e.d. touch lights to the front breast plate to serve as headlights. I had one torn apart to get ready to paint the casing when I noticed that the casing itself would make a good vent cover. I cut out a small piece of chromed wire mesh from a drawer divider (used for separating silverware in a kitchen drawer) and fixed it with hot glue to the inside of the plastic casing.

I also found that a particular plastic canister lid from my parts bin (like the ones that come on Pringles cans) fit the bottom of the light casing perfectly. I epoxied the lid to the helmet and used a dremel to carve out a hole in the center for air flow. Using the lid as a base allowed me to be able to remove the vent cover easily. I eventually added two of these vents, one at the top and one at the bottom, but that was still not enough. The portholes still fog up terribly. I am considering, in the future, adding a small electric fan to aid with the ventilation.

The corrugated hose you see on the starboard side is a plastic cable cover that I found at a junk store for $0.10 a foot. It fits perfectly into the pvc male adapter that I screwed into the side of the helmet. This hose will run to the back of the helmet and connect to the tank assembly.

While I'm on the subject of corrugated hose, remember those hoses that I got real cheap and intended to attach to the top of the tanks? Well, here's a little trick I adapted from a technique I read about on Tom Banwell's blog. He used it to mold leather to a corrugated hose, but I thought it would also work for my paint job. I wanted the hose to look like it was copper. I first tried dry brushing the hose with copper acrylic, but the effect was too subtle. I wanted to use a copper spray paint for this, but I needed to mask off the deep recesses so that they would remain black. I wrapped the hose with cord so that the paint wouldn't get into the recesses. Then I spray painted it, and removed the cord. I had to do a little touch-up with acrylic paint, but overall the technique worked well.

Heading back over to the work on the tank assembly; I needed a sort of box to fit between the two tanks. This box would have all sorts of controls and gauges on it and also serve to anchor the bottles together. I started by making a cardboard model for the box. This is something I never used to do, but I find myself creating more and more models for items for which I am uncertain of the design.

I used the model to test fit with the bottles and to finalize the design. When I was happy with both, I cut the box design out of a sheet of wood paneling. The completed box would be stained and sealed and then have all the gauges and stuff added later.

I still used a little cardboard on the parts that wouldn't show. It is more forgiving, and my measuring skills sometimes fail me. Below, is the finished wooden box anchored between the two bottles, which have had their rivets added to the bands. The box was secured to the bottles.., I mean tanks, using glue and two small sheet metal screws.

Here is the first and largest of those gauges that would be attached to the box. It was constructed from the lid of a spray paint can, a piece of cardboard and a gauge face printed out on the computer (my own design). I laid out the gauge face design in Inkscape. I made several designs and tried out each one to see which I liked best for this application. The markings are nonsensical and cryptic. The dial face pictured below was my front runner, but did not make the final cut.

I mounted the gauge to the top of a copper fitting assembly, using a wooden dowel, some wadded up paper (to secure the dowel inside the copper fitting) a washer (to lock the dowel onto the plastic gauge body) and some epoxy.

For the crystal cover, I used the plastic lens and bezel from a $0.99 travel alarm clock I got from a discount store. It was the perfect size. It was attached using E6000 glue.The pointer hand is a brass clock hand picked up for $0.10. It is fixed in position and does not move.

I used some brass tag frames (I don't know what else to call them; label holders, I guess) as the bezels for more gauges on the box face. I cut some acetate to serve as the crystal and printed out the gauge faces. Different clock hands served as the pointers. Below is a test layout for the gauges on the box face. The three brass dots are large thumbtack heads that have stick-on silver numbers added. The brass thingy below them is part of a broken porcelain drawer handle that I salvaged. It made a satisfactory and ornate pointy knob thingy. I attached it with a screw through the wood so that it can turn to point to the different numbered settings. It would have been great if it could have actually activated something, like lights, when it was turned, but sadly it doesn't.

After finallizing the layout, I scribed around the parts to show their placement so that I could drill my holes and whatnot. I had originally intended for the vertical gauge on the left to have a movable slider that would adjust the pointer, but again, sadly it was not to be.

I did add one more detail in the form of an axillary hose line running from the box to the bottom of one of the tanks. The hose is a piece of plastic sprinkler system tubing, painted copper. For connectors, I used brass hex nuts. In order to help it maintain its shape in that "S" curve, I inserted a piece of wire clothes hanger inside the tubing and bent it to shape. This was harder than I had expected, but it did work. The tubing is attached to the box and bottle with epoxy. Below you can see the entire box and tank assembly.

There's more to come, so stay tuned. I promise that I will post sooner next time. Now that the pics are all cropped and re-sized, it will go much faster.

See Also:
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.1) WIP
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.2)
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.4)

Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.2)

2011-10-23T13:06:00.002-04:00

It's been several months now since I started work on my Steampunk Diving Helmet / Space Helmet, and a couple more since it was finished; so you might want to refresh yourself on this project by going back and reading the first post for it here: Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.1) WIP. When we left off, I was almost finished with the air tanks, and their construction had been a series of failures. We will finish those off later. First, let's get started on the helmet itself.

Fortunately, the helmet itself proved to be less troublesome than the tanks, though still quite a bit of trial and error and a whole pile of work. It all started with the search for the perfect sphere. I hunted for days looking for something with the right size and shape to be the basis for my helmet. In the end, I could not find exactly what I was looking for at a price I was willing to pay, so I settled on an inflatable beach ball. I was still experimenting with materials and techniques at this point, so I wasn't too worried that the ball was a little large and looked more like a pumpkin than a sphere. I figured I could always find something else and re-do it later. Of course that never happened.

I inflated the beach ball and coated it with petroleum jelly as a release agent. Then I went about covering it in a coat of papier-mâché. I used strips of paper torn from a phone book and cheap white glue. As you will recall, I am not adept at papier-mâché, so my results were not pretty.

Then I went about trying my newly found fiberglassing skills on the sphere. I used the ill fated "cheesecloth and resin" technique that I was pioneering on the tanks. It made for a leathery surface that had a lot more flex to it than I had expected.

When I was confident that the fiberglass was thick enough to hold the sphere's shape, I removed the beach ball. Then I started figuring out where and how big I was going to cut my holes for the neck and three portholes. I used the rim of a bucket as a guide for the neck hole, and I used a 6" plastic plate as a template for the portholes.

I cut out the holes with a pair of scissors (the fiberglass was pretty thin, so this was possible), but I had to be careful of cracking at the edges. I do not think I could have used scissors to cut the holes if I had not used the cheesecloth instead of actual fiber mat.

For the rims of the portholes, I searched the local dollar store for the right shape. I found what I was looking for in a child's plastic Easter bucket. I cut most of the bucket off, as I was only interested in about 2" at the base. I used scissors for this too, as I could clean up the edge with a dremel after it was in place.

I made adjustments to the portholes until I got the fit I wanted. Then I cut out the bottoms of the buckets with a dremel bit and glued the porthole rims in place with five minute epoxy. Now it was finally starting to take on a more recognizable shape.

Next, I started work on the shoulder cowl. This I made out of cardboard. I taped two pieces of cardboard together and cut a large hole in the center for the neck. Then I bent the cardboard into a curve that would come over the shoulder, and down the back and chest. I left the back a little straighter and the chest a little more curved, as I am a big guy. I did a few trial fits on myself to see how close the front and back edges should be. The piece was very flexible at this point, and had to be held in place by blocks, but would eventually be ridged and hold its own shape after the fiberglass was applied.

Before I could fiberglass, I had to marry the sphere to the shoulder cowl. That was a little tricky. As with most of the process in the build, I was flying by the seat of my pants. I had no idea how I was going to do any of this until I was elbow deep in doing it, so some things worked out better than others. The neck was a trouble spot.

I created a collar out of cardboard to serve as a bridge between the sphere and the shoulder cowl. Getting it the proper size and placed perfectly was difficult.

Once I was happy with the placement of the collar, I taped it in place with masking tape. Then I sealed the deal by laying on a coat of fiberglass all around the neck, thus permanently marrying the sphere with the cowl. This time (and from this point forward) I used real fiberglass matting instead of cheesecloth. Then I went ahead and finished coating the entire cowl with fiberglass. This would give it the rigidity to hold its own shape without blocks. Once the fiberglass was dry, I could cut away the unnecessary parts of the cardboard collar. Actually, for the sake of getting my head into the thing, I would end up ripping or sanding out the entire cardboard collar, and even a little bit of the fiberglass covering it. I would patch these holes later with some more fiberglass and bondo.

After the cowl was fiberglassed, I went on to cover the entire sphere with two coats of fiberglass matting. I used the fiberglass to make a smoother, stronger transition between the sphere and the porthole rims, covering the rims from the outside with fiberglass mat.

At this point it was really starting to look like a diving helmet. I couldn't resist taking a picture of myself in it during a test fitting.

With the helmet all glassed, I hung it over the back of a chair to get a look at how the air tanks would fit on the back. Those black hoses are something I found at a warehouse store for $0.45 each. I think they are supposed to be part of a funnel for automotive oil changes, or something. Not really sure. But for $0.45, hey, who cares!

I trimmed the corners off of the cowl to make for a smoother look. Then I gave the whole thing a coat of flat black spray paint (I'm too cheap to buy actual primer) so I could get a better look at it as a solid unit. It would also give me a good base color that would help with the sanding, which comes right after covering the whole thing in bondo to smooth it out.

I was unprepared for the nightmare that was the bondo and sanding ritual. I think it took about three days to get it somewhere close to smooth, and believe me, it is nowhere near as smooth as most of the prop artist's pieces I have seen on the web. I think the process when something like- primer, bondo, sanding, more bondo, more sanding, more bondo, more sanding, more primer, more sanding, spot glaze putty (which is a one part smoother version of bondo), more sanding, more spot glaze putty, more sanding, more primer, more sanding, more spot glaze putty, more sanding, more primer, give up.

I know it looks like a diving helmet already, but there is a lot more to come, so stay tuned.

See Also:
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.1) WIP
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.3)
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.4)

Smudge Fan v2.0

2011-10-12T19:45:00.000-04:00

A while back I made a set of smudging fans with the hopes of making them cheaply enough that they would sell with each smudge stick. They were nice, but not nearly as simple to make as I had hoped they would be. Consequently, I didn't end up making any more of them.

This is my second attempt at a simple smudging fan. It is very simple and elegant. Just a nice large natural feather with some leather wrapping and a few accent beads. These should be very serviceable for simple smudging ceremonies and they are economical enough and simple enough to make that I can sell them as an add-on with each smudge stick sale. And actually, I like they way they look even better than the first ones I made.

Doctor Glamour - The Trailer

2011-10-09T11:57:00.000-04:00

Early this year I did a series of posts about a very exciting project that I was commissioned to do for an independent film. I created two prop tomes for Andrew W. Jones's upcoming film short "Doctor Glamour". Well, it's been a long wait, but the film's trailer is finally out.

Doctor Glamour (Trailer) from Andrew W. Jones on Vimeo.

In this trailer, you can just catch a glimpse of my books. I'm very excited to see my work in a published format like this. I can't wait untill the final version is finally ready. It should only be another month or so.

See also:
Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 1)
Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 2)
Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 3)
Doctor Glamour - De Vermis Mysteriis
Doctor Glamour - (fini)

Bicorn Hat, Swords and Accessories

2011-09-11T17:05:00.000-04:00

I did a lot of props and costume pieces for my larp at this year's Origins (Aethernauts: The Space Between - Steampunk Edition), one of which was the Steampunk Phonograph, which I posted about earlier, and another was the Space/Diving Helmet which was a major build that I will be posting more about soon. But I also did some smaller items. In hindsight, I wish I had spent a little less time on the props and costume pieces and a little more time on some other elements, but all in all the game ran pretty well.

Many of the characters in this larp were Victorian era military officers, so I made some uniform pieces and accessories for them. First lets look at the simplest of the items. This is a plastic toy spyglass that I found at a discount store for about a buck. I made quick white canvas belts with brass buckles for the officers out of some old canvas webbing I had. I wanted accessories to match, so I made a spyglass holder out of a cardboard mailing tube wrapped in white butcher paper. The belt loop is chip board wrapped in white paper. It was attached to the tube with some glue and a heavy duty stapler.

Next up is this pistol holster. I had planned to make a steampunk rifle, but I didn't have the time. Instead, I decided to use my Nerf Maverick with the Steampunk paint job (the one pictured is not painted, it was just for test fitting). I wanted the body of the holster to be soft and flexible so that it wouldn't scratch the paint on the gun, so I used a sheet of white craft foam. This I glued into a cylinder, and added a belt loop made out of chipboard in the same manner as the spyglass holder. I made sure the cardboard for the belt loop ran the full length of the holster to give it more form and strength.

A very simple and inexpensive costume piece that easily differentiated the military personnel from the other characters, without having to create full uniforms, was to create rank insignia epaulets. These were made from just a piece of rectangular chipboard covered in black cloth. I then glued on strips of gold knotted trim and bits of ribbon from the fabric store. These would then be stuck onto the player's shoulders with a bit of double sided tape.

The epaulets I made for the retired Major-General were a little more complicated, but similar. I used a bit of gold satin fringe sandwiched between two pieces of chipboard (one slightly larger than the other). These ones were round on the ends to create the shoulder cup style of epaulet. The chipboard was sealed with mod podge and painted gold. The fringe was arranged around the cup and glued down to the larger piece. Then the smaller piece was used to cover this. The upper (smaller) piece also had some black ribbon added for additional decoration. None of these look very much like actual rank insignia from any country or period, but my project did not require period accuracy. They were only meant to convey the idea of a military uniform on a non-existent budget.

Some of the military officers was also given an officer's sword. I wanted these to be very cheap and simple. They turned out to be a little more complicated to make than I expected, but they looked pretty decent. After looking around the shop for a few minutes, I found a few pieces of wood trim that would work nicely. They weren't all exactly the same size, but oh well. I cut them all to the same length and trimmed down around the handle so that a piece of 3/4" pvc pipe would fit over the end. The pvc would serve as my handle. I wouldn't have to wrap or paint it, since I was going with a white trim theme. It would look like an ivory handle. I shaved down the tips into a rough point so that it seemed more sword-like, but I left the edges flat and made sure the points were quite dull so that no one would get hurt. The convention actually has rules against using these kinds of props in games, for safety reasons, but as long as no one gets hurt, they are seldom enforced.

I created a paper template for the hand guard and traced it out onto chipboard. This was then sealed with mod podge and spray painted gold and slid over the end of the handle. The blades were primed and painted with silver. Some glue and an upholstery nail at the pommel held the hand guard in place.

The scabbards were made from corrugated cardboard folded into a box that would fit around the blade. I left both ends open for simplicity. I wrapped the whole thing in masking tape and painted it gloss black. What really sold it as a scabbard was the piece of red ribbon trim that I glued down the side as an accent. I created belt hangers out of painted chipboard and a brass rivet. Chipboard wasn't really strong enough for this, and most of the belt hangers ended up broken by the end of the game, but they were only needed for the one event. The whole thing was topped off with some decorative cord tassels.

The most difficult of the military costume pieces was the bicorn hat, that I had originally intended for the ship's Captain, but ended up giving to the retired Major-General. I had to do a little digging on the internet for ideas on how to make the hat. Most helpful was posting on the Replica Prop Forum where I found out the proper name for such a thing, which then led me in the right direction to finding reference images and such.

Again, this needed to be done on the super-cheap, so back to my good old friend, chipboard. At $1.75 a sheet, it is hard to beat. I sketched out a rough circle on the chipboard, and at the center of it I cut out an oval with measurements that roughly matched the dimensions of my head. I made it a little tight on purpose, figuring it is easy to remove material, not so easy to put it back.

Next came the shaping of the chipboard. This was harder than I thought it would be. It took several days of pushing and prodding and pinning with clips and clothes pins to get it to where I wanted it. The best work was done after I realized that the chipboard would form well after it was wetted down with a misting of water. That made it easier to bend without creasing, and it allowed the board to mold to the desired shape and stay there after it dried.

After shaping, I needed to cover the chipboard with something. I was hoping to find some sort of spray on flocking material to give it a cloth like texture, but I was unable to find anything like that locally. I briefly considered just spray painting it, but ultimately decided to just cover the thing with cloth. Fortunately, I had stocked up on cheap black cotton cloth back when Wal-Mart had a fabric department. I applied the cloth with spray glue and was careful to avoid wrinkles.

After realizing that you could see the glare form my bald head through the hole in the front during a test fitting, I added a swath of black cloth loosely across the head opening, to prevent this.

As the final detail, I added a trim of fake white fur all around the edges. I considered some sort of ribbon or decoration on the side too, but decided not to. The two sides of the hat was then closed up with a few pieces of double sided foam tape.

Here is a pic from the larp so you can see some of the props in action. More pics from the larp will be posted on RogueCthulhu.com (eventually).

Good News / Bad News

2011-09-05T11:21:00.000-04:00

So, the good news is, that after three years of being laid off from work, I have finally secured a steady day job that will let me catch up on some long over due bills. The bad news is, that I am now working 60 hours a week at said new job, which leaves me very little time to work on any projects or make any blog posts. I haven't even managed to list the three Cthulhu books from my last post on eBay yet.

Furthermore, I was pretty scared there for the first few weeks. My new job is very physical, and it has taken a toll on my hands. Practically overnight I developed near crippling arthritis in both hands. OK, maybe more like moderate arthritis, but it sure felt crippling. Pain all the time, can't move my fingers in the mornings, loss of sensation and loss of fine motor control. Just holding a hobby knife was near impossible. Any kind of crafting was right out. Since then it has gotten better, most of the pain is gone and I have regained some sensation and a good bit of motor control, but I'm still suffering from severe joint stiffness in my fingers. Every morning I take three Advil and soak in hot water for 10 minutes just to get them moving so that I can get dressed.

So that's why there have been no new posts in the past month. I still have a lot of material to post from my Origins prop projects, even if I can't get much done in the workshop for now. So during one of the four hours I have to myself each day, I will try to get some of it posted soon.

New Cthulhu Cycle Books

2011-07-17T15:02:00.001-04:00

I have just finished a set of three Cthulhu Cycle re-covers that I am about to put up for sale on eBay. For those of you who don't know, I make custom hard covers for trade paperback books. I frequently re-cover Cthulhu fiction books published by Chaosium. I have a particular style that I use for these books. The three posted here differ only in that I have chosen to use cast resin pieces for the front cover centerpieces, instead of the usual chipboard glyph centerpiece. I also added some "grunge" to the recesses to give it more depth. Oh, and normally I highlight with gold, but this is the first time I have tried green and copper on one of these books.

These books will be sold individually. They have not yet been posted to eBay, but they will be shortly. You can find them with the link over in the right column to my Rogue Cthulhu eBay page.

Steampunk Phonograph (pt.4)

2011-07-03T15:26:00.002-04:00

I'm back. Origins is finally over and I'm still working on putting my stuff away from the trip, but I have a few minutes to post about some of the new props that I took with me.

The Steampunk Phonograph build was shaping up and nearing completion when I last posted. With the pipe work sorted out and the horn nearly complete, by next big hurdle was the optics. I had decided in the early stages that I wanted to use a laser pointer instead of a traditional stylus. Now I just had to find a way to make one fit. I started by tearing apart a laser pointer to see what I had to work with.

It was harder than I thought. The body of the mechanism and the lens are fused to the casing. I had to cut down the casing with a Dremel to get at the circuit board. Then I de-soldered the momentary contact switch and removed it from the board so I could implement my own switching mechanism. I even had to trim dowm the board a bit to fit the whole thing inside a copper elbow for mounting.

Then, something happened. I stumbled upon a completely mechanical solution, that didn't require any rewiring or dissassembly of the laser pointer (a new one, obviously), and it even looked better than my original plan. A half inch copper pipe fit over the body of the pointer perfectly, and with just crimping the pipe into a slightly oblong shape, twisting the pointer inside the pipe would depress the switch and hold it down. Also, the whole pointer assembly fit perfectly inside a reducer T, and it even looked cool. All I had to do was cut a sleeve of pipe and crimp it, then jam that sleeve inside the reducer T. I had a fender washer that fit the end of the reducer T perfectly, and would keep the pointer in place. The tiny nub where the keychain attaches to the end of the pointer stuck up past the fender washer, which made it perfect for threading a split ring through. The split ring would help to keep the pointer in the right position and also serve as the "switch". By turning the split ring, the whole pointer would turn inside the sleeve and depress the switch. Turn it a little more, and it would turn off. By attaching the fender washer to the reducer T with super glue, I could remove the pointer from the assembly at any time to replace the batteries.

The body of the phonograph was given a black lacquered finish, just like the horn. I used a gold leafing paint pen to trim the edges.

The last piece of the puzzle was the spindle arm, which I had already started a while back. I had originally wanted to make it so that the spindle arm rotated as it played, but that seemed impractical on my time table. It would just have to be stationary. I started with a length of pvc pipe which, coincidentally, fit perfectly onto the end of a copper reducer T. I needed to build up the pipe to the diameter of the cylinder tube, giving it enough of a snug fit that it would hold in place, but not so snug that it would be hard to change tubes. I glued foam padding to the pvc pipe.

Then I covered the foam in velvet cloth. I sewed the velvet into a sleeve and pulled it over the foam. One end of the tube of cloth got glued down to meet the pipe. The other end got tucked into the end of the pipe. a white glass marble fit perfectly into the end of the pipe with the cloth tucked in. It was a nice snug fit. The marble would serve as a decorative piece, and to hold the cloth in place.

I had also decided early on that I wanted a sort of "floating" acrylic ring around the cylinder The laser would shine through the ring, as sort of a lens. I'm not really sure why, I wanted it, I just thought it would look neat, and kind of futuristic. It sold the idea of a laser stylus better than just having the laser hitting the bare surface of the cylinder, imho.

Mounting the acrylic ring so that it seemed to float over the cylinder was a bit of a challenge. I pondered several design approaches before settling on a thin metal arm for the ring to be attached to. I had some left over chromed rod from my Steampunk Diving Helmet project that would fit the bill. I cut it to length, and epoxied it to the ring, by carving a small groove in the acrylic with a Dremel. This gave the epoxy more to grab hold of. Then I attached the rod to one of the reducer Ts with a copper strap and more epoxy. I kept the spacing constant by using chipboard shims until the epoxy was dry.

My plan to use the screw and washer assembly to mount the horn to the pipe-works needed a little fine tuning. First it needed a longer screw, and a slightly different selection of washers.

Then I needed to cut a custom wooden plug that would fit snugly inside the pvc elbow. I got as close as I could to the right diameter with my hole cutting drill bit (for cutting holes in doors for lock assemblies). Then I had to improvise a power sander using a sanding block and a drill press to shave it down to the perfect size.

Once it was the perfect diameter, I had to make countersinks on each side for the nuts, one that would be epoxied to this piece and one that would remain on the screw, holding the washer assembly together on the horn.

Then the plug was epoxied to the inside of the pvc elbow. After it was dry, I could unscrew the elbow from the horn, without affecting the washer assembly, allowing for easier storage and transport.

The last detail to be completed before final assembly was the speaker grill and sound system. I bought a small battery powered speaker set from a discount store for $1.50. It is designed to be used with mp3 players. I also picked up a simple mp3 player for about $20. Both would fit inside the body of the phonograph, or, to eliminate having to open the lid to change the song, I could put the mp3 player underneath the body, attaching the wire through a hold in the bottom, and just slide it out to change the song, and then slide it back under again to hide it. I loaded up the mp3 player with some classical music for the LARP, but it can play anything.

The speakers would be hidden by the fretwork on the lid, which would also let the sound come through. It is a little muffled, but still audible. To completely hide the inner workings, I added a thin piece of satin fabric to the underside of the lid, held in place by a piece of foamcore.

A word about the pipe-works; The majority of it is made form copper plumbing pipe. Some of it is made from pvc pipe and painted to match. Marching the color was hard. Copper has a wide range of colors, from pinkish, to dark orange-brown. Just to make the copper pieces all match each other, I had to wash them in HCL acid and scrub them with a scotch brite pad. Then when they reached the color I wanted, I sprayed them with clear coat to prevent further oxidation. Then I had to use several enamel and acrylic paints to get the pvc to match it. I got as close as I could. I have about a half dozen "copper" paints, but none of them ever seem to look like real copper.

Some of the pipes were soldered together, and some were not. This allows for disassembly for transport and storage, as well as some room for adjustments to the position of the horn, cylinder and stylus arms. I also needed to be able to swing the stylus and cylinder arms away to open the lid of the body and get to the speakers and mp3 player. I learned the hard way to swing them forward, not back, or the whole thing will be rear-heavy and tip backwards.

That's pretty much it for construction. This build was complicated in so far as it had a lot of little technical details to be tackled. But it was far easier than the Steampunk Diving Helmet project. It would have been harder if I had not used a pre-fab box as the body.

Here are some glamor shots of the finished assembly. BTW, I did end up putting the wire grill in the horn during the show, but it looks just as good without it. Some of the pics here show it with and some show it without.

Steampunk Phonograph (pt.3)

2011-06-15T04:18:00.002-04:00

It's only a week until Origins, and I've been working furiously to finish my props for the steampunk LARP I'm running, "Æthernauts". I haven't had much time to post, and won't have until I get back. But until then, here's an update on the Steampunk Phonograph.

In part 1, I showed you the faux wax cylinders I made from toilet paper tubes. I also made some cardboard boxes for them, but had not yet printed out the labels. Finally I have finished them. Here is the final product in all its glory.

I modeled the packaging after the old player piano rolls we used to have in my house when I was young. I'm not sure how old they were, but I imagine they were probably from the 30's and 40's.

Then, in part 2, I showed you the phonograph horn I made from cardboard and a plastic cone. I puzzled and puzzled over how I was going to attach the horn to the body of the phonograph. I wanted to preserve the opening at the base of the cone, so that it looked like the sound really was traveling up the pipework into the horn (and to a small degree it actually would). But I just couldn't figure out a way to do that with a strong enough joint. So, I finally decided that I would have to secure it by closing off the end of the horn with a custom fitted washer assembly and a screw. I will then embed the nut for the screw into a plug in the connecting pipe, so that the horn will screw into place and the shaft of the screw will bear its weight.

With this new design, if you were to look down the barrel of the horn, you would see that the end is closed off (and has a big screw in it), which will kind of kill the illusion. So I needed some way to obfuscate the small end of the horn. I got the idea to install a piece of wire mesh, like a speaker grill, into the neck of the horn. I had recently cut up a piece of chromed wire mesh for a vent cover on the Steampunk Diving Helmet I'm working on. I had it sitting nearby and it looked appropriate for the job.

I cut out a paper template the size of the opening at the large end of the plastic cone. Using that for a size reference, I cut the wire mesh in a circle and bent in the edges. I thought that it would look a little nicer if it were slightly domed rather than flat, so I bent it with my hands using a decorative stone sphere as a form.

Here is what it looks like in the neck of the horn. Of course, real phonographs never had any such grill, but they never had lasers to read the cylinders either. Since this is a fantasy steampunk phonograph, and not a period reproduction, I can do what I want with it. Besides, real period cylinder players, that I have seen pictures of, had much smaller horns anyway. The big flower-like horns seemed to come about more with the later model disc playing phonographs.

The next order of business is paint. It took me a little while to decide on a paint scheme. I originally wanted a mahogany finish, but since neither the horn nor the box have wood grain, I had not real way to pull that off convincingly. Finally I decided to go with gloss black panels with gold accents, simulating black lacquer and brass trim. First, I painted the outside edges gold.

Then I masked the edges off with a thin strip of masking tape before painting the whole outside with gloss black spray paint. After removing the masking tape, I got a nice lacquer and brass effect.

For the inside, I did the same thing, but this time, I painted the panels gold too. I wanted the inside to have more style to it. Some baroque gold inlay would set off the black lacquer very nicely. I drew out a a scroll pattern on a piece of paper, then traced it with a wide tipped marker. I stacked several sheets of paper together and cut the design out with an xacto knife. Then I gave the cut out template a light shot of spray adhesive. Just enough to let it stick, but not enough to make it adhere permanently. Then I laid the paper masks in place.

Then I painted over the masking tape and paper masks with gloss black.

Here is the final result. Pretty snazzy!

Now I'm not sure if I want to use the wire grill. I probably will though. Once the screw assembly is in place, I won't like seeing it.

Now I'm working on the body of the phonograph. Since I'm using a pre-fab box, most of what is left is arranging the bits of copper and pvc pipe that I'm using as the armature and horn base. I originally wanted to have several working parts on this thing. I wanted the hand crank to really crank and also I wanted you to be able to feel it winding a spring. I also wanted the spindle that holds the cylinder to spin, either by the action of the crank, or by a motor. Sadly, I don't have the time to make these things function the way I had envisioned. Plus, for the type of prop that it is, it isn't really necessary. I have to start making concessions for the sake of time if I want everything done by next week.

So here is the hand crank assembly. Pretty simple. It does turn, but it isn't connected to anything. It just spins in its socket. The tubing is a piece of automotive brake line. It is soft enough that it can be bent by hand, but firm enough to hold its shape well. I chose it mostly because the connecting ferrel had the right size and thread pattern to screw into the finial that I found. The finial was just a piece of junk that someone gave me a while back.

Coming out of the opposite side of the box, will be copper and pvc pipe (painted of course) that will hold the spindle, laser and horn. Here is a quick mock up of the pieces (though they are not all cut to size, and some are incomplete).

This mess of pipes needs to be anchored very securely to the box due to all the weight and torque. The bottom pipe fits into a snug hole in the side of the box, and ends in a flange that will be epoxied and screwed to the inside wall of the box. I made the flange by cutting the pipe lengthwise into quarters about an inch down and bending down the tabs and flattening them out.

That's about as far as I have gotten, so that's where I'll have to leave it for now. Like I said, I probably won't have time to post anything else until I get back from Origins, but rest assured I am taking lots of pics as I work on these props. The Steampunk Diving Helmet is almost finished and is looking pretty darn good. I can't wait to show it to you!

See also:

Steampunk Phonograph (pt.1)
Steampunk Phonograph (pt.2)
Steampunk Phonograph (pt.4)

Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt. 1) WIP

2011-05-27T04:49:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in my post, Steampunk Phonograph (pt. 1), I am making a series of props for a live action role playing game to be run at Origins 2011. This project is also for that larp, and it is a work in progress.

I start a lot of projects in which I have only the vaguest idea of how I am going to accomplish them. I use a lot of experimental methods (experimental for me at least). I like branching out into new techniques and media. Most of the time those experiments go very well, and I happily end up with a very nice project and a new arrow in my crafting quiver. But sometimes, ...not so much.

This particular project started off with a string of failures. Or, like T. Edison would say, I found about a half dozen ways not to make a diving helmet. Most of the failed methods came up while I was working on the air tanks that will be attached to the back of the helmet. Oh, BTW, although it's modeled off of an old time metal diving helmet, this is actually a space helmet, hence the steampunk part. Let's take a look at some of the less than successful attempts I made in the early going.

From the very beginning I had the idea to use two liter soda bottles for air tanks. I figured they would be very quick and easy and super cheap. Well, I got one out of three right. The problem came in when I tried to rectify two defects that the plastic bottles have. One, they have a funky shaped bottom, and I wanted a rounded bottom. Two, they are thin walled and easily squished. I wanted them to be more rigid.

My first attempt to round out the bottom of the bottle involved using papier-mâché. I tried to make a papier-mâché cap that would fit over the existing bottom. It needed to fit snugly, so I had to find a ball or other round smooth object that is the exact same diameter as the bottle. But I couldn't find one. So I wrapped a sheet of paper around a bottle to get the diameter right, then I inflated a balloon to match the diameter and stuck in at the end. It didn't want to stay put, so I tried to tape it in place. This setup was far from ideal.

I don't do much with papier-mâché because, well, I kind of suck at it, as you can see. This piece of crap took about two days to dry, and was completely unusable. Time for a new plan.

My second idea was to round off the bottom with clay and then papier-mâché over that. I'm not really much better at sculpting clay than I am at papier-mâché. While the clay did work, it used a lot of clay and made the end of the bottle very heavy. I kept it as a back up plan, but in my heart I knew I needed to find something else.

My third attempt to round out the ends involved a relatively new material for me, rigid polyurethane foam. Again I wrapped the bottle in paper (waxed paper as a release agent, and then office paper for support). Then I poured the foam inside the paper cylinder over the end of the bottle. When the foam hardened, I removed the paper.

I used a cheese grater type hand rasp to shape the foam into a rounded end. While the foam is closed celled and forms a hard skin on the outer edge, by sanding it down, I was going to get a very rough and porous surface that would need coated with something, possibly resin, or spackle, or body putty.

I liked the way this one turned out, and I figured that I would solve my smoothness problem with a coating of fiberglass resin. You see, by this time, I had already had several failures on my second criteria, that being the whole "rigid" issue, which led me to the idea of coating the whole bottle in fiberglass. But first, here are some of the other ideas I had for making the bottle rigid that didn't work out so well.

My first idea to make the bottle rigid was a really stupid one. I thought I could keep the bottle under pressure. I considered putting a small amount of water (maybe an ounce) inside and then dropping in a seltzer tablet and capping it off. After some reflection, I decided that even if by some miracle I guessed the amount of water and size of the seltzer tablet perfectly, the whole thing would be very dangerous. This is basically the makings of a crude bomb. Not something you want to wear as part of a costume prop. In a sad testament to my thick headedness, in the end it was not the explosive potential that dissuaded me from this design, but the idea of having a little liquid sloshing around in the bottom of the tanks.

Not content to let the pressure idea well enough alone, I then tried to inflate a balloon inside the bottle. Not as easy as it sounds. The difficulty of the task ended those experiments fairly early (OK, and maybe I was starting to realize that a bottle under pressure was a bad idea).

Up next, I once again turned to the rigid foam. I mixed up a batch, thinking it was more than enough, and did a slush coating of the interior of the bottle. Unfortunately, it was not more than enough. The coating was too thin and spotty and its thinness caused it to be too brittle.

This idea probably would have worked, and may have been my best (or at least simplest) design, but the amount of foam it would have taken gave me pause. You see, I'm cheap, and the foam is not. I have practically no budget for this project, as it is basically a lark and not going to net me anything beyond about four hours of enjoyment at a LARP. I winced at the amount of foam needed and so I decided to shelve this experiment and explore other options. In hind sight, if I had just bit the bullet and went forward with this plan, I probably would not have used any more foam than I wasted in other experiments.

By this time I had spend probably a week or more futzing around with the bottles so far. Which brings me to the aforementioned fiberglass. Since I was having trouble shoring up the walls from the inside, I thought about forming a rigid coating on the outside. It should be noted that previously, I had only ever used fiberglass on one other project, and while that project was successful, it was far from pretty. Fiberglass is messy and difficult to work with (imho). Fiberglass matting is a hairy unruly mess to work with. Fiberglass cloth is a bit easier to work with, but is more expensive.

So here's where my mind does some contortionist maneuvers that make the pressurized bottle design look sane. I have three quite large rolls of fiberglass matting that have been sitting in my basement for almost 20 years, doing nothing. Only used once. Lots of it. Already paid for. That was made specifically for this process. Sitting idle. For 20 years. I know this. I did not forget about them. Yet, instead of rejoicing that some finding from the junk store, purchased (albeit for a pittance) without clear intent or imminent need and squirreled away untouched through two decades and three moves, was finally going to find its purpose, I declined to use them. Instead, I looked for a cheap alternative to glass fiber of any kind.

I theorized that cheesecloth was cheap, thin, lightweight, and relatively easy to work with. It should make for an economical alternative to glass cloth. Mind you, I had to purchase cheesecloth for this project, cheap as it was. But in my mind, it was going to be worth it not to have to deal with the glass fiber mat. I did a little digging and found one artist who used the stuff with fiberglass resin to make sculptures, but didn't mention much about the precess. I posted a thread on the RPF, and basically got a bunch of people telling me that cheesecloth was going to be vastly inferior to glass. But I soldiered on. I'm an idiot.

My first attempt to coat the bottle with fiberglass did not go so smoothly. In my mind, I imagined that it would be just like wrapping a gauze bandage in a spiral down a tacky barber pole. In reality, it was more like trying to paint a hair net with hot caramel. I pre-cut the cheesecloth into three inch strips and coated the outside of the bottle with fiberglass (polyester) resin. I barely got the first strip to wrap around, and it had massive holes in its coverage. Clearly I needed another coat, and possibly another tactic.

The cheesecloth was stringy and flimsy and clingy and it did not want to behave while I applied it. So, I tried to make the cheesecloth a little easier to work with by starching it. Though it did make the cheesecloth easier to handle, this alone would not be enough to alleviate my difficulties.

On my second bottle, I decided to try coating the bottle with spray glue and then wrapping it with cheesecloth before applying the resin. Brilliant! The cheesecloth went on just like I imagined it would. Easy as pie.

Working on both bottles at once, I moved to putting the second coat of cloth and resin on the first bottle. The second coat ended up going on a little smoother (probably due to having gained a little practice), but after it was dry I started to question if this was even the right path to be taking. The surface was very uneven and was going to take a LOT of sanding and putty to smooth out. It was barely even recognizable as the bottle who's shape I liked enough to use from the beginning. Without ever putting resin on the second bottle that I covered so nicely with glue and cloth, I set aside the fiberglass design and went back to the drawing board.

I wanted to go back to shoring up the walls from the inside, in order to preserve the smooth clean outside of the bottle. I postulated that it was the narrow neck of the bottle that was holding me back. If I had a larger opening, it should be easy to fit something inside that would make the walls rigid. I had thought of putting reinforcement bands with big rivets (fake) around the bottles for decoration. One of these would easily hide a seam, so I decided to cut the bottom of the bottle off. A fresh bottle, mind you. Which means that I will have to foam the bottoms all over again. C'est la guerre.

My plan now, was to cut a piece of chipboard to the exact size of the inner diameter of the bottle, allowing it to press firmly against the inside walls when inserted with the edges butted up snugly against each other. The chipboard is nice and stiff and about 1.5mm thick. Its edges would act like a keystone in an arch. This should allow very little room for malformation when pressure is applied to the sides of the bottle, but the fit would have to be very snug. I used a strip of paper to measure the exact inner diameter of the bottle. Some adjustment needed to be made to compensate for the difference in thickness between the paper and the chipboard. I didn't expect that to affect the length measurement, but it did, significantly. Anyways, I got lucky with the measurements and the technique worked perfectly on the first try.

I did a test fit first, to make sure everything was OK, then I coated the chipboard with white glue and slid it into place. I left about a centimeter hanging out past the edge of the cut bottle, to create a flange for reattaching the bottom.

Of course the chipboard didn't fit past the curved end of the bottle neck. At first I thought the plastic in this area was thick enough and didn't need to be stiffened, but later I decided it did. So, back out with more foam. I gave it a much thicker coating this time, but I tried everything I could to minimize the amount of foam used (as best as I could, anyway).

Then, wouldn't you know it, I decided that though the sides were much stiffer, but they still needed more reinforcement. I cut out several disks from corrugated cardboard and glued them in as reinforcing bulkheads. This should make the bottle damn near squish proof.

Next, as I mentioned, I had to re-do the foam on the bottoms. As unnecessarily complicated as this design seems to be, it is the final design, and the one that I used for the prop.

Since the bottoms were not going to be fiberglassed, they still needed something to smooth them out. Enter Bondo, car body filler putty. This is the first time I have ever worked with body putty. It was actually not that hard to use. However, to get a nice smooth surface, it requires lots of sanding, and re-applying, and then more sanding, and then a primer coat, then more sanding, then re-applying, then more sanding, and then more primer, and then more sanding....

Finally, they had the shape and rigidity I wanted. At last I was able to give both bottles a primer coat of flat black, then paint them in a nice metallic copper.

The finishing details for these bottles will be the brass riveted bands. The bands themselves were cut out of chipboard, sealed with Mod Podge, and painted gold (brass).

To make the rivets, I found a nice rounded wooden "plug" that was the right size. These are normally used to plug the countersunk screw holes in wooden furniture. I stuck one on the end of a screw, to make a handle, then coated it in melted wax, letting it sink into the pours, and polished it smooth. This would serve to smooth out the surface, and act as a release agent. Then I pressed it into some rolled out plasticine clay to make a temporary mold for casting with urethane resin.

Of course, I momentarily forgot about my trick for using a light coat of spray paint as a mold release on plasticine clay molds. Because of my laps, I had a lot of clay stuck to the cast pieces that needed to be scrubbed off. You can bet I'll remember next time.

These bottles are now almost finished. The bands and rivets will not be applied for a bit yet, so that I know how to place them in relation to how the bottles will be attached to the helmet. They should be ready to view by the next post.

Until then...

See Also:
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.2)
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.3)
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.4)

Doctor Glamour (fini)

2011-05-18T04:39:00.000-04:00

Now that the build logs are finished. I have a few more glamor shots of the two books together.

But first, here are a few stills taken from the film production blog and facebook page which feature the book props. As I understand it, the green-screen version of the film has been locked and sent to the visual effects shop to have the cgi elements rendered. Should still be several months before it is finished, but these stills look pretty good.

Ok, so here are the rest of the pics.

Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 3)

2011-05-13T19:54:00.001-04:00

Click here to get on this train from the beginning.

So, as I was saying. I finally decided on the design for the iron bindings that were going to wrap around the spine of this Necronomicon, and made paper templates to full scale. The next step was to sculpt the pieces in plasticine modeling clay.

I rolled out the clay with my pasta maker (not used for food, obviously) and traced around the paper template with an xacto knife. I thought I was being clever by using glass as a work board, thinking that the silicon rubber would not stick to the glass. Wrong. Pro Tip: They say silicone rubber doesn't stick to much, but that has not been my experience. The one thing that I have found that neither it, nor urethane resin sticks to is vinyl contact paper. If I had been really clever, I would have stuck a piece of contact paper over the glass before beginning.

I cut out three designs from the clay. Two of the front/back board pieces (above), one facing up and a mirror image facing down, and one for the spine piece (one mold would work for both spine pieces needed). I made sure to texture the surface with my tiny ball peen hammer to give it that hammered iron look. I made a little dam wall around the pieces and then poured in the RTV silicon rubber.

Then, each mold was cast twice in urethane resin. To save on rubber, I made the molds a little thin. To give them a solid backing, I poured plaster of paris on top of the rubber before removing the clay. You can see the plaster backing in the pic below.

Once I had cast pieces to work with, I could get a better idea of where things were going. I laid them out and agonized over the fitting and trimming for a little while.

For added security, I decided to use machine screws, instead of glue, to fix the spine pieces in place. I drilled a hole though the resin pieces and the cover and ran the screw in from the back side of the spine. I would later have to trim the screw end down a bit with the Dremel, and create a small cavity on the back of the skulls, with same said Dremel, to cover over the screw ends.

With the pieces laid out to see, I decided that the hinges I had made with the epoxy putty and wood dowels were too small for the spine hinges. After more agonizing, I decided to use a similar method, but just take it up a size with a larger dowel. However, I was hesitant to run the epoxy putty through the pasta machine again, as it nearly broke the thing on the last attempt, and it took me two days to clean it out and get it back together. So this time I cut the dowels to size, drilled out the ends and cut in two grooves with the Dremel before coating both of them with brushed on polyurethane resin.

I had to coat them twice, and ended up having to re-cut the grooves afterward. I also gave them a few good whacks with the ball peen hammer while the resin still had a little give to it. This provided some texture. While the epoxy putty would have served as its own adhesive for attaching the hinges to the other resin pieces, like it did in the clasp, now I would have to use more brushed on urethane resin as an adhesive to glue the pieces together. More resin should fuse the resin coated dowels and the resin pieces together into a solid piece. Should, begin the operative word. It did work, but I had some cracking problems at the joint. I had to re-fix them twice and put the resin on extra heavy, and the joint was still a little more delicate than I would have liked. I laid in a piece of waxed paper to keep the brushed on resin from getting all over the leather.

Once the hinges were fused in place, I could remove the whole assembly (another up side to the screw method) and they were ready to paint.

I had actually already started painting these before I remembered that I wanted to add some scrapbooking "dots" as rivet heads, so I had to paint them over again.

Finishing off the clasp presented a challenge. Even with the 4" wood screws in the text block, the cover would have a little flex to it. My resin clasp would have none, creating stress that could crack the clasp, or pop the glue holding it to the cover. I needed a way to give the clasp a little flex too. Then it dawned on me. In the past when I had made hinges for books- working hinges, I used a piece of leather as a backing and glued the ridged metal hasp parts to it. So, I measured the distance the clap needed to bridge and cut a piece of leather to fit. I used a thick piece of black latigo leather and glued it to the back side of the resin clasp pieces. Then a made another bridging piece out of sculpey and sanded it to fit in the gap between the two resin pieces. I also found a use for those extra hinge pieces I had made earlier. The bridging piece and the faux hinges were glued to the leather backing, not to each other or the resin pieces. This allowed them to "float" a bit and slide over each other as the piece flexed a little.

Now that all the pieces had been fabricated, they all got a primer coat of flat black paint. Then, they got dry brushed with metallic finish paint that contains actual steel as the pigment. Here is our first really good look at what the book will look like. The end is in sight.

Now that all the fabricating and test fitting was done, I could glue the text block into its cover.

And then send the resin pieces over for their final paint effects. I decided to go with rusted iron for the look of the bindings. The effect comes from a two part kit from Rustolium. I don't know if they make it anymore, as I can't find it on their website. I had used this kit once before while doing the iron bindings on the chest for the Black Duke project. But I didn't have a lot of experience with it. One thing I added this time, was to sprinkle some play sand onto the wet paint in spots. This gave a very grainy, granular texture, like real crumbling rust.

Finally, the finishing touches. Once all the pieces were secured in place, the areas around the pieces were dry brushed with green, black, brown and purple to simulate the build up of grime on the cover and in the recesses. I also made some cuts in the cover with an xacto knife and widened them with the mini butane torch.

That's it! Build complete. It was a very complex project, but I think it is my best work to date. I'm also very excited to see it on film. Filming has wrapped on Doctor Glamour and they are now in post production. It will still be about eight months before the film is finished, since just about the whole thing is green screen.

Now, here come the glamor shots...

Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 2)

2011-05-07T01:58:00.003-04:00

If you missed part one of the making of the Doctor Glamor - Necronomicon, you can view it here.

So, when last we left off, I had just finished making a custom designed sigil for the centerpiece of the book out of sculpey. This I later made a silicone mold of and cast it in urethane resin. This has two benefits. One: I can make multiple copies. Two: urethane resin is more durable than baked sculpey. And this particular piece has long thin and easily breakable parts to it. Most of the accent pieces for this tome will be cast in resin. I ended up making more than seven new silicone molds for this project, which is way more custom pieces than I had anticipated doing.

On the fore edge of the book, above, you can see the beginnings of my clasp adornment. This is one of the few pieces that I was actually able to use from molds that I already had. This piece is actually one of the first pieces I ever molded or cast. I just never found a project that was suitable for it. It is too large for most of the book projects I have done. It was originally a long straight piece, but for this book, I heated it and bent it at a 90 degree angle to hang over the fore edge. I actually cut a slit in it while it was warm and pliable, right at the angle, so that it would bend easier. This would work out well for the next step, which was to fabricate a hinge at the bend.

This hinge is only decorative. It does not bend. Early in my design process I conferred with the director, Andrew Jones, and asked him if it would be OK if I made the book so that it can not be opened (not capable of opening), since he had already told me that it would not be opened on screen. I told him that I had some ideas to make chunky hinge and clasp pieces that would look nice, but would be impractical and extremely difficult and time consuming to make functional. He OK'd the idea, so that is why these hinges are non-functioning.

The hinge barrels are made from a wooden dowel that has been covered in a thin sheet of rolled out epoxy putty. I used a generic brand of epoxy putty similar to Milliput. If you try this method, I highly recommend not using your polymer clay rolling machine to flatten epoxy putty. I nearly ruined my machine that way. Maybe if I had pressed the putty between too sheets of waxed paper it would have worked out better. Anyway, Once I covered the dowels in epoxy putty I used a razor knife to indent two circumscribing lines to look like segment joints, and I used a tiny ball peen hammer to add some dents, to make it look more like hammered iron. I made two of these for the clasp and four more to be used later for the spine hinges. After shaping I pressed them into the split at the bend in my clasp pieces. Once dry, they will become solidly attached and will look like they were part of the original sculpt.

The resin pieces I used for the clasp did not have any hammer dents in them originally, so I added some to the finished resin pieces by grinding small divots into them in random places with a round Dremel grinding bit. I used to different designs for the hing pieces, one for the front and another for the back. I'm not really sure why, I just liked it that way. They will join in the middle along the fore edge with some sort of locking mechanism (also non-functional) that I had yet to decide on.

On to the rest of the cover. I laid out several covering materials side by side before deciding on the oxblood leather. I'm usually pretty stingy with my use of leather, as it is very expensive (anywhere from $2 to $5 a square foot when purchased by the side), and this project was already way more involved than I had planned on it being when I gave my quote for the price, but what the hell. I was more concerned with making a piece to be proud of and staying true to my vision than I was about staying on budget. So they got a really good deal on the props. If the project turns out good, and especially if it gets me some more work or recognition, it will have been for a good cause.

Before gluing the leather to the book boards, I scuffed it up a bit. I have rough wooden walls (made form T1-11) in my workshop, so I just massaged the leather against the wall a few times to scuff up the surface. Then I glued it down to the boards with a pva made for leather.

Setting the cover and accent pieces aside for just a moment, lets turn our attention back to the text block. It took a little finessing to get the pages a roughly equal thickness at the spine and fore edge. It took some manipulating of the threads I sewed through the spine, some splitting apart of the signatures, and eventually the insertion of about two dozen one inch wide strips of chipboard placed inside the signatures along the spine to puff out that edge. Eventually I got a nice uniform 4.5" thickness front to back.

I had already gouged up the page edges just a little bit with a Dremel and my fingernails while the text block was waterlogged, but I wanted more texture than that. I had recently seen a great tome created by Ross MacDonald in a post on Propnomicon. It had little bits of paper sticking out from between the pages that had a very authentic feel and gave the book a great visual texture. I decided to try something similar. I stained about two dozen or more sheets of scrap paper to insert between the pages. Then I placed them strategically, looking for the optimal visual impact. Not too much symmetry that it looked fake or forced but enough to satisfy my sense of balance between positive and negative space. I ripped most of the scrap paper into sections before inserting them, so I ended up only using about six or eight sheets. I tacked them in place between the pages where I wanted them with some roll-on dry adhesive. I just glued the scrap piece to the page it was resting on.

Since there was no glue on the spine anymore and the threads were somewhat loose still, the whole thing was a little sloppy. After positioning all the scraps, I glued a mull to the spine in order to give the text block a little more stability. There was still a problem, however, that I hadn't considered. It came to me while I was laying in bed thinking about the project. Since most of the added thickness created by soaking the text block came from the warping of the pages, the whole text block was now kind of spongy, except for along the spine where the thickness had been bolstered with added strips of chipboard between the pages. If you picked it up and squeezed it, the text block would squish like a sponge. This was a problem. Especially since the resin pieces I would be using were going to be ridged with non-functional hinges. There would be very little flex at all. Any squishyness of the text block would not only dispel the illusion of this being a thick and heavy tome, but it may stress the resin pieces or the glue attaching them. My solution was to drive 4" long wood screws down through the text block. They would serve as columns supporting the text block against being squished, and also adding more lateral stability. Any pressure applied to the cover boards now, would press against the screws, instead of squeezing the text block. Also, by adjusting screws, I could fine tune the thickness of the text block.

Here's what the newly modified text block looks like inside the leather bound case before any of the resin attachments are added. ...like a glove.

The resin pieces attached to the cover were the thing that was going to give this tome its character. They are also the part that requires the most work and was the hardest for me to figure out what I was going to do. I had a vague idea, but vague ideas won't cut the mustard when it comes down to fabricating parts.

Right from the beginning I knew I wanted large chunky iron bindings, with hinges, that wrap around the spine. I also knew early on that I wanted these bindings decorated with skulls. I had a small skull sculpture, that was just what I was looking for, that someone had sent to me years ago. I made a mold of it and cast two copies in plaster. I originally intended to use the plaster casts and paint them to look like bone, but I was unsure if the plaster would be strong enough to withstand the stress where it was attached to the resin "ironwork". Also, chipping was a concern. I was also not completely convinced that bone or ivory would look good against the iron (-or bronze. I hadn't decided that yet either). So as a backup, I also cast two in resin. I could decide later which ones looked better.

The painting of the plaster skulls took sealing, painting, sealing again, staining, and then about a million coats of dry brushing, to get right. They look very nice. But I didn't end up using them. Instead, I went with the resin ones and I painted them to match the iron finish of the bindings.

Like I said before, I did a lot of laying things out and visualizing on this project before I knew where the design was going. Much more so than on any other project. During one of those sessions, I got the idea to put a small lock mechanism (non-functional), a key hole basically, in the crux of the "claw" shape of the front cover clasp piece. I was originally going to put the keyhole on the fore edge, but this looked better. I made a quick sketch for scale and then cranked out a simple button with a key hole in it, made out of sculpey. I didn't bother to cast this one out of resin. This would mean that I would have to come up with something else for the hasp on the fore edge, but that could wait. I had bigger fish to fry.

I did a little more roughing up of the leather with some sand paper. I thought it would be easier to do it now than after the resin pieces were attached.

The corner bosses pictured here had just the right blend of organic and angular shape to them. They already had "hammering" dents cast in them, so no need to use the Dremel. These were the only other piece that I used from my "stock" molds. But even those got some work done to them, as I didn't want them to just float on the corner like they usually do, I wanted them to wrap around the corner. So I made some resin strips (which meant another new mold) that I could fuse to the original pieces at right angles at the edges that would hang over the corners. You can't see the modifications very well in the pics, but trust me, it meant extra work.

Deciding on the design for the iron bindings was probably the hardest part of this project. Making my vague idea into an actual detailed design took several days and many failed attempts. I went through probably two or three times the number of design sketches that I did for the centerpiece. I started out just trying to do a quick sketch of the over all book, to get an idea of what I wanted to do, but nothing seemed to look right. I didn't start having any success until I started making full scale drawings with the cover sitting right in front of me, helping me to visualize.

Again, I wanted something that had a nice blend of organic, almost tentacle like, protrusions and hard angles. After finally coming up with a design that I liked, I made a few photo copies (so as not to disturb the original) and cut out paper templates to further help me to visualize. I would later use these templates to help sculpt the prototypes out of plasticine clay, which would then be molded in silicone, and then cast in resin.

I ended up making two versions of the part that would go on the spine. One had symmetrical lower "beards" and the other had asymmetrical ones. I vacillated between the two for quite some time, before deciding on the asymmetrical ones. My reasoning being, I liked them both, but the symmetrical ones would only look good if the points came together perfectly in the final fitting. The asymmetrical ones would look good even if they did not line up perfectly.

Keeping with the motif, I went through more than a dozen designs for the part of the bindings that would lay on the front and rear boards before I finally found one that I liked. I used the same process as on the spine piece, drawing at full scale, and then photocopying and cutting out paper templates. The next step will be sculpting them in plasticine clay.

...But that will have to wait until next time.

See also:

Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 1)
Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 3)
Doctor Glamour - De Vermis Mysteriis
Doctor Glamour (fini)

Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 1)

2011-05-02T07:02:00.004-04:00

As I stated in an earlier post, I was recently commissioned to create two prop tomes for the upcoming film project, "Doctor Glamour". While the first, De Vermis Mysteriis, was a fairly simple and straight forward build, the second and larger of the two, the Necronomicon, was a much more involved project. I had some difficulty finding the right book to use as the base of my tome. I wanted something that was very thick and had a large format. I was looking for a large unabridged dictionary type volume such as the one I used for the Black Duke project. Unfortunately I was not able to find exactly what I was looking for. Any book I could find that was of the format size I desired did not have the thickness I required. After considering my options, I decided to use a book that was roughly the same size as the dictionary used for the Black Duke project, but that was only about half as thick.

I started by tearing off the cover from the text block, and cleaning up as much of the glue from the spine as I could.

To my surprise, I found that the base book was not made of signatures sewn along the crease, as most hard bound books are, but was sewn from the side near the spine. Coincidentally, the book I used for De Vermis Mysteriis was also sewn this way. I had a plan to make the text block thicker and it would require that I cut the threads that held the signatures together. They did not however immediately fall apart, as they were also held by the remaining glue along the spine. Knowing that the signatures would eventually separate from one another, and that I would eventually have to re-sew the signatures back together anyway, I thought it would be easier to sew them now and leave the threads very loose to allow for expansion.

My plan was to soak the text block in warm water for a while allowing the paper to soak up the water and expand. I had a paperback book once that got wet and when it dried it had swelled to over twice its original thickness. I was hoping for a similar result here. It was actually more difficult than I had expected to get all the pages to soak up the water. I had to keep opening the book under water to different pages in order to get the water to flow between the pages. It took several hours underwater before I was satisfied that it had soaked up the water and expanded the paper fibers. I didn't want to leave it underwater too long or else I would risk the pages tearing. Some did tear, but that would not be a problem. I intended to distress the pages anyway, I just didn't want the whole text block disintegrating to mush.

After taking the text block out of the water bath, I used my finger nails, and also a dremel bit, to gouge up the edges of the pages a little. It was easy to do while the pages were wet and soft. I also tried to pry apart some of the signatures where they were glued together at the spine. This was more difficult than I had expected, but would be necessary, since the spine would also have to grow in thickness, and the glue would restrict the expansion of the pages at the spine.

Fearing that the thread I had used to re-sew the spine was too weak, I sewed it again with synthetic sinew. Then I set the text block on front of a heater fan to dry. The drying took four days, but when it was finished the pages had expanded to over twice their original thickness. I also took the opportunity while the pages were drying to brush on some dark stain mixture along the edges of the pages to make them look old and stained.

Meanwhile, I knew that the cover would need to accommodate the increased thickness of the text block, so I split the cover down the center of the spine. I had to wait until the text block was dry and I could be certain of the new thickness before I could splice in a new piece to widen the spine. When I was sure of how thick the book would be, set the boards the proper distance apart, then I glued in a piece of tyvek on the underside and a piece of mulberry paper on the top side. Tyvek is my new favorite material for making hinges and spines. It is extremely strong, tear resistant and glues well.

While I had spent a lot of time conceptualizing the design of this tome, I still didn't have a clear idea of exactly what I was going to do when I started. I did a lot of test fitting and mock-ups to help me visualize what I wanted. I did have a general direction, but some of the details I would have to struggle with along the way.

I spent two days trying to come up with a design element for the front cover. I didn't want to use something as trite as the symbol from the "Simon Necronomicon", or as common as a pentagram. I tried to design my own Simon-like sigile, but I was not happy with the results. In the end i decided to use a symbol that I had designed for my "Book of IOZ" years ago, and which is featured on some of my Necornomicon Pages. I decided to cut it out of Sculpey, like I did with the title lettering for the De Vermis Mysteriis.

More on this build coming soon.

See also:

Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 2)
Doctor Glamour - Necronomicon (pt. 3)
Doctor Glamour - De Vermis Mysteriis
Doctor Glamour (fini)

Steampunk Phonograph (pt.2)

2011-04-29T01:12:00.003-04:00

In Part 1 of Steampunk Phonograph, I showed you the construction of the "wax cylinders". Now let's take a look at the construction of the phonograph horn.

I have never made something like this before, so my methodology was a bit of a stab in the dark. Luckily, my stab seemed to hit the mark. I started with a kids plastic cheerleader megaphone that I bought from the dollar store. Basically just a plastic cone of approximately the right shape and size for the base of the horn. It would of course need panels added to it to give it that trumpet shape we all recognize. I decided to try corrugated cardboard for the panels, because it is light, cheap and easy to cut and glue. I suppose I could have used cardboard for the entire horn, but when I saw the plastic megaphone, I thought it looked like it was something I could use, so that's what I started with. As it turns out, it was a a good move. The size pieces of cardboard I had to work with, added to the length of the megaphone made for the perfect length for the horn that I wanted.

I had only the vaguest idea how to go about this, so I started by making a paper template. I envisioned six or eight panels coming out of the plastic cone. I measured the circumference of the larger end of the cone and found it to be about 40cm. That divided by eight very well, so I planned on eight panels. I took a standard 8.5x11 piece of scrap paper and folded it in half to get a center line. Then I measured a 5cm segment that would fit to the cone and centered it on the center line. Then I just extended lines out to the far corners, giving me a trapezoid. I had no idea what shape I really needed, I was just figuring on a lot of trial and error.

I folded the lines instead of cutting them, figuring the fold would give it a bit more strength and stability for my test. I made eight of these paper panels and taped them together and had a look at them. It was actually not that bad. And it fit on top of the cone just about perfectly. I could have actually gone with that, but I did think it needed a bit more shape.

I figured that if I angled the line inward a little, halfway along the length, that would add more curve to the horn, or at least another segment of flare. What I really needed was to bring it in a little on both sides with a gentle curve, but I had no idea how to get such a curve and make it consistent. I didn't have anything like a french curve template handy, so I thought I would start with just a straight angle and see how that went. I brought each side in by 1cm, halfway along the length.

I made seven more of these, and taped them together, completing my second paper test horn. I sat it on top of the cone and it fit and balanced perfectly. To get something so flimsy to balance so perfectly on my first try was kind of creepy. It's not taped to the cone in the pic, it's just sitting there, balanced perfectly on the edge.

The angle I had added to the paper panel was taking me in the right direction. The horn had a much more pleasing bell shape to it, though still somewhat angular. But I decided not to press my luck by trying to go for a better curve. Since I was going for a steampunk version of a phonograph, a somewhat stylize horn would be OK. This would do.

I moved to cutting the panels out of corrugated cardboard. First I cut out one of my paper panels and traced it onto a piece of chipboard to make a tracing template. I wanted to make sure all my panels were exactly the same. I was also careful to make sure that the ribbs in the cardboard were running the same direction for each panel.

After cutting out eight panels, I started taping the seams together with masking tape. In my first attempt, I scored the panels at the angle so they would bend nicely at that joint. That looked like crap. What I ended up doing was to bend the panels over the edge of the table, kind of like the way you curl a piece of ribbed ribbon with a pair of scissors. This gave the panels a nice gentle curve that looked exactly like I had envisioned. I wouldn't need a french curve after all. This was supposed to be just a test fit, but when it went together, it fit so nice, I just left them that way. The majority of the tape is along the seams on the underside (outer side) so you can't see it in the photos.

I had originally planned to make the horn in two halves that could be fitted together on site. This would make transport and storage much easier, but that's not really working out so far.

Once I had all the panels taped together for the test fit, I sat it on top of the cone to see how it looked. Voilà!

I played around a while with several different designs to try to find a good way I could marry the cone to the panels in a non permanent way that could be done and undone easily on site, but without much luck. I ended up just gluing them together and covering the joint over with some papier-mâché. Then I coated it all in Mod Podge for a sealer and then a base coat of flat black spray paint.

It's hard to get much of a sense of scale from the pictures. The wide end of each of the panels is 8.5" long, making the circumference of the large end of the horn about 68", which would make the wide end about 22" in diameter.

See Also:
Steampunk Phonograph (pt. 1)
Steampunk Phonograph (pt. 3)
Steampunk Phonograph (pt. 4)

James A. Leach, R.I.P.

2011-04-23T04:52:00.000-04:00

This past week, my shop clerk (now retired) suffered the loss of her ex-husband, Jim. James A. Leach passed away in the hospital last week while being treated for pneumonia. Though they were more than twenty years divorced, Jim had been living with Toni and helping her care for her aging mother for the past few years.

In preparation for the memorial service, she and her daughter, both of whom I have known since I was in the second grade, asked if I would help them put together a framed photograph of Jim. They presented me with a very old, very damaged, wallet sized black and white high school senior picture. I had a limited amount of time before the service, and even more limited photoshop skills to draw upon, but I was thankfully able to enlarge the photo to 8x10 and make sufficient repairs as to make it presentable. Above is the retouched photo that was used for the memorial service (reduced in size for bandwidth purposes). Below is the original.

As there would be no viewing of the deceased (the remains were cremated) this photo was the centerpiece of the service. I don't do a lot of photoshopping, but I think it came out fairly descent.

Rest in peace, Jim. You will be remembered.

Steampunk Phonograph (pt.1)

2011-04-21T03:42:00.003-04:00

At this year's Origins Game Fair (June 22-26, 2011) I am running a lovecraftian Live Action Role Playing game based on one I ran last year called "The Space Between". Last year's LARP was basically the prequel to the movie "Event Horizon". The maiden voyage of an experimental spaceship that can travel across the galaxy by punching a hole through space and entering another dimension. This year's LARP, called "Æthernauts", is a reboot of that story, but reworked in a Victorian steampunk setting. To that end, I have a whole slate of steampunk props that I am working on for the game. I don't want to give away any spoilers about the game, but I do want to share the props with you. They are all works in progress at the moment, so I will be posting their construction piecemeal.

This is the first item for Æthernauts that I started on. It is going to be a steampunk phonograph. It was originally just going to be a prop of a regular phonograph, but during the brainstorming, I had the idea to replace the needle with a laser pointer, kind of making it a Victorian CD player.

Using a disk rather than a cylinder would have been much easier. I could have just bought any old vinyl record and made a new label. But I have never been one to take the easy road. I preferred a cylinder, so that's where I started. I had an idea of what might look good, but it was untested, so I had no idea how it would turn out.

I'm on a very tight budget for this project, so the cylinders have their inglorious origins in my bathroom waste bin. These toilet paper rolls needed a little reinforcement, and a way to hide the tell tale spiral seam that makes them look like, well... toilet paper rolls. So I wrapped them in some office paper trimmed to size and coated in glue. Then I gave them a base coat of black spray paint.

Next came the grooves. Making grooves or indentations into the rolls would have been hard, but creating raised ridges is quite easy. A little Mod Podge, a healthy length of black crochet thread, and a lot of patience. It's important to make sure that the windings are evenly spaced and have no crossed windings.

Once the Mod Podge was dry, I gave it another shot of gloss black spray paint. The raised thread looked a little wrong, but luckily I had an idea how I could make it right. I made a strip of paper the width of the space with no windings, and wrapped and glued it to each end of the cylinder. This raised the surface of the cylinder to match the height of the windings, making the grooves below the surface, just like they should be. Another shot of gloss black and viola! (yes, I know. it's a thing)

Being pleased with the results I set about gilding the lily. A custom made cylinder box seemed the thing to do. I based the design on the old player piano scroll boxes we used to have when I was a kid. Antiques even back then. I had never made a box with a fitted lid from scratch, and I was a little concerned that the tolerances would be too tight for me to pull off (exact measurements have never been my strongest suit), but it didn't turn out too bad.

I plan to make some printed paper labels for the boxes, but I haven't designed them yet. I did do a little recon to see what actual cylinder packaging of the period looked like, but I actually don't like it, and it's the wrong shape, so I think I'll make some labels reminiscent of the ones on those old piano scrolls.

It might be worth mentioning that before looking up the packaging designs on wikipedia, (which was after I made the prop cylinders) I had never seen an actual wax phonograph cylinder. Of course I had a vague idea what they should look like, but I had never seen a close up picture. They are a lot thicker that I thought. Anyway, I guess most of my players probably haven't seen one up close either. Here's to hoping.

Next up will be work on the body of the phonograph and the speaker horn. I have selected a prefab box to use as the body. I'm going with the rectangular one, on the right. I like the baroque scroll work on the lid. It will serve as a nice speaker grill for the real speakers that will be hidden inside.

More on that later.

See Also:
Steampunk Phonograph (pt. 2)
Steampunk Phonograph (pt. 3)
Steampunk Phonograph (pt. 4)

Doctor Glamour - De Vermis Mysteriis

2011-04-15T06:17:00.005-04:00

About two months ago, I received an email from someone who saw the tome I made for "The Black Duke" film project and was interested in having me make something for him. Later he told me it was for a film project of his own, and he wanted me to create two prop tomes; a "De Vermis Mysteriis" and a "Necronomicon". Filming was to begin in mid April, so he needed an answer right away. I received this request with the usual reluctance, but I needed the money, so I agreed.

The upcoming film is called "Doctor Glamour". It's kind of a campy lovecraftian themed oddity set in a steampunk alternate Arkham. Oh, and did I mention, it's a musical! The client, independent film director Andrew Jones, didn't give me much in the way of requirements or specific direction. In fact, about the only specific direction he gave me was to avoid the color green, as the film was going to be shot in front of a green-screen. But he did send me links to his production blog and to the film script. There was enough detail there for me to get a good idea what he was looking for.

As with most commission jobs, time was short, and as usual, I spent too much of it wrapping my head around the project, waiting for design ideas to "click". Once they did, I had to put in some very long nights to make the deadline.

The first tome I worked on was the De Vermis Mysteriis. The first step, after doing a bit of brainstorming, was to select a base book of the appropriate size. I had intended on using a larger book than I ended up using, but because I wanted there to be a significant size difference between the two tomes and I was having trouble finding a base book for the Necronomicon that was as big as I wanted, I settled on an average sized "New Standard Encyclopedia" (volume "B"). I removed the text block from the case and cleaned up the glue in the usual way. Then I sanded the boards a bit so that the new covering material would adhere better.

I knew that I wanted to have the tile in raised letters on the cover for this one, but I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to accomplish that. I had thought I would cut the design out of chipboard and glue it to the cover and then use my crumpled paper technique over it. But even after selecting a font with minimal serif, cutting it out of chipboard was going to be far too difficult. I decided to try an experiment. I printed the title out to full scale and laid it over a rolled out piece of Sculpy.

At first I started cutting through the paper and Sculpy with an Xacto knife, but that was still too difficult, especially around the tight corners. So I lifted a technique from Michelangelo, and poked tiny holes through the paper with a straight pin, following along the edges of the design. The holes created dimples in the Sculpy that were visible enough to follow after the paper was removed. I then followed the outline of holes and cut out the letters with the Xacto knife, very carefully.

This technique worked better than I had anticipated. Cutting the letters out of Sculpy was far faster and easier than I thought it would be, and WAY easier than cutting them from chipboard would have been. I also got a much cleaner edge. I had been smart enough to lay the sheet of Sculpy on a thin metal sheet that I could put directly in the oven without having to move the letters.

After the letters were baked, I glued them to a piece of hardboard and gave them a coat of sealer. The I created an RTV silicone rubber mold of them. I could have used the Sculpy originals on the tome, but I was afraid I might screw something up, and have to cut them out all over again. This way I could make a resin copy of the letters and re-cast them as many times as I needed. The resin casting actually came out very nice and in one piece, with a very very thin membrane of plastic holding all the letters together. This would normally be considered "flash" and be trimmed off, but in this case it was actually helpful in keeping the letters aligned.

I glued the resin title to the front cover board, flash and all, and used the crumpled kraft paper over it and also the back cover board. Then the paper was given a base coat of black acrylic paint, which was followed up with a sponged on stippling of dark brown, and finally dry brushed with a light golden brown acrylic paint. I had never used brown paint for this technique before, and I have to say the resemblance to leather was uncanny.

After turning in the edges, I stuck the book-block back in for a test fit to make sure everything was hunky-dory. Also, this gave me an opportunity to set the groove with my bone folder.

I added a strip of chipboard to the spine to strengthen and stiffen it. I also glued on pieces of cut heavy cord to simulate raised cords on the finished spine, which would soon be covered in soft black leather.

I got the leather that I used for the spine and corners from cutting up an old leather jacket that I bought from a thrift store.

The last step before antiquing was to add brass upholstery tacks along the edges of the leather. I actually liked the look of the book so much at this point that I considered not doing any more antiquing to it. I think I may make some more books in this same design.

But the antiquing must go on, so I pulled out a couple of the upholstery tacks and painted around the edges of some of them (including the empty spaces where tacks were removed) with some green faux patina paint. I also used a dry brush with brown and black around the edges and on the leather itself for some aging and grime. I made a few small slits in the leather with an Xacto knife and lightly sanded it in places. Then I took a mini butane torch to some areas, especially the slits, which the heat opened up wider and made look older and more natural.

The final step in preparing the cover, was to apply some gold Rub-N-Buff to the raised letters on the cover.

All that was left to do was to deal with the text block. I hadn't originally planned to, but I ended up giving the page edges a light shot of gold paint to simulate old worn gilding. The tome was going to be open on screen, so it needed to have some custom interior pages. The client only wanted two custom pages, but I ended up giving him four, so that he had the option of turning a page on camera. The custom pages feature a few of my pieces of line art that I made for my Necronomicon Pages. The text is actually spells taken from our public book of shadows here at the shop and laid out in a nice Old German font similar to the title. I aged and trimmed these pages and tipped them in to the center of the text block.

The last step, of course, was to case in the text block.
And here it is. De Vermis Mysteriis, all ready for its big screen debut!

... Tune in next time for pictures from the making of the Necronomicon.

See Also:

Doctor Glamour - The Necronomicon (pt. 1)
Doctor Glamour - The Necronomicon (pt. 2)
Doctor Glamour - The Necronomicon (pt. 3)
Doctor Glamour (fini)

Adam Freaking Savage

2011-04-10T04:36:00.000-04:00

Last week I sold a set of Necronomicon pages on my Etsy site, which in and of itself isn't too unusual. But the thing that made this particular sale stand out was the name on the paypal receipt. Adam Freaking Savage!

Not to gush like a fanboy, but I'm a big admirer of his work, both on and off the show. He's where I wish I could be. Not the blowing shit up thing (though I may, or may not, have done a fair bit of that in the past, but without the cameras, or witnesses), but the professional prop maker thing. His attention to detail (obsession, really) is amazing. Just the idea that he would find something of mine worth buying, even as a passing novelty, is pretty ego boosting. Plus,..

Adam Freaking Savage!

Necronomicon Pages set #8 & #9

2011-03-17T09:38:00.000-04:00

I have finally finished work on sets #8 and #9 of my Necronomicon Pages series. This brings the total to 36 pages (and one more that was created for another project and is not included in any set). All nine sets are currently available on my Etsy and ebay pages.

Like the previous sets in this series, they include cryptic text, macabre artwork and unique detailing (there are no burnt edges or blood spatters on the ones pictured but there are on the finished product). the artwork, as before is a mixture of mideval woodcuts and original artwork by artists such as myself, Zarono and Darren Campbell.

Those who purchase the entire set as a whole get a small discount on the overall price, and I also try to stuff in a couple of bonus items for those customers too. The first print run of the new series was only 10 copies and three of those have already sold on eBay. This is not a limited series, but if you want to be the first kid on your block to complete your set, you better get them fast before this printing sells out or you may face delays while I work on another batch.

Matched Set

2011-03-11T21:42:00.000-05:00

My shop has been closed for the winter, due to high heating costs, and I haven't been in the workshop as much as I should have in the past few months. But I did manage to get down there for a few days to complete work on a commission that I got just before the shop closed for the season.

A regular customer of mine had previously spoken to my clerk about the book repair and recovering that I do. He managed to get in touch with me just in time to commission me to repair and recover two very large and heavy hardback books from his collection. Not that either of them were all that old, or even poorly made. In fact one of them had nothing wrong with it at all, but the other had seen quite a bit of use and the covering was starting to come off of the spine. He wanted me to repair it and recover both so that they would look like a matched set.

The books in question are both from author Judika Illes. The Element Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells, and The Element Encyclopedia of Witchcraft. Both of with are very good books that I recommend. They can be a little hard to find in bookshops, no only because they are metaphysical books, but as the publisher, Element (a division of Harper Collins), does not seem to have a distributor in the U.S. I eventually got a few copies for the shop by ordering from a distributor that is based in Canada. Ms. Illes and I actually exchanged a few very nice emails over the subject a little while back.

The customer requested the painted kraft paper covering with a large raised pentagram in the center. He wanted both books to match except for their color. He wanted one to be green and the other to be red. Laying out a pentagram seems like it would be easy, but it's not. In order to get it just right you need a good protractor and the ability to do some calculations, or a very good background in geometry. The geometric construction of a regular pentagram is one of the more complicated ones I have ever seen for a simple geometric figure. In this case I went with the protractor. You actually have to draw the pentagram three times. Once to get it right (which becomes the center line) and then again shifting the lines a few millimeteres to the left and then to the right, so that you have lines you can actually cut on.

Most of the books I recover have flat spines, but these were rounded spines due to the thickness of the books. I was a little concerned about this, but it turned out to be no problem for me at all. I reused the existing front and back book boards and added some material to stiffen and strengthen the hinges and the spine. The paper covering was done in the usual manner, with the pentagram underneath. I designed some decorations to add to the corners on the front and back, because the pentagram alone seemed a little too plain.

I decided to change from my usual method when it came to pasting down the end papers. I usually mask off the area and use a spray adhesive, which works well at first and dries instantly with no moisture, but I have been having some concerns about this method. Some of the books I have used it on have, over time, developed wrinkles and puckers in the end papers that I can't explain. Also, the spray glue seems to weaken over time. So instead I decided to use white glue. I used a foam roller to apply it very sparingly and let it sit a moment before pasting the papers down and smoothing it out. It seemed to work out well, and I intend to continue using this method for a while to see if it makes for a nicer finish in the long run.

At the last minute, I decided to add some stick-on lettering to the spine to denote the titles of each book. Getting the spacing and alignment right was a big pain, but I think they came out well. I had intended to put the author's last name as well, but to tell the truth, it slipped my mind until after they were picked up by the customer.

I have another movie prop commission coming up, so I'll be back in the workshop now for a while. I also have a bunch of steampunk props I am making for a larp for this year's Origins. Those will keep me very busy. I'll be sure to post lots of pics.

Get It For Less

2011-02-26T16:19:00.000-05:00

I am currently in the process of posting all of the recent Rose Quill Pens into my ETSY.com shop (http://www.etsy.com/shop/roguecthulhu).
As an added bonus, I am extending a 5% discount to all readers of this blog. This applies not only to the pens, but to all the items in my etsy shop. Just input the discount code: DISCOUNT5ARXT at checkout and you will automatically get a 5% discount off of the listed price of all items (not including shipping charges).

All the new pens are already listed on my eBay store as well (http://www.witchcrafters.com). I don't know of any coupon feature available in eBay, but if I find one, I'll make a coupon for that too and post the code here.

A Rose By Any Other Name

2011-01-31T19:57:00.000-05:00

It's been a log time coming, but I have finally put the finishing touches on my latest project, and just in time for Valentine's Day. Silk rose quill pens!

This past Christmas season, I had a part time job working at my favorite craft store. As I was working the register, a customer came through with some silk flowers (they sell a lot of silk flowers there). Only, for some reason, these particular flowers struck me as the perfect size and shape to be used as finials on top of a quill pen. I don't know what it was about them, but seeing them just made it click in my head. And so I thought to myself, I don't think I've ever seen a flower used on a quill pen before. Lots of feathers, yes, but never a flower. So I bought one to try it out. First I bought a black rose bud that was left over from the Halloween stock. You know, for the goth girls.

That seemed to work out pretty well, so I went back and bought a couple more. Then I thought, why just make pens for the goth girls? Regular girls can write bad poetry too. Why not make flower pens that appeal to everyone? So I went back and raided the silk flower isle looking for anything that I thought would look good as a pen. Admittedly, I kept my eye mostly on the roses. But I did buy one other kind of flower.

I had a girlfriend back in the day who loved calla lilies. When I saw this one, I immediately thought of her (not that I needed an excuse). It was the right size and shape, so I tried it. I think it turned out rather well. I have considered sending it to her as a gift but, after all these years, that might just create more unease than happiness, and that's not what I want.

While I was shopping for flowers, I sauntered down the wedding supplies isle and found some cute charms that I could add to the pens. I knew that I would probably be wrapping the joint where the stem meets the pen shaft with some kind of ribbon or something, and I thought a little charm hanging from the ribbon would be a nice accent piece.

As for the grip, some of those I wrapped with ribbon,

and some of them I wrapped with metal wire.

I haven't yet used any of the metal tubes that I plated with copper using my galvanic plating/etching rig, but some of these are made with the same metal tubing that has been lacquered. In general, the long ones with lots of stem and leaves, like this one...

...are the ones that have the metal tubing for shafts. They average about 13 inches in length and some of the original artificial flower stem has been preserved, making them look pretty much just like flowers when they are in their bud vase holders.

Which brings me to the bud vase holders. I can't believe I hadn't thought of using a bud vase as a pen holder sooner than I did. I actually spent several days trying to think of something to use as a holder so that I could package them as sets. When it finally dawned on me I felt really stupid for not thinking of it immediately. I went to several different stores and picked out quite a few different designs and sizes of vase to try out. I have managed to make use of most of them. I'm glad I didn't just get one kind of vase for all of them. Some of them really work better with one style vase or another. As the project went on, I started doing a little bit of decorating of the vases too. As you can see, silver hearts were not the only little metal charms that I bought for decorations.

The shorter pens (averaging about 9.5" in overall length), like the one above, have wooden shafts. The wooden shafts have two advantages. One, is that they are cheap. I can get 24 pen shafts out of a $1 pack of a dozen 12" hardwood dowels. Compare that to the 11 slightly shorter shafts I can get out of one 60" metal tube, that costs about $7. The other advantage to the wooden shafts is that they can easily be drilled. I have to drill two small pilot holes into the shaft when I do the wire wrapping, so that I can tuck in and hide the ends of the wire. I can not easily do that with the metal shafts (if at all).

The metal shafts (like the one pictured above) have one big advantage. They paint very quickly and easily. All I have to do is cut them, quickly buff them with fine sand paper, string them on a bamboo skewer for painting, do a quick light spray from the paint can to prime them, let it dry just a few seconds, then give it a heavy covering coat and once that is dry it's ready for clear top coat sealer. The prep and painting process probably takes no more than two or three minutes per pen. I get a really nice even finish with basically one coat of paint. If you scratch them, however, the paint will chip off easier than with the wooden shafts. I usually give them a double coat of clear acrylic sealer to help prevent them from getting scratched by the metal charms or the rim of the vase. I may look for a metal primer to use on them before painting to see if that helps too.

In contrast, the wooden shafts (like the one pictured above) take a lot of work to prep and paint. First, I have to sand them with medium sand paper, then fine sand paper. Then, in order to eliminate tiny crevices caused from the wood grain, I have to rub them down with a piece of air-dry clay to fill all the tiny cracks and imperfections that will show up when it is painted. I used air-dry clay because I didn't have any wood filler putty at the time I implemented this step to solve the tiny crevice problem. Later I get some wood filler, but I honestly like the air-dry clay better. Then after the clay is dry, I have to sand it again with medium, then fine sand paper. Then I have to cut them to length and drill tiny pilot holes and insert T pins in the ends to hold them while they are painted and drying. Then a coat of primer. Then another sanding. Then paint. Then wet sanding. Then more paint. Then more wet sanding. Then more paint. I have to sand and paint at least three times to get a nice finish. After I do the wire wrap, I usually have to mask them off and give them one more quick touch up coat, because I can hardly do the wrapping without marring the finish a little. Then, finally, clear acrylic sealer. With drying time, this process takes about two to three days.

I think the wire wrapping around the grip looks and feels better than the satin ribbon. But it is much more work and I can only do three or four of them a day because it makes my hands hurt. First you have to drill a tiny hold in the shaft on the back side at the tip. Then you stick the end of the wire in the hole and start wrapping. You have to keep the wire very taught and wrap very carefully in order to get a nice kink and gap free wrap. Then, while keeping the wire taught, because at this point it is like a spring, you have to drill another tiny hole at the top of the wrapping on the back of the shaft, making sure to get it as close to the top winding as possible, and without marring either the top winding or the shaft. It needs to be very discreet. Then, still keeping tension on the wire windings so they don't go SPROING and unwind, you have to cut the wire in just the right spot, and bend a 90 degree tab in just the right spot, so that you can fit the tab into the hole to anchor it. This hides the end of the wire, and prevents future sproing. You have to use needle nose pliers to get the tab into the hole and you have to do it without marring either the wire or the shaft with the pliers, and while holding the tension on the wire. You only have one shot to get it perfect. Multiple attempts invariably led to imperfections. In short, it sucks. But I love the way it looks when it comes out right.

For my first batch of flower pens I made 19 different sets, each with its own bud vase holder. I did, red roses, black roses, white roses, light pink roses, a yellow rose, and one calla lily. These pics are obviously not all of them, but this post is already getting kind of long and these pictures are HUGE, so I think I'll hold off on posting the rest until I trim them down a bit. I have all 19 currently up for sale on my ebay store, with lots more pics of each one. You can view them here. They would make a great Valentine's Day present for a loved one, especially one that likes to write poetry (like most girls do) or who likes quill pens. They range from $25 to $35 for each set, which I think is a fair price, given all the labor that went into them and given that ostrich feather and macaw feather pens are selling on ebay anywere from $20 to $100 each. The heavy glass bud vases do make them a little expensive to ship, but I will ship them all Express Mail to ensure you get them by Valentine's Day.

Galvanic Copper Plating

2011-01-10T03:59:00.002-05:00

Hello again; long time no blog. I'm back in the workshop again, finally, and very excited about my current project. It's more quill pens, but they are very nice and different from what I had been making. I'm experimenting with some new materials, including shafts made of metal tubing. Some of which are being painted, and some I am going to try copper plating. This post is less about the pens (more on them later) and more about the copper plating process.

Some of you may remember my first attempt at using electrolytic (galvanic) etching. If not please check it out. Also it is worth checking out the reference sites I linked to in that post, especially of you are planing on doing any etching or plating yourself. Last time I was focused on etching. This time I am more interested in plating. The process is exactly the same, but with the polarity reversed.

I'm going to start with the raw metal tubing. What I'm using is 1/4 inch galvanized automotive break line. You can get it at any automotive parts store. I got a 60" long line for about $7. Both ends are flared, so if you don't want that, you will have to cut the flare off. I did. Then I cut a section to the desired length (5.25") with a tubing cutter. Tubing cutters can also be found in an automotive or hardware store. Mine cost less than $10. They are used for cutting any kind of metal tubing, but especially copper plumbing pipe.

Speaking of copper plumbing pipe, that's what I'm going to be using for both my anode and my vessel. I took a short piece of used copper pipe, I think it was 3/4" pipe that happened to be about 9" long, and cleaned it out real well with some muriatic acid (HCL). I was more interested in cleaning the interior than the exterior since that is the side that will be reacting during the plating process. I then stoppered up one end with a cork. This pipe will be filled with my electrolytic solution (copper sulfate) and will, again, serve as both the reaction vessel and the anode (I'm pretty sure I'm using the word anode correctly in this context, but please don't beat me up if I am not). Another advantage to using a copper pipe like this, is that all the surfaces to be plated are roughly equidistant from the anode and copper source material, which should ensure an even plating. If I were to use a copper plate anode on one side of a tank and the tube to be plated on the other, such as with my rig from my previous experiment, the copper would tend to deposit mainly on the side facing the anode.

I want to make sure that the piece of tubing is coated evenly and with no blemishes, so I will solder on a small metal tab for the alligator clip to attach. In my first attempt I used a 1" steel brad, but in this pic, I am using a "T" pin. I placed the end of the pin inside the tubing along with a small piece of solder (after coating the pin with flux). I used a neodymium magnet along the outside of the tubing to help hold them in place while I heated the pin with a small butane torch to melt the solder. I also ran some 1000 grit sand paper over the outer surface of the tubing to make sure it was nice and smooth for plating, though that probably wasn't strictly necessary.

I wanted to make sure that the copper pipe stayed perfectly upright during the process, so I used some newspaper as wadding and wedged it into the mouth of a glass jar I had handy. The jar will also serve to catch any leaks in case my corked end is not perfectly sealed (it isn't). I wrapped some thin galvanized jewelry wire around the outside of the pipe just to give me a convenient place to attach the alligator clip.

The metal tube I am plating will sit nested inside the copper pipe. In case you were wondering from the previous picture, that is a bamboo skewer stuck in the end of the tubing, so that it sits at the right height in the pipe. It is important that the tubing not be allowed to touch the side walls of the pipe, or it will complete the electrical circuit and nothing will happen.

Then the pipe is filled with the electrolytic solution, which in this case is copper sulfate. As in my previous experiment, I used a commercial septic cleaner called "Root Gone", which comes in a crystal form, that I added to water to the saturation point. I made sure that the water level was above the top of the tubing. As the cork leaks a bit, I will have to top it off periodically.

Using test leads with alligator clips on the ends, I attached the positive terminal of a generic 9V battery to the copper pipe, and the negative terminal to the metal tube (actually, to the T pin). In my previous experiments, using 12V at high amperage for short times was way too much current. It ate the anode very quickly and although it did deposit material on the cathode, that material did not bond and was easily wiped off. My previous experiments of using 1.5V at low amperage worked better, but very slowly. I did, however, leave it on for too long (14 hours) and it, again, ate through my anode. I was looking for some middle ground. I didn't have a 6V battery, so I thought I would try a used 9V that was still good, but kind of weak. I wanted the process to go fast enough that it didn't take all night, but slow enough that the copper being deposited would bond properly to the metal tubing.

I left it set up for about an hour and then checked it. SUCCESS! I had a nice even (if not a little thin) copper coating that was well bonded to the tubing. I wanted a little thicker coating, so I wiped it down and put it back in for another hour. Something worth noting, is that the finished product does not come out the nice warm orange-copper color we are used to seeing on pipes and wiring. It comes out a very bright garish, almost pinkish copper color, like a mint fresh penny. I'm sure a few days in the open air will tone it down and warm up the color (I hope).

On a side note, my used 9V battery was good for about two and a half plating sessions (total of 5 hours) before it had to be replaced. One problem I keep having is, I can never seem to remember which way to connect the battery. I have to keep looking it up. So this time I wrote myself a little note to keep with my gear. Material is REMOVED FROM THE POSITIVE terminal, and DEPOSITED ON THE NEGATIVE terminal. Write that down, kids.

UPDATE: Although the first two tubes I plated with this rig went off without a hitch, good coverage, no problems. The third and fourth tubes were both problematic. The third one was the one where I switched batteries between the first and second hours, and its finish came out dark in some areas. It plated evenly, but it didn't look nice. The fourth was just a mess.The copper only stuck in patches, and covered less than half of the tube. I tried all sorts of alterations to the power supply to solve the problem. I switched out the battery again; I tried using a "wall wart" transformer (5V 2A and another that was 12V 800mA); I tried using a C cell battery. I got plenty of copper built up, but nothing would stick, and I even noticed some degradation of the tube wall thickness on just one end that sort of puzzles me. And I think I burnt out both of the wall warts I used. I guess my apparatus still needs some work. I will have to go online and see if I can find out what the optimal voltage and amperage would be. If anyone else has any idea what went wrong, please leave a comment.

Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?

2010-11-29T03:50:00.001-05:00

Hot off the work bench, here is my latest Cthulhu Cycle re-cover effort. This is a copy of Robert W. Chambers', The Yellow Sign and Other Stories, published by Chaosium as part of the Cthulhu Cycle series of short horror fiction books. It was made using the same techniques and in the same style as the other Cthulhu Cycle books I have recovered (which you can also find on this blog, in case you're a new visitor). It has a custom hard cover made with the crumpled paper technique and features the customary tentacle motif frame with brass tack heads, and a central glyph on the front cover. This time the glyph is my own interpretation of the Yellow Sign, which is based on a drawing by Jason VanMeter, which was probably inspired by the well known design by Kevin Ross.The sketch by VanMeter is one of my favorite Mythos images. It was just a simple doodle he made on the outside of an envelope that he had mailed from Japan to a mutual friend. The background was manila and it had several postmarks over top of it. I liked the image so much that I scanned it and spent hours doing color separations and clean up in photoshop (with my admittedly limited skills) to try to liberate the image from from its original media.

Click for larger images

The color scheme on this volume is different than any of the others I have done so far. It was done in mottled white and ivory acrylic paint over a yellow background and highlighted in gold. I also went with a gloss topcoat on this one, whereas I usually use a matte topcoat with this painting and finishing style. But I thought the gloss looked better with this color scheme. The glyph is done, as usual, in black with gold highlights. The book has yellow end papers and a black satin ribbon bookmark.

Because I was going with a lighter color scheme on this one, I used white butcher paper instead of brown kraft paper for the covering material. It seemed to work fine. In fact there was little difference to the way the two behaved. If anything, I thought the butcher paper was a little more manageable.

The tentacle motif frame around the front and back covers got an update with this edition too. The design I had been using was very difficult to cut out with a razor knife due to its tight curves. I re-drew the border with slightly larger tentacles that had more gentle curves and fewer tight corners, so that it would be easier to cut. Otherwise, it looks very similar and you probably wouldn't have noticed the change if I hadn't pointed it out.

New Domain Name

2010-11-20T16:00:00.001-05:00

Old followers may have noticed that I recently added a title logo for this blog. I'm trying to spruce things up a bit. I also recently purchased the www.mrxdesigns.com domain name and a beefy hosting package (it was on sale). Right now it just redirects to this blog, but who knows, maybe soon I will add some other features and even set up a gallery or shopping cart on my site!

Upsetting News

2010-11-20T15:57:00.000-05:00

I got an upsetting email the other day from the folks over at Shadowmanor.com, where I sold some custom covered blank journals last year. It seems they have had a complaint from one of their customers who purchased one of the books I made. It looks like the binding is experiencing some issues. Reading their understandably unhappy email, and seeing the (albeit fuzzy) pictures of the damage was very distressing to me. I am currently working with Shadowmanor.com to rectify the situation the best way I can. I have offered to fix any construction or materials issues that may exist for this, and any other of the books I made for them, at no charge. I'll even ship them back at my own expense.

Hopefully this is an isolated incident, but if you purchased one of my books from Shadowmanor.com and it is experiencing any construction or materials issues (short of abuse), please email me. You can send me your book and I will do whatever I can to fix the problem.

More Cthulhu Cycle Re-Covers

2010-11-20T15:45:00.001-05:00

Hello all. It's been a while since my last post. I have started a new job, so I haven't been in the workshop as much. Plus, I just haven't felt like blogging lately. Oddly though, my traffic hasn't completely fallen off, and I've even picked up three new followers since my last post, about a month ago.

Here are some pics of my latest books to sell on eBay. They are all Cthulhu Cycle books published by Chaosium. They are all done in the same style as my previous Cthulhu Cycle re-covers.
First up: "Arkham Tales".

Next, "The Book of Eibon".

And third, "The Terror".

Each of these sold to the same guy on eBay. He is also interested in my re-cover of "The Yellow Sign", which is almost finished. He's going to have a lot of good reading to cozy up to the fire with this holiday season!

The Black Duke - the Set (fini)

2010-10-17T17:13:00.000-04:00

Thanks to a feature spot on Propnomicon, I got a bump in traffic today. So I figured this would be a good time to post the last of the pictures of the Black Duke project. These are just pictures that had more than one item in them, which I wanted to hold back since I was posting each item separately. Also, I have some glamor shots of the set as a whole. If you haven't already, click on the links at the end to see production shots and finish shots of each of the items in the set. I hope you enjoyed this project. I haven't heard anything about the production of the film since sending off the props, but it was scheduled to shoot in like April, so hopefully it is well underway. There has been no activity on the website (www.blackedgeproductions.com), so that may be a bad sign. Anyways, I wish them the best of luck with the project. Now, on with the last of the pictures-

As always, click through for larger images.

The Black Duke - the Tome (part 2)

2010-10-14T15:37:00.003-04:00

I haven't been in a blogging mood lately. Sorry about that. Anyways, on with the Black Duke Project...

After securing the antiqued leather straps to the cover, I removed the masking tape place holders and glued the painted resin bosses and centerpiece in place. These were made the same way as my other projects, with cast resin finished with acrylic paint and some gold rub-n-buff.

Once all the cover attachments were in place and dry, I "cased in" the text block, meaning I glued the pages into the cover. In order to come anywhere close to matching the coloration of the natural pages, I had to custom paint the end papers. In addition to my usual coffee and tea dying treatment, I also used a foam roller and some "antique varnish" acrylic paint to add some "foxing" to the edges of the paper. The paper I started with had a very light lavender color to it. I don't remember now why I thought that would make a good base color to start with, but I remember thinking that it would.

This was the first time I had attempted anything like this technique, and I had mixed feelings about the results. I made extra sheets in case something went wrong during the paste up. I picked the two that matched the closest when it came time to use them. On their own, I don't think they look bad, but they didn't really match the natural aging on the rest of the dictionary's pages. However, they were convincing enough to use, and they matched the general color closely enough that if someone were flipping through the pages, there wouldn't be a terribly noticeable difference.

I used the same "antique varnish" paint to add foxing to the inserted pages as well, but with a much lighter hand. I laid out the interior pages in two columns, and used an Old English typeface font with justification. The text itself was lifted from latin liturgical texts (I have no idea what they say). A few pieces of line art were thrown in to break up the text. Their placement was strictly based on visual astetics. The line art was a mixture of actual medieval woodcuts, available on the internet, and drawings I had made for my Necronomicon Pages.

Additionally, there were several full color images that the clients wanted me to incorporate. I featured these as full page plates set aside from the text. The color images had to be printed after the aging of the paper because my printer does not have waterproof colored ink. As mentioned previously, these pages were "tipped in" to the existing text block by running a thin line of glue along the gutter edge, thus gluing it to the page in front of it.

With the interior custom pages tipped in, the text block cased in, and the cover embellishments all in place, the Tome was nearly finished. At this point it looked very much like many of the prop tomes I have made over the past few years. But this time I was going to try something different. This time I was going to add the finishing touch that would really sell this as an ancient tome of evil. Grime.

I started out subtlety, as this was the first time I had tried this and wasn't entirely sure how it would work. I used a black acrylic paint (which dries flat) and a dry brush and gently stabbed at the creases and crevices where I thought dirt and grime would accumulate. Also, I added the flat black to the edges and areas where I thought the object would get the most wear. In the pic above, you can just see the darkening around the edges of the leather straps and along the head and tail of the spine.

I continued this process around each side, applying grime around the edges of all the straps, bosses and the centerpiece, and also along the edges. I worked slowly, building up in layers, as actual grime would. I even took a towel and wiped off some of the paint I had added after each application. I wiped the cover as if I were cleaning it, to simulate how the large flat areas would not have as much grim build-up, because of normal handling and the occasional cleaning. I continued until I was satisfied that the book looked truly ancient and used. This simple thing might not seem like much to most people, but it represents a turning point in the realism of my prop work.

With the addition of the grime, the Tome was finished. So, here are about a zillion glamor shots of the finished piece. As you can probably tell, I was pretty proud of it.

I have one more final installment to this series of posts, which will include pictures of the set as a whole. If you are just tuning in, make sure you check out my previous posts of the other items in this set. The links are below.

See also:
The Black Duke - the Diary (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Diary (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 3)
The Black Duke - the Tome (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Set (fini)

Goatswood Recover

2010-10-01T04:47:00.003-04:00

Sorry to break the flow of the Black Duke - Tome posts, but I wanted to get this up there to coincide with its ebay sale.

I just recently finished this exciting recover of the paperback Call of Cthulhu role playing supplement book, "Ramsey Campbell's- Goatswood, and less pleasant places", published by Chaosium.

The finished book measures 11.25" tall by 8.75" wide and 1" thick. the new hardcover was created with paper covered chipboard, in the usual manner. There is not much new in the way of construction technique for this project, so I didn't bother with any construction photos.

The finish is a mottled dark green and black with copper highlights. The most striking and unique features of this project are the front title plate and frame, and the rear goat's head silhouette applique. Both are of my own design. They were made from chipboard, and have been given the same antiqued copper finish. They were intended to look very old and dirty. The whole cover was made to have a sort of unhealthy antique appearance.

The tack heads that dot the appliques and which ring the edges of the book are much easier to see in the larger version of the photos (click through). They are real metal brads that were pushed through the cover and cut off at the back.

The title plate was printed on a special paper made from coffee leaf. It has a natural red blotchy parchment like color that did not require any dying or antiquing. I glued it to a piece of card stock to give it more body and then glued it to the back side of the frame.The bookmark is black cloth ribbon.

The inside front cover has a blank book plate (also known as an "ex libris" plate) for the owner to fill out at his discretion. This is the same book plate that I used in the Shadowmanor.com journals that I did not have pictures of, so just in case you were wondering what it looked like, here it is. The book plate was sort of an afterthought (it was a left over from the Shadowmanor journals) and I don't really think the coloration goes that well with the end papers I chose. Perhaps in future versions I will try something else.

This project was very hard for me to get off the ground. It sat dormant in the early stages of production for over a year because I just couldn't wrap my head around what I wanted to do, design wise. Even as I forced myself to move forward on this, I was very uncertain of the design. It wasn't until I came up with the title plate frame that things started to come together for me and I started getting excited about it. Now that it is finished, I am quite happy with it, and I think I might even do another one just like it (or very similar).

This item will be going up on ebay very shortly (perhaps even today). The original book, without modification, has a cover price of $28, so it will not be cheap, but I think it will be an excellent unique and usable display item for someone who is serious about his or her Call of Cthulhu books. I have a whole line of these recovered supplement books planned and which I hope to have finished in time for the holidays. I also have another three or four Cthulhu Cycle books that will be ready in about a week, so keep watching my ebay page if you are interested.

Update: I posted this item on ebay, and it sold within an hour. It is one of the top two fastest selling items I have ever listed. I never even got around to sending out a notice on my email list (I'm sick right now, so I took a nap). I did post about it on Yog-Sothoth.com.I don't normally list these kinds of items for international sale, as I hate dealing with international shipping. But this time I did. This book will be headed to England. I hope I charged enough for the shipping.

The Black Duke - the Tome (part 1)

2010-09-26T16:24:00.003-04:00

The third and final piece of the Black Duke project was the Tome. The clients wanted something old looking to represent a dark tome, sort of like a satanic or demonic bible. At least that was my interpretation of what they said they wanted. They were originally attracted to my work from pictures on this blog of items such as the Unholy Cross of Cthigla and the 9th Gate tomes. The tome was the first item we discussed (originally it was the only item we discussed, until the project turned into three items). We talked about different design elements, color schemes, covering materials and certain other requirements they had, such as they wanted a large baphomet head image to dominate the first page of the book. They also had some color prints that they wanted incorporated into the interior. They didn't need the whole book to have custom content (which would have been expensive and time consuming as I would have had to lay out each page by hand and sew the signatures), but they did want some custom pages inserted into the body of the book, so that they could open it up and flip through a few pages on camera.

They wanted the dark red lizard skin vinyl covering cloth that they had seen on some of my other tomes, and they finally decided to go with the inverted double cross from the Unholy Cross of Cthigla as the centerpiece. They picked the gothic bosses from the back side of the Unholy Cross of Cthigla tome for all the corners. I gave them a few different size options, and they decided to go with the "big honkin' dictionary" size. It would be a very large and impressive tome indeed. The largest I had ever made.

As with most of my projects, I was eager to get started, so I neglected to take many "before" pictures. Above is the earliest image I have of the tome. It was made from a very old, large format unabridged dictionary (Webster's, I think) that I rescued from a yard sale. It was 8.5 inches wide, 11 inches tall and about 5 inches thick. It weighs several pounds. The cover was a little beat up, but usable. I removed it and cleaned up the spine. The red vinyl cloth was used to recover the original book boards. I did have to perform a little surgery on the original cover. It needed a little larger "square" at the foredge, as the original book was found lacking in that department. The spine covering was fairly soft and the French groves sort of floppy and ill defined. Before re-covering the boards with the vinyl, I decided to cut the spine down the center and paste in a piece of cardstock to make it a little wider. This would push the grooves farther around the corners and push the foredge out a bit. I also had to paint the edges of the text block, as there were these annoying black tabs visible which marked the sections of the dictionary letter by letter. The gilding would hide these spots. You can still barely see them when the book is open and the pages fan slightly.

We decided to go with about a dozen custom pages (technically it was 24 pages, twelve leafs). Some in the front, and some in the middle. I would use a baphomet image that they picked out, as well as some color prints that they had sent to me, along with some actual medieval wood cuts and a few pieces of my own line art that I decided to throw in at the last minute. For the majority of the text, I went with excerpts from liturgical texts in Latin, using an Old English style font that has a very distressed look, like very old hand carved typeface. Luckily, due to the size of the book, standard 8.5x11 pages fit into it almost perfectly, with only very minor trimming needed. Above, you can see the custom pages drying after receiving their aging treatment of black tea, coffee, and walnut ink. The color images had to be printed after the pages were dyed, as the color ink from my printer is not waterproof. Later, these pages would be "tipped in" to place by using a thin strip of glue along the spine edge of the new pages and inserting the pages in the desired location (effectively gluing it to the page in front of it, just along the edge closest to the spine, also called the "gutter"). The original pages of the dictionary were badly yellowed from age (and being printed on poor quality paper), so they would match pretty well to the color of the custom pages if the camera caught someone flipping through the book.

I started designing the cover by laying out the cast resin pieces that I knew I was going to be using. Then, I marked their relative size and location with some masking tape, so that I could see their positions while I was working on other elements.

I decided to go with two thin leather straps with buckles to close the foredge of the book. To balance the design, I went with matching leather straps as decorative pieces across the spine. I started out by working out my design, size, and spacing by making a template out of card stock.

Next, I cut out the pieces from black latigo leather, using the paper templates as a pattern. Even though the leather I used was thick and a little rough, there still needed to be some dressing done to them in order to make them look old and distressed, much like the leather covering and thong used on the Diary. I started by giving them a good rub down with some mink oil. Then I beat the crap out of them with a hammer, giving them dents and marks to simulate age and use. That wasn't enough. I was going for a very old look, so I need a convincing aging of the leather. Next, I took a hobby knife and started making small careful cuts to the surface of the leather, especially along the edges and at corners to simulate nicks, splits, and cracks. In addition to straight slices, I also cut out small triangular wedges for deep splits. This looked pretty good, but still wasn't convincing enough. The real magic happened when I hit the pieces with the propane torch. Just like with the thong from the Diary, the heat from the torch made the leather dry up and shrivel slightly. It exaggerateded the cuts I had made and made them look more like cracks and splits from age and abuse from years ago. It also removed the fuzziness of the flesh side and around the edges, which is a dead giveaway that the leather is not old.

Once the leather pieces were appropriately aged, I could start adding the necessary hardware. The buckles I used were from a craft store and had an antiqued brass finish. In attaching them to the leather, and for attaching the leather to the covers, I used a combination of leather glue (pva) and rivets. The rivets were two part quick rivets that also had an antiqued brass finish. You can see the leather being glued and clamped in the image above the paragraph above. However, the brass collars that hold the strap in place after it is buckled (I have no idea what the technical term for them is) were hand made by me out of sheet brass. Well, actually it turned out that it was steel with brass plating, but that didn't matter much. Making the collars was a big pain in the ass. It involved a lot of heating and hammering, and I don't have a proper anvil anymore for this type of work (I lost my mini anvil in a move), but they turned out really well. I didn't want a sharp edge, so both of the edges had to be turned under. Trying to use a hammer and a pair of pliers to fold a strip of metal lengthwise along it's edge, that is only about 3/4 of an inch wide to begin with, was a real chore. I dry brushed them with black acrylic paint to try to match the antiqued finish of the buckles.

Once the buckles and collars were in place, I started attaching the leather pieces to the cover. The strips that go around the spine were attached first, by placing two rivets in the center of the spine on each strip. Then the book was closed with the text block in place and the decorative ends were glued in place to the front and back covers. No glue was used along the strap, just on the ends. If the book had not been closed when they were glued down, the book would never have been able to close, as closing it would have stretched the leather straps around the hinge. If the straps had been glued down, they would not have been able to buckle as the book was opened and again would have interfered with the working of the hinge. You can see the buckling at the hinge in the picture above. This happens because the hinge of the leather straps and the hinge of the book are operating on a different radius, because one is outside of the other. Obviously it would have been difficult to hammer the rivets with the text block in place, so to do that I hung the cover over the edge of a sturdy table.

The leather straps at the foredge were attached the same way, glued and riveted. This was the first piece that I have made that used this double strap design for a closure. I like it a lot, but it was a lot of work to make.

Tune in next time for the addition of the cast resin pieces and the finishing touches.

See also:
The Black Duke - the Diary (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Diary (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 3)
The Black Duke - the Tome (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Set (fini)

Deus Ex Libri

2010-09-21T03:33:00.003-04:00

Since switching to shorter posts, and posting large projects in serial format, I have been trying to post every three to four days. But, as you can see, I have fallen behind again. Sorry about that. I have been sick for the past few days.

Very shortly I will be posting about the third of the three prop items from The Black Duke project, but first...

A few weeks ago I mentioned that a friend of mine, for whom I was doing some book repair and recovering, brought me an old bible of his mother's that was in need of repair.

This bible (new testament) was printed in England in 1928. It has solid wood boards and (had) a leather spine. The boards are carved olive wood from Jerusalem. The leather spine was very badly rotted, practically non-existent, but the pages were in good shape (I'm told there were one or two pages that had tears, but I didn't see them so I didn't repair them). The end papers were pretty far gone too, but they would have to be sacrificed during disassembly anyway.

I carefully cut away the rotted leather spine with a razor knife. Then I did something I had never tried before, I tried to disassemble the book properly, using water to soften the glue, the way an archivist would. Given the book's age, I assumed it was probably constructed in the "proper" way, and thus should be able to be taken apart by softening the glue with water. Most professional bookbinders and archivists only use glue that is "reversible", meaning can be dissolved, so that any repairs or changes can be "undone". I used a spritzer and carefully wetted the endpapers that were glued to the boards (called "paste downs"). After about an hour the glue began to soften and the papers and their glue were able to be removed. It took quite a bit of wetting and scrapping, but I was able to get all the glue off of the wooden boards this way. I cleaned up the glue from the spine by scrapping it with a knife, just to get any loose glue. I didn't want to risk damaging the signatures, so I didn't bother wetting the spine to remove the glue. The paper used for this bible was that really super thin vellum like stuff. Besides, the spine seemed to be holding up pretty well (apart from the leather) so I didn't think it was necessary. I did, however, remove and replace the rotted silk bookmark that was attached to the spine. I also gave the cleaned boards a good rub down with Old English and let them dry a few days before continuing.

While removing the glue and end papers from the boards, I noticed that one of the boards had been cracked and subsequently repaired by someone else. The repair seemed to be good and was barely noticeable. The crack runs underneath that piece of cellophane tape in the pic above the last paragraph. At first, I thought the tape was just to repair a tear in the end paper.

The next order of business was to cut a new piece of leather for the spine. I started by making a paper template to get the size right. Then, I cut a new piece of leather from an oxblood hide I had in stock. I had considered using the brown "bomber jacket" leather, as the original leather and the end papers were brown, but the brown leather just didn't look as good up against the wood boards.

The next step was to thin, or "skive" the leather, suing a skiving knife. This is a very tedious process that involves basically shaving the flesh side of the leather with a tool akin to what you would use to shave down corns on your feet. But trust me, the two tools are not interchangeable. Using a skiving knife is an art unto itself. One wrong move and you can cut right through the leather. The reason I needed to skive the leather at all, was to reduce its thickness, especially on the head and tail, where it is going to be doubled over to create a neat edge. And, to smooth the transition at the edges where it will be glued to the boards. I don't want the thickness of the leather to be noticeable under the end paper. So mostly I'm just thinning around the edges, probably about an inch in on each side.

I started out using one of my old cutting mats to work on, but after gouging it up at the end of every stroke, it dawned on me to use a sheet of glass as a work surface. It is hard, smooth, and won't scratch or gouge. I will have to remember that trick for the future.

Skiving makes a huge mess, and takes forever. You're left with a huge pile of fluffy leather shavings that want to cling to everything. If you work with leather much, it's a good idea to save these shavings in a plastic bag. You can use them later for some projects. Some repair projects call for mixing glue with leather shavings to create a sort of "spackle" that is used to fill cracks in damaged leather.

A quick test fit determines where to fold over the ends for gluing.

Then comes gluing in the new bookmark and gluing the leather down to the spine. I used a red satin ribbon for the bookmark. The old one was olive green to match the olive wood, but Kelly Green (which is what I had) didn't look right. Since the edges of the pages are red (I think they used to be gilded), and the new leather spine is oxblood, I went with a red ribbon. Unlike the original bookmakers, who did use reversible glue, I used a PVA specially designed for leather. I considered using a reversible glue, but I was not confident in the holding power of wheat paste for the spine. I was afraid it would either not be flexible enough or would dry out and tear off. Oh well, The client isn't too concerned about the archival quality of my work. They just want their bible functional again.

Next comes the end papers. The old ones were a chocolate brown color, and although the paste downs (the part glued to the boards) and one of the flyleaves (the first page, that is also part of the end paper) had to be removed. I still had one flyleaf intact. I was afraid to try to remove it as I didn't want to risk damaging the first page of the text block (the flyleaf is glued to the first page by a thin strip along the fold). So I wanted the new end papers to be brown to match the remaining flyleaf, which would become just another superfluous page. I found a nice textured brown card stock in the scrap-booking section of the craft store.

The card stock was attached to the first and last page in the usual way, using a strip of dry roll-on adhesive film. The end papers were actually put into place before the leather spine was glued on, so I guess I posted that step a little out of order.

To prepare for attaching the boards, I used a piece of emery cloth (it's like sand paper) to rough up the finished surface of the leather. I wanted to make sure it adhered to the boards very well. A slight mis-measurement (about a millimeter) when turning over the head and tail, means that I will have to do a little trimming to making the leather spine meet up exactly with the edge of the boards. That was probably my biggest mistake on this project. Leather tends to stretch, so I can't even say that I measured it wrong. It may have just stretched a little while working with it.

The final step is to mask off the boards around the edges to glue down the "paste downs" (end papers). I used a spray adhesive to glue down the end papers, as I usually do. I like the spray adhesive for this because it doesn't add any moisture to the end papers, and I have had a problem with my end papers wrinkling from moisture in the past.

And that's it! Here is the finished book.

Byron's mom was very happy with it. She said it had been her grandmother's, and she was very happy to have it usable again. With luck, it should last her family another 80 years.

I had intended to cut this down into two posts, but what the hell. I haven't posted all week so, here you go. Enjoy.

Tickle Your Fancy

2010-09-13T02:39:00.002-04:00

Over the past year, since I first had the lamentable notion to buy some dip pen nibs on ebay, I have been enjoying crafting some hand made quill pens. Some with feather bodies and some without. They have been selling, albeit slowly, in my shop, and on ebay and etsy. About a week ago, I noticed that most of the first two batches I made were gone, and only about four or five remained on the shelf. I cranked out a new batch which made use of some nice ostrich plumes I bought for the purpose. Here is the latest crop of quill pen goodness.

You'll of course notice that the basic design of these pens are all the same. I like this design very much. They look nice, are easy to make, and feel good in the hand. However, I am planning on striking out and making some more challenging designs in the near future. This design is made from wooden pony beads glued over a hardwood dowel. The beads I use for them come pre-stained in muted earth tones like the ones above. They are nice, but the pallet is limited. I have taken to repainting them in bolder colors. I started doing so because they don't come in pure white, black or red, all of which I thought would look good with the feathers that I have.

On the ones with white feathers had very ugly brownish central shafts (rachis). It through off the whole design. To rectify the problem, I used a gold leaf paint pen and painted the shaft to cover up the ugly brown. It was a nice effect. I may try more of that sort of thing.

This is the only one that I made in this batch that doesn't have an ostrich plume. It's also probably me favorite of the bunch. I like black and white, with the silver accent.

For the future, I plan to experiment with some different materials, maybe some metal shafts. I also have it in my head to do something with sculpy over a wood dowel core. I also want to buy some higher quality feathers. I have had my eye on some blue macaw and other exotic bird feathers on ebay. They are very beautiful, and would make excellent pens, but they are a little pricey. With Halloween coming up, I need to make some more skull pens.

The Black Duke - the Box (part 3)

2010-09-09T17:29:00.003-04:00

Once all the pieces were glues in place, all that was left was to touch up some of the paint on the accent pieces, and to add some paint to help sell the item as being ancient.

I previously posted about using acrylic paint to add "grime" to a prop tome to give it a very used and ancient look. The Black Duke project was the first project in which I used that technique, and I was quite pleased at how it came out. The technique was first envisioned to be used on the Tome, but it seemed to make sense to apply it to the Box as well.

I started by loading up a large artist's brush with flat black acrylic paint. Then I wiped most of it off, as I would if I were dry brushing. Then I applied the brush in a jabbing motion around the edges of the accent pieces. I let it get on the accents just a little, and applied it to the wood for a distance of about an inch around the pieces. I layered it up slowly, getting more near the edges of the accent pieces and less as I strayed away from them. I tried not to be too even with its application (though I think I should have done better), so that it didn't look fake. You don't want the edge of the paint to be the exactly same distance away from the accents all the way along. Too much consistency will not look natural.

In addition to flat black, I also added some green in the same fashion, but much more sparsely. I especially added green to areas of the wood where I had torn chunks out of it. It adds a little organic color to the black, making it look more natural. Also, it kind of makes me think of a little moss or lichen taking hold in some of the recessed of the rotting wood. The green is barely noticeable in normal room lighting, but shows up much more prominently in sunlight and under some flash photography conditions. I hadn't really anticipated this when I was making it. I did all of my work indoors in my workshop, which has barely adequate lighting. Once I got it outside to show some people, the green really popped. I even went back and added a little more black on top of it to tone it down. I hope this does not present a problem during filming. In the future, I will be more conscious of this issue on other projects.

The last thing I did was to add some simulated water stains to the front. I imagined that water, even moisture in the air would react with the rusted metal straps around the box, and leave a trail of discoloration on the wood. I used the rust color from the iron finish, along with some flat black, and dabbed in a line coming straight down from the tips of the metal straps, as if by dripping water. I had never tried this before, but it seemed like the right thing to do. However, I was not terribly happy with how it came out, so I stopped there. If it had come out better, I would have probably done it in other places around the box, where it seemed logical for a water stain to occur. It doesn't look terrible. It didn't ruin the piece. It just did not come out as well as I had hoped, so I thought I would rather not add more of an element that I didn't like.

I think the box turned out well, and over all I am happy with it, but there are some things I would do differently. In hindsight, I wish that I had practiced the watermarks things a little before trying it on the production piece, and also, I wish that I had been a little more conscious of the box's appearance under different lighting conditions. I should have also applied a very light coat of the flat black dry brush all over the piece to take away any remaining gloss from the stain. In harsh light, the difference from the clean stained areas, which has a slight sheen, and the dullness of the painted areas is very clear. A very light dry brushing of black acrylic would have toned that down. The glossy areas aren't very convincing as being ancient. But again, this is only visible in harsh light, like sunlight or under flash. I hope it doesn't show up on camera in the movie.

I told you, I took a lot of pictures.

Stay tuned for the next installment of The Black Duke project, the Tome.

See also:
The Black Duke - the Diary (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Diary (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Tome (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Tome (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Set (fini)

The Black Duke - the Box (part 2)

2010-09-03T01:07:00.006-04:00

... So there it was, all nice and pretty and waiting for the next inevitable step.

My heart was heavy with dread at preparing for the next phase of fabrication. It looked so beautiful as is, I really didn't want to have to mess it up. But the clients wanted the box to look very old and beat up. Of the three props, they wanted the box to show the most weathering and damage from age and abuse. So I grabbed my tools, took a DEEP breath, and started tearing into it.

First I started hammering dents into the surface with a small ball peen hammer, then I took some heavier swings at it with a claw hammer. Then I started raking the claw of the hammer across the surface. Then I started making divots and gouging small chunks out of it with the claw. I was making some significant damage, but it was not enough. I have done this kind of distressing in the past to simulate age, and usually, just a few dozen light whacks with the hammer to dent it up is sufficient to make it look old, but this project called for more extreme measures.

The claw hammer wasn't quite doing it, so I took a few more gouges out with it, then moved on to some other instruments of torture. I used an icepick and put scores of punch holes in it. They kind of look like old tack or nail holes, or possibly boring insect holes.But what really started getting the job done was the flat head screwdriver. I started off taking stabs at it with the screwdriver, just tearing off little chunks as I went. Then I started using the screwdriver like a chisel and prying into the grain of the wood, and using a hammer to help chisel off slivers and chunks in a very controlled manner. I did this all over, but especially at the edges where I could get at the end of the wood grain. I just had to be careful not to go too deep, as the walls of the box were only maybe 3/8 of an inch thick and made of soft wood. I didn't want the thing to lose structural integrity.Oh, I almost forgot. I also used a razor knife to plane down some of the sharp edges of the box, just in spots.

After I had thoroughly gouged the hell out of this beautiful box, I colored in all the areas of raw wood with a black sharpie marker. Black sharpie is great for making damaged areas of wood look ancient. Then I gave the whole box another coat of dark brown stain to blend it in. One of the problems turned out to be getting into all those little holes I had made with the icepick. It was hard getting a marker down there, and even getting stain down into those holes was difficult. You can still see lots of little light colored dots all over it in the pics below. You can't hardly see them in normal light, but the flash from the camera makes them show up like a soar thumb. I did my best to darken them all, but I'm sure I missed some. I hope they don't show up on camera when it is filmed. It kind of ruins the effect.

The client and I talked about how the box should open. I thought that letting the lid open fully (180+ degrees) didn't look right. The client agreed. I laid out several options for limiting the distance the lid would open and he left it to my discretion as to how to go about it. I had originally intended on adding a strip of wood (1x1/2x7) along the back side of the box as a stop. When opened, the lid would rest against it and stop at about 120-130 degrees. I went so far as to make the piece. I even rounded and tapered the edges (which took a lot of work) and stained and distressed it to match the box, but when I put it in place for attachment, it just didn't look right. So I abandoned the rail idea and decided to use some light chain, with a nice antique bronze finish, attached to the lid on the inside. I attached it with some antique finished upholstery nails, that I had to cut down so that they didn't stick through the wood. I also put glue under the upholstery nail heads. Here is a pic with the nail heads clamped in place waiting for the glue to dry.

As soon as we started talking about the design of the box, I had it in my head that I wanted to use these cast resin pieces as iron bindings. I carved these pieces out of clay and then made rubber molds out of them, years ago. I modeled them after some images I saw on the internet. I made them along with some corner pieces (bosses) that I have been using on some of my books. But these larger pieces never quite fit any of my book projects. They were just too big for most of them. But they were the perfect size for this box. The original castings didn't have nail heads, so I used some self adhesive "dots" that I got from the scrap booking section of the craft store. I debated for a while what type of finish to use and decided that my ubiquitous bronze finish didn't quite fit the piece. Besides, it would look suspicious if the finish on the Box matched the finish on the Tome. There were already going to be some similarities in style ( I was using the bosses that matched these pieces). Ultimately, I decided to try out a new paint kit I picked up that gave a rusted iron finish. It is a multi-step system that took a little getting used to, but did give a nice finish.

At first I thought I might use these pieces on the lid of the box, but then I decided to use them to wrap around the corners. Lining them all up was a real chore. These would be the only parts of the box appliques that would be cast in resin. The rest I cut out of chipboard.

I was using the original brass hinges that came on the box, but they wouldn't match the faux hardware I was making, so I painted the hinges flat black and then applied the rust finish treatment to them. Then I augmented them with chipboard cut outs that gave the appearance of cast iron hinges that matched the other ironwork, complete with self adhesive "dots" serving as nail heads.

I had toyed with the idea of using a hasp and a real lock on the front of the lid, but I didn't have a convincing antique lock that looked the part. So I decided to make a fake lock face that matched the rest of the ironwork and would give the impression of a built in lock. The fake lock mechanism was a simple rectangular affair consisting of two pieces made from several layers of chipboard. I would later add tiny rivets around the edges with small dots of the liquid leading used in making faux stained glass projects (like my open sign). Then, after sealing the chipboard with Mod Podge, I applied the rust finish. Before applying the lock to the box, I glued a piece of black card stock to the back to give the keyhole depth. I do think this lock works for this piece, but it is by far the weakest element in the project, in my opinion. It is the first (and possibly the only) thing I would consider changing.

The straps that would go across the top of the lid, flanking the lion design, were a much more elaborate affair to create. They too were going to be made from chipboard, mostly because they needed to be able to bend around the curved front and back edge of the lid. I took some time deciding on their design. I had thought about doing something more elaborate and "scrollie", but it looked too busy next to the lion design. In the end, I went with a design that was patterned very closely on the resin pieces being used on the box sides. I had to create these from scratch for this project, so I started by making a paper template that was the correct size I needed to fit the box. Then I drew the design out at full scale, taking careful note of certain measurements so that the design elements would fall into the place where I wanted them on the lid.

Once I was satisfied with the design, I used the template to cut out the pieces from chipboard. I carefully bent the chipboard pieces to match the curve of the box. Because the cast corner pieces had a hammered surface texture, I needed to give these one as well. To achieve this, I just placed them on a hard surface and gave them a few dozen whacks with the ball peen hammer. The chipboard held the dings rather well. The divots were more subtle than those of the corner pieces, but they did show up. Then I sealed the pieces with Mod Podge, added "dots" to simulate nail heads, and painted them flat back. Then I applied the rust finish. In the pic below, you can see the chipboard hinge embellishments laying on top of the lid, before they were glued in place.

Not until I had finished all of the embellishments did I glue any of them in place. Now that I had the corner pieces, the straps and the lock all fabricated, fitted, and painted, I was ready to glue them on with white glue. I used masking tape to hold some of the pieces in place as they dried, especially the straps, which had to conform to the curve of the lid.

At this point it's almost finished, and I'm thinking it's starting to look pretty good. But like my earlier tomes that looked too "new", this piece needed some more finishing touches before it would be ready for its big screen debut...
(to be continued)

See also:
The Black Duke - the Diary (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Diary (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Box (part 3)
The Black Duke - the Tome (part 1)
The Black Duke - the Tome (part 2)
The Black Duke - the Set (fini)