Copper Elder Sign Box

I thought I had posted this item, but now I can't find it anywhere on this blog, so, I guess I will do a quick post about it now. I made this Elder Sign box several years ago. It started as a small cheap trinket box that I bought on clearance from a local wholesale club. It had a nice dark stained rustic wooden body, that was well made, and a ceramic tile set into the top. The tile had Christmas art on it- a snowman, I think. I liked everything about the box, except for the art.

I had purchased wooden boxes with tile tops from this place in the past, and the last ones I had, I sanded the surface of the tile, painted over it, and added a cast resin applique to the top, and sold it in my shop. No pictures of those ones I'm afraid. This time I thought I would try something different.

A couple of years ago, I found a roll of heavy copper foil on clearance at the hardware store. It had an adhesive backing on one side and I guess you are supposed to use it as flashing around the foundation of your house. I think it is supposed to repel termites. I don't know, I threw away the box a long time ago. I bought it because it was a big roll of copper foil, and fairly cheap.

My first few attempts at using this foil, I was tempted to make use of the adhesive that is already on the foil. It seemed pretty strong, as it was a bear to get the vinyl backer to peel off. Unfortunately, the adhesive does not stay strong. Over time (a few months), it will inevitably loosen up and the copper foil will pull away from whatever you stuck it to. So, I have since learned that I must scrub off the adhesive and use a different glue. Kind of a pain, but whatever.

This box has a cast resin Elder Sign appliqued to the top, underneath the copper foil. I carved the sigil by hand out of a block of wax (years ago). I think this was actually the first thing I tried to carve in wax. Then I made a latex rubber mold of the carving. I use the rubber mold to cast all kinds of stuff, plaster and cement disks, resin appliques, whatever I need an Elder Sign for.

I put the resin casting on a work surface covered in vinyl contact paper (a.k.a. shelf liner). Vinyl contact paper makes a good non-stick work surface. Then I cut a square of copper foil and covered the casting with room to spare around the edges. I used various sculpting tools, mostly ones with round metal tips, to work the foil around the casting and into all the contours and creases. Sort of like chasing. When it was done, I carefully peeled the copper loose from the table and the casting. I sprayed the reverse side of the copper with strong spray glue and put the casting back into the cavity. Then I masked off and sprayed the tile with glue too. I glued the foil, along with the casting, down to the tile and trimmed the edges of the foil. Then I smoothed everything out and worked the edges of the foil around the edges of the tile, making them disappear. I didn't do anything to weather or seal the copper. I just let it gain a natural patina.

I had this box on the Rogue Cthulhu prize table for a while. But lately I have been thinking of giving it as a gift to someone in the Mythos prop community. I'm just looking for the perfect thing to put inside of it first.

Bricks are Heavy

From time to time I find myself scouring the workshop looking for something clean, compact and heavy. Even more so, now that I have been doing wood working. With increased frequency, I need to weigh something down, usually while glue is drying. Usually I drag out the old used bolts bin, and the large chisel box, and maybe a few large blocks of wood that we use for cribbing. But I would prefer to have something that is cleaner and more easily stackable.

Coincidentally, I have several bags of old cement products (mortar mix, floor leveler, concrete, etc). I'm sure some of them are no good any more. The only way to be sure is to test them, but then they are almost certain to go bad once opened. Anyway, I really just want rid of them. They take up space, and who knows when I will need them again, or if they will be any good when I go to use them. I would prefer to just buy new when I have a need. But I don't just want to assume they are all bad and dump them, so I am testing them, one bag at a time. if it is bad, I dump it. If it is good, I am turning it into bricks.

I found an old plastic shoe box that is a good size and shape for making cement bricks. It looks like a plastic bread pan. First I mix up a small cup of the material and let it set overnight, just to be sure. If the material sets up OK, then I mix up a batch in the plastic pan.

Solid cement blocks are decently heavy, but to make them even heavier, I am adding pieces of scrap metal. I have a bucket where I throw anything metal that needs disposed of. When the bucket is full, I usually just set it out on the curb with a sign. Within a day, one of the cities scrap collectors will nab it. Well, I decided to make use of some of the smaller bits, like broken bolts and hand tools, to add to the cement mixture to make the blocks heavier.

I leave the blocks to dry overnight, and then I de-mold them. Pretty simple. I might paint the blocks at some point, or even wrap them in some cloth, to protect my work piece. I have some regular clay bricks that I covered in cloth at my store workshop to use similarly. But for right now, they are just plain cement bricks that I can stack on wood pieces while the glue dries.

I'm not sure how I'm going to like storing these, or how often I will use them, but this cement was basically going to be thrown out anyway. And the bricks will probably be easier to store than 60lbs. sacks of cement. If I end up not liking using or storing these bricks, I will just smash them with a sledge hammer, pull out the metal scraps, and throw the crushed cement out into the gravel driveway.

Mother's Little Helper

My mother is getting older, and she has diabetic neuropathy, and very little strength in her hands. I keep telling her to buy 2-liter bottles of soda instead of cans, because they are cheaper. She keeps saying that she has trouble opening them, and when she can get them open, she can't close them tight enough to keep them from going flat.

I've seen bottle grippers (and she has a few) that could help with opening and closing them, but they have their problems too. Depending on the design, they might also require some grip strength, and regardless of design, they would require her to dig out a tool whenever she wanted to open or close the bottle. People are lazy. They would rather just buy cans.

The other day, we were having this discussion for about the umpteen-millionth time, and it dawned on me that what she really needed was a better cap for the bottle. One that would be easy for her to open and close.

I took the cap from an empty 2-liter bottle of soda and embedded it in an "ergonomically" shaped chunk of polyurethane plastic. Now, she can just remove the original cap when she opens a new bottle, and replace it with this "grip cap" and leave it on there until the bottle is empty. Give the cap a rinse when the bottle is empty, and it's ready for use on the next bottle.

The initial prototype took me about 20 minutes to make. I didn't document its creation, because it was just a proof of concept prototype, but you can see it above. It is an organic shape with knobbly edges about three inches in diameter. It was made with a very quickly hand sculpted mold made from sulfur-free modeling clay, into which I poured polyurethane resin.

After the prototype was finished, I decided to refine the shape a bit, and so I made a wooden puck by drilling out six holes in a circle in a piece of 1-by lumber and then cutting out the circle with a jigsaw. I gave the puck a coat of gloss spray paint to help it not stick to the clay when making the mold.

I then flattened out some sulfur-free modeling clay (sulfur can inhibit the curing process of silicone rubber, so I only buy sulfur free plasticine-type modeling clay; hear after referred to as "clay"). Then I mold the clay around the puck, after spraying it with some silicone mold release spray. I put the clay just around the bottom and sides. The top face is left open. Then I pull the puck out the the clay, leaving the shape intact.

 To prevent resin from dripping into the cap, I mask off the underside of a used 2-liter bottle cap from my plastic parts bin. Then I stick it, bottom side up, in the center of the clay mold. Make sure you do NOT spray mold release on the cap. You want the resin to bond with the plastic cap, just not to the clay mold.

I mix up some polyurethane resin. Here, I'm using Smooth-On's Smooth-Cast Onyx, because it's what I had on hand. It's a 1 to 1 by volume mix ration of part A and part B. When it cures, it comes out glossy black. Sometimes I add a little talc powder to the mix as a filler. This resin has about a two minute work time, and can be demolded after about fifteen minutes.

I pour the resin around the cap, up to the rim. I want the finished piece to be big and chunky, and easy to manipulate with fiddly fingers- like a baby toy. 

Once the resin sets, I peel off the clay mold. I do it carefully, so I can just re-use the mold a second time without having to reshape it around the puck. Remove the masking tape, knock down any sharp corners with some rough sand paper, and give it a wash, and it's ready to go!

 I made a total of three of these, the prototype and these two from the wooden puck. That should be plenty for now. I still need to see if the resin will bond well to the plastic cap. Some plastics don't want to stick to anything. But so far they seem fine. Mom seems to like them. She says she doesn't have any problem gripping them or twisting them, and she even thinks they look cool on the soda bottle. :)

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7 - the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini

Before we get to the game pieces, like the houses and roads, we have one more board piece to look at. Though not exactly a terrain tile, the island of Catan is surrounded by various ports where one can trade commodities. Likewise, the island of R'lyeh is surrounded by portals where one can transform one commodity into another.

The portals were a challenge in that there are a lot of them, all with the same design, which in my mind instantly said silicone mold and casting resin. I designed the portal to look like a stone ring surrounded by symbols, kind of reminiscent of a Stargate. I sculpted the original out of Sculpey. I rolled a large piece of Sculpey into a long snake, connected the ends into a ring and then flattened the top of the ring with a rolling pin. Then I sliced the flattened ring with a razor blade to make it look like there were a number of carved stones laid out in a circle. I used a screw driver and a bamboo skewer as tools to carve glyphs into the tops of each segment. I made a few random gouges in the clay with a razor to make the stones look cracked and worn. After it was baked, I mounted it to a piece of hardboard and sealed it with spray paint.

Then I used silicon RTV rubber to make a mold of the original. The first casting I made was a solid piece of urethane resin plastic. Once I saw how much resin it took, I started to panic. I had to cast nine of these things, and because they were pretty big (about six inches across) they took a lot of resin. Fortunately, I am a cheap bastard, and I know a lot of tricks to make resin stretch. First, I used a lot of filler. Normally I use powdered talc as a filler. This does weaken the plastic somewhat, but these were not load bearing pieces. Another cost saving measure is to do a slush cast. This builds up the piece in layers and makes the final piece hollow. It took about five or six times longer to finish these pieces than it would have, but I did save a lot of resin by adding a little resin at a time, brushing it around to coat the mold surface, waiting for it to dry, then repeating until I had a sufficient thickness built up to demold the piece. The last cost saving measure I took was to add play sand as an additional filler material on the inner slush castings (but not the initial coat, or it would have shown on the surface of the finished piece). This added a lot of bulk to each coat of resin. The biggest down sides to doing a slush casting, was the amount of extra time it took, and the final piece had no underside (it was a one piece mold) so there was no surface to apply the glue for fastening it down to the wooden base. I had to add a strong glue in a heavy bead along the inside bottom edge of the casting with the expectation that the glue would sag downward and touch the wooden base.

The wooden bases were cut on a band saw from the same MDF as the terrain tiles. I made them a different shape and slightly smaller, to differentiate them. Before gluing the resin rings down to the wooden bases, I painted the base where the inside of the ring would be. Each color represented a different commodity that could be traded at that portal, with white being a generic portal where all commodities could be traded. The colors corresponded with the colors of the terrain tiles.

Each portal was primed with black spray paint, sponge stippled, and dry brushed with grey acrylic paint. The stones were given a florescent red inlay in their glyphs. I was pretty rushed by the time I got to the portals, so my standard of quality began slipping. I only had a day or two left to finish the project. And I still had player pieces and game cards to make.

 The player pieces were problematic on a number of fronts. Again, I had to make a lot of them fairly quickly, so they had to be simple and cheap. I went through several design ideas before settling on one that would fit all my needs as well as my budgetary and time constraints. I had it in my head that I wanted to use the little plastic Cthulhu idols in the "Bag of Cthulhu" that I love so much. But scale was a concern. I needed to somehow make the small ones bigger, or the big ones smaller. I decided to put the smaller ones on a pedestal made from sliced pvc pipe to create "shrines" that would serve to replace the cities of Catan. I Also used pvc pipe slices to make the "altars" that would be analogous to the settlements in Catan.

Since pvc pipe is hollow, I needed to make it have a solid flat surface, so I poured a little plastic resin into each of the slices. I made sure to do this on a piece of hardboard covered with vinyl contact paper, as vinyl seems to be the one thing plastic resin won't stick to. Once dry, I just flipped them over, trimmed off any flash, and had a nice neat little altar top, ready for paint.

For the bases of the plastic Cthulhus I used a slightly smaller diameter pvc pipe and made thinner slices.

 Then I glued the small plastic idols on top of their bases, and they too were ready for paint.

For simplicity and time concerns, I used straight cut slices of MDF to serve as roads (or rather "tunnels" in my game variant vernacular").

Painting the pieces was also problematic. The raw MDF wanted to soak up the paint like a sponge. It was hard to get a finish that didn't look like spray painted MDF. If I had more time, I could have employed some sort of sealer, I suppose. The color scheme was a challenge as well. I needed to use colors that differed from those of the color coded terrain tiles. I had already used most of the useful primary colors for those, so I decided to go with metallic colors for the game pieces. Only one problem. There are four player sets and only three easily differentiated metallic colors- silver, gold and copper. For the third one, I chose a metallic cobalt blue (largely because I hadn't used blue yet, and I happened to have some metallic blue spray paint). Even still, since the player pieces didn't have any florescence to them, it would be hard to see them in the odd lighting of our game room. The gold and the copper ended up looking too much alike, so I had to change to a darker color of copper. I also added some verdigris patina to the edges of the copper to further differentiate it. The blue was rather dark, and I was afraid it would be lost entirely in the predominantly red lighting of our room, so I dry brushed the blue pieces with a little white, which would glow purple in the black lights.

I got the pieces to be easily differentiated from one another in normal lighting, though I didn't like the way they looked. They were blocky and poorly painted, at least compared to the terrain tiles. Once I got them into the red and UV lighting of the Rogue Cthulhu game room, they were a complete mess. They were hard to see, and difficult to tell apart. I had to put up a small white light above the game board just to make it playable. I didn't even take any final pics of the completed pieces, as they frankly didn't look worth the time to photograph. The pic above of them on the painting table is pretty much how they look, at least the gold ones. Clearly, the game pieces need to be overhauled before next year.


So, since you have all been so patient following along on this rather lengthy build, I decided to put the final wrap-up pics here instead of making them another post. Here are the game terrain tiles, sans portals, all laid out on the floor.

And here they are with portals. The portals are not properly arranged in these pics, as I was in a hurry, and didn't really know how to arrange them yet (I had only played the game twice by this point and in Catan, the ports are pre-fixed in position and do not need to be placed).

And here are a few pics of the game being played for the first time at Origins 2013.

 Thanks for following along. This was a fun and ambitious build for me. More than once I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew, but I'm glad that I pushed myself to finish it. It was a very rewarding experience and I am very proud of the final product.

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini
Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear

Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet (pt.4)

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.5)
Steampunk Diving (Space) Helmet Full Costume