I have an aversion to neck-cloths of all sorts, being around rotating machinery as much as I am. But it was clear that I would need something to complete my ensemble for Maker Faire so I bought a $2.50 tie and a roll of Stitch Witchery and "fabricated" this:

My friends over at Bostodelphia have invented a drink in my honor!

Now, a proper Steampunk cocktail needed 3 things, in our opinion: steam, something English, and something German. Steam, well, duh. English, for the Victorian England connection. German, for the association of that country with all things industrious. Oh, and Von Slatt's 1929 Mercedes Gazelle replica.

I've been struggling with what color and how to paint the car.  My initial inclination was to have a standard automotive paint job done at a body shop and have all of the brass be polished and lacquered.  However the expense of the paint job and the idea of the upkeep on all that shiny brass was daunting.

Then my Mom & Dad give me this brass transit.  Not only will this make an awesome hood ornament but I just love the aged look of the brass.  Now if I were to have the car professionally painted the finish would just not jibe with the aged brass I plan for the rest of it.  So I'm going to paint it with gloss black XO-Rust.  I painted my bus with XO-Rust and it as held up very well plus an XO-Rust paint job is a good analogue of an original finish with some age on it.  Finally, it'll only cost me about $30 and I'll be able to do it myself in a day.

OK, I totally want to live in a country where,  sports podcasters for the Guardian take a moment out from talking about football to have a little conversation about SteamPunk, Philip Pullman, and atheism.

Hi Everyone!

This goes out to my LJ flist first - tonight it gets posted on SPWS so act now if you want a chance at one of the 10 signed copies of Jay Lake's Mainspring !

Publishing house Tachyon Publications and editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have agreed to make their new fiction anthology, Steampunk, available for pre-order at a discounted price!  This volume, priced at $14.95, is being offered at $12.00, including free shipping within the United States. Shipping outside the United States will be by Global Priority Mail: $9.50 to Canada and $11.00 to our friends in Europe.

So yesterday Merlin Mann got a video posted to Boing Boing called Steampunk DIY. Well I just had to respond as I know a thing or two about the future of SteamPunk . . .

Scroll down in the window to view my response.

I've been neglecting my workshop projects in order to redesign and upgrade SteampunkWorkshop.com and now it's done! I've just changed the DNS delegation so it may be a few hours before the new site appears for everyone but you can see it here:

http://steampunkworkshop.com

Ciao!

Jake.

Here's a little teaser for my next project. This one probably won't be published until March but porkshanks' guest spot should be up in February.

I brought my camera to work Wednesday so I could take some pics of a bunch of old phones we're going to sell on eBay (office phones, nothing interesting) and I took this on the way in:



Maybe I need a bag so I can carry the camera with me more often, I never seem to have it when I need it.

I went out to Ohio to pickup the car I bought on eBay earlier this month. The expedition was entirely uneventful with the exception of the 23 grueling hours behind the wheel. It was almost pleasant as I finally got the opportunity to read "Golden Compass" - thank goodness for audiobooks!

What a wonderful book! I'm glad I had the opportunity to read it before seeing the movie and though I usually prefer a single reader rather then a cast, the audiobook version is extremely well done with wonderful voice talents.

Here's a shot of the car in the drive, the snow started falling about two hours before I got home which meant I was white knuckling it down through the Berkshires! Gah, I don't need to do that again anytime soon.

This is the oddest referrer I found in my logs so far, it was responsible for 354  hits yesterday (edit: and over 1200 hits the next day):

http://frum.nationalreview.com

Well, without him we wouldn't have axis of evil

The Google SERPs have been pretty stable for "Steampunk" for some time. Lately Brass Goggles has dropped back to the second page, probably due to the recent outage - I am confident they will return to the fore in a few weeks. I'm also happy to see SteampunkMagazine.com climbing up the ranks. Steampunk.com is an enigma, a check of the way-back-machine at archive.org shows that it was a earnest project, but it sure does look spammy now.

Anyway, usually the first result is a couple of thumbnails from the Google Images search page, but at least once today it was results from the Google "Products" page.

Also on the subject of shopping, I got a really nice note from Etsy.com's Vanessa Bertozzi thanking me for the mention in the Make: Steampunk Gift Guide. I really like Etsy's mission of creating a marketplace to connect artists and craftspeople with customers - in my Steampunk Utopia all artists and musicians can make a living wage plying their craft with the help of such tools.

Look what my awesome daughter drew for you!

Brass

- Just testing phone posting - I promise I won't abuse the ability like SOME people -

I posted the details of the construction of a car carrier I just completed. This is what I'll use to bring "Eliza" back to Massachusetts.

It started out looking like this:



and became:



More here: http://steampunkworkshop.com/trailer.shtml

She may look like a Lady, but underneath she's an Eliza Doolittle, an old style VW Beetle. I saw her on eBay this morning and had a moment of weakness. Now I just have to go get her. Oh and I have such plans for her!

I made this yesterday:



It's a respirator you can pop in your mouth when you just have to do something quick, like lay down a second coat of spray paint, and then leave the area. Breathe in through the mouthpiece, out through your nose. The mouthpiece is from an old diving snorkel and I used hot glue to attach the respirator cartridge I got from Home Depot.

Sorry for the underexposed photo, I'm still learning about first and second curtain flash sync on my new Canon EOS Digital Rebel (woot!)

Look what I got today. These are cobalt steel twist drills, and not a skanky Harbor Freight set either. These are high speed jobber length drills. Aren't they lovely, all oily and shiny? I bet they'll cut brass like butter, oh yeah, I bet they will.



In the box on the left side are fractional size drills, 29 of them from 1/16" to 1/2".

In the Box to the right are letter size drills from A (.234) to Z (.413) and along the back are number size from 1 (.228) to 60 (.040) - yeah, they're backward compared to the others. Letters and number size drills are typically used for drilling prior to threading with a tap. I think there may also be some relation of these sizes to wire gauge.

I'd love to know the history of these sizing systems - I'll post an update if I discover their origin.

OK, so I'm here now with a paid account. I've been wanting a place to post random nonsense when I don't feel like coding HTML and adding a page to steampunkworkshop.com so I'm going to do that here because this is the social network site where I've met the coolest people - well except for Doc Datamancer and Johnny Payphone on MySpace - but they're somewhat less chronologically challenged then I am and can hang out in those sorts of places.