Prototype Embedded Electronics – Together

Now that I have completed the three circuits that I had planned to embed in the Steam Punk prop (Torch, Pulsing/Fading LED, LED Chaser) it’s time to put them together in a single main/sub configuration as they would be in the prop. I had to cheat a little here … I couldn’t find one of my male to male DuPont connectors and, rather than make a new one, I opted for the easier option of replacing the 2x2 SMD circuit with the 4 x 5 LED “Desk Light” circuit. In terms of testing the components together, this should really have no practical impact on the outcome. Sure, they are through hole components … and a lot more of them, so the only real difference from the perspective of testing the overall concept is that it will draw more power from the battery. In the embedded scenario, I need to rebuild ALL of the component circuits, so there really isn’t anything lost there.

I have connected a 9V battery to my trusty solderless breadboard and then connected each of the components to the power rails. The Torch and Pulsing/Fading circuits are connected to the 9V directly, whereas the LED Chaser is connected to 9V via a 5V Regulator (I opted for an early version of this as I didn’t need the optional LED power indicator).

The result is as expected … it all works just dandy. I should probably go ahead and work out power consumption so that I have an idea of how long the battery will last in the prop. I’m still toying with the idea of also embedding a battery charger circuit … but it is easy and cheap enough to use a commercial – “off the shelf” charger so I’m not going to bother with that … yet.

There are still more tweaks and optimisations that I am planning, but that’s for later.

I present to you the prototype embedded electronics of the Steam Punk prop …

Fiat Lux

Combined embedded electronic circuits for a planned Steam Punk Cosplay prop

Electrolytic Etching–Plans and Musings–Part 1

Following on from the previous articles about Acid Etching. Now I am going to do some etching using electricity.

The principals are the same as with acid etching, however, with electrolytic etching, the atoms are separated with electrons, rather than chemicals.

You can use some pretty safe voltages and the mordant is reasonably safe (salty water) so there is far less risk to your person using this method that using toxic chemicals. Safety should still be observed, the process releases gasses. While the gasses that are released are fairly benign, you should still do this in a well ventilated space.

OK. So … the electricity source. My 12V battery charger is nowhere to be had, and I don’t want to buy another one. The solution? Make one.

I still have a large number of old mobile phone power adapters with a power output range of 5V through to 12V. I don’t need anything as powerful as 12V … so I am using an old power adapter (for something … I can’t remember what it was for … a charger for something that I don’t have anymore).

I want to be able to regulate the power, so I’m going to wire it up to a potentiometer. I also want to be able to switch it off … so a SPDT (single pole double throw) switch will do the trick. I have some parts from other electronic projects, so there isn’t much that I need to buy.

The parts list for the power supply are as follows:

• 6.8V AC Adapter;
• SPDT toggle switch;
• 330Ω Resistor;
• 3mm 5mA Red LED;
• 10kΩ linear potentiometer;
• tuning knob;
• PCB perf board;
• 2 x banana plug sockets;
• 2 x alligator clips attached to banana plugs;
• red and black multi-strand wire;
• 130 x 68 x 44 mm jiffy box

(the idea for this power supply came from NavaChing – Etching, although I have modified the design so suit my purposes … I don’t plan to run the etcher from batteries).

I have some testing and soldering to do first, so I’ll post some pictures later when I get the device working.

As I have mentioned in other posts, I’ve had some success with electrolytic etching steel previously, but this time I want to etch brass so I’ll walk through the process in some detail so that others can benefit from my mistakes.

To recap on the process … design, print, transfer, remove paper from work piece, connect work piece to the positive (+) rail, connect a conductive piece to the negative (-) rail, immerse work piece and conductive piece in salty water, power up, bubbles and etching happen, power off, clean work piece, enjoy your success.

Acid Etching … musings and plans – Part 3

Tonight, I got around to having another go at the acid etch of my test piece.

If you recall, the last time I did this, the acid wasn’t bighting very deeply in the metal. The process was OK, but the result was rubbish because the acid wasn’t strong enough.

I went and bought some more peroxide and made the acid a little stronger.

I used a better quality paper (Kodak premium photographic paper this time) and I added some more peroxide to the acid (the peroxide weakens over time with sunlight).

I gave it a good ironing, but the transfer was still missing some bits … so I did it again.

Then I bathed the piece in water to get the paper off … resulting in …

A reasonable transfer. There are still some holes in the transfer, but I’m going to go with this anyway. It has a nice distressed appearance.

Next, instead of wiping the acid onto the piece, I immersed the piece in acid for 30 minutes.

After that, I used some acetone to clean the toner from the surface of the piece and gave it a bit of a light polishing.

You can see that the acid has bitten more deeply into the surface this time. The overall appearance is quite good, and I am happy with it.

As I said earlier, it looks more distressed, and that is a good thing in this case. Of course, I won’t always be looking for a distressed result, so I need to improve my transfer technique so that it does what I want it to do every time.

I’m not really sure what I am going to do with this piece now that I have made it … maybe just cut it out and mount it in a stand … who knows.

Steampunk Goggles–Simple Prototype

Goggle Design

For my prototype goggles, I’m going to keep with a pretty simple design. Two eye cups mounted on a nasal loop with a strap that goes around the head. Kind of like old style motorcycle/airman goggles.

The eye cups will be cylindrical pieces with straight sides and a curved outside edge that wraps around the eye. The curved piece will connect to the leather strap that goes around the head. The nasal will be a simple curved piece that will be brazed to the two eye cups, forming a single, unhinged piece.

I have made a cardboard template that fits comfortably on my eye, and from this I made some measurements and then did a design using Gimp.

The design is 17.5 cm x 6 cm … I still need to print this out, transfer it to cardboard and then test the design against my face again so that I can make any refinements to the design that I need to, rather than simply go straight to brass.

The design was done using Bezier curves so that the design work is easier than using my compass and protractor … although that’s how I started with the design.

I have also made sure that the image that I am creating in Gimp is 1:1 scale, so that when I print it out, I don’t have to fart around with scale.

I have left a border, top and bottom, so that I can add some border design later on … but for now. That’s the hardest part of the design done.

Acid Etching … musings and plans – Part 2

Quickly … to the redesign!

After last parts failure to save my design, I have quickly made up a new, smaller design. This one is a simple 5x5cm design as a proof of concept.

Negative and flipped horizontally … I also added the word “Asylum” across the gargoyles brow.

This was then printed out and ironed on to the brass plate.

Now it is reversed through the magic of transfer printing.

I then used a white acrylic paint to block out the edges of the plate and the right-hand edge so that the acid wouldn’t eat away at the rest of the stock. I also painted some white paint onto the back of the stock so that the acid wouldn’t mark the back of the piece.

I had to make a swab for the acid. This is simply two bamboo skewers wrapped together with a rubber band and with a cotton ball at one end.

Next, I poured my acid into an acid proof container and then swabbed the acid onto the design using my home-made swab.

When I thought that I had rubbed enough acid into the design, it was time to clean the resist off the stock so that I could reveal my masterpiece …

Well … not so much masterpiece as, very, very faint etching indeed.

I think that I did two things wrong here:

1. The acid was not fresh … it had been sitting in the bottle for about two months. The acid needs to be refreshed from time to time (add more peroxide, add more hydrochloric acid). I noticed this previously when I was etching printed circuit boards; and
2. I certainly didn’t swab acid onto the design long enough.

No great loss, I have learned my lessons and I can move on. I will get some more peroxide so that I can freshen the acid, print and transfer again, and revisit this design at a later date.

Importantly I learned that, essentially, my plans are feasible with stronger acid. I won’t make those mistakes again and I did not ruin the stock. In a worst case scenario, I could polish the design out of the brass stock (if I really needed to).

I found some other gothic designs that I like and will probably use in the goggle design. I’m going to be going for a steam-punk/Cthulhu inspired design when I finally do get on to that project. Probably working in something like this …

I’ve seen this in a couple of places … including tattooed onto someone's back. Either that or draw my own Cthuluesque design.

Acid Etching … musings and plans – Part 1

I have done acid etching of PCB for electronics, and it isn’t very hard. To take things up a notch, I want to do some acid etching of some brass plate. This is all leading to part of my current down-scale projects.

The idea is very simple … make a design using Photoshop (or another image processing tool). The image is the same size as the piece of brass that I am working with (35 x 5 cm). I want the design to be simply a border with cogs in it (steam-punky) and with a bit of text in one of the cogs.

OK, so I did that bit. I got a good steam-punk texture from the Internet and played with it until I was happy with it as a pattern. I made a pattern filled border that was also a simple repeated design and made sure that the bits that I wanted to be etched were white and the bits that I wanted to remain were black (or shades in between).

I printed out the design onto my black and white laser printer and then ironed the design on to the brass plate.

Sounds simple? It is … except that I stuffed up in two ways:

1. I forgot to reverse the image;
2. Photoshop trashed the image when I saved it (old version … long story).

Still, I got the image transferred on to the brass plate.

The iron was on it’s hottest setting and I kept the iron moving on the paper for about 5 minutes.

You can see that the transfer isn’t perfect, but I thin that this will add a patina to the etch when I’m done.

The next step will be to paint around the transfer so that none of the border will be exposed when I start rubbing acid onto it. I’m going to use an acrylic paint to mask the edges of the brass plate.

After the plate is properly masked, I will move on to the acid etching part of the process.

As a heads-up … the ingredients that I will be using for doing the acid etching are:

• hydrochloric acid;
• hydrogen peroxide;
• heavy duty rubber gloves;
• acid safe plastic container (for the acid);
• cotton wool swabs;
• nail polish remover.

The hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide mixture has already been converted into cupric acid (by adding copper) and there are plenty of good resources for making cupric acid on the interweb.

I will be putting the acid into the container and then wetting the cotton wool swab with the acid and gently rubbing the surface of the brass plate with the acid. This should have the effect of etching the parts of the design that are not covered with the resist (paint and laser printer ink). After that, the plate is bathed in water to neutralize any acid that is still on the plate, then the plate is cleaned off with the nail polish remover. That will remove the laser printer ink and help to clean off the acrylic paint.

What I should end up with is a nicely etched brass plate.

I am practicing this now so that when I come to make the pieces for the goggles, I can pre-etch them. It would be a lot harder to etch the pieces when they are shaped … so I’m going to do that first.

Later, I will make a very simple prototype pair of goggles (with no lens and no moving parts) so that I can get the basic design bedded down.

Now that I’m moved

Now that I have moved to my new abode (temporary accommodation). I don’t have a lot of space to do much … so I have to scale my experiments and prototyping to stuff that I can do in a small room and on a desk. Not a lot of scale really.

So, over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be doing some small scale prototyping of moving parts that I will be working up into a pair of steam-punk style goggles.

The basic design of the goggles will be a simple affair with two ocular apertures, ideally with some slotted eye-piece covers and a working mechanical iris.

The prototype goggles will be all about the “how to” and won’t necessarily involve a whole working model at the end of it.

I am going to start by making a single eye piece and see what I can make to “gussy” it up.

I also want to use the prototype as a workbench for acid engraving. I have some cupric acid that I have produced from doing some electronic PCB engraving, and I want to see how far I can go with this technique for an artistic design on brass-work. Later, I might even do some Dremmel pierced work on the frame as another piece of experimentation.

So … on to the plan.

I have bought a couple of brass rod and brass cylinders (including some nifty hollow hexagonal pieces). I want to use the brass rod and tube to make some brass nuts for the goggles. This should be fairly straight forward. Cut the rod, cut the tube, flux the rod, and braze. When the rod and tube are in one piece, use a tap and die to cut the thread on the nut and the goggle body where the nut will attach.

If you are interested in seeing some awesome steam-punk goggles … do a search for gogglerman, his stuff is truly inspiring.

Steampunk Electronics–LED Goggles Part II

The circuit for this project is pretty straight forward. Basically, each of the LED connect to the positive through the anode and to the negative via a 150 ohm resistor.

On a breadboard, it looks like this.

There is a jumper going from the positive to each LED anode. The cathode is connected to the negative through the resistor.

When it is powered up, it looks like this.

There are 20 LED in parallel.

This is enough LED for two eye pieces, making up a pair of goggles. I need to work out how long it takes before the LED drain the 9 volt battery. To do this, I’ve simply charged the 9 volt battery and marked the time when the LED were connected.

I did a rough test last night, but with 100 ohm resistors instead of 150 ohm. I started to get no light from some of the LED after 3 hours. That’s not a bad outcome. So long as I use rechargeable batteries, it shouldn’t be a problem.

I don’t know if the increase in resistance will make that much difference in the power consumption … but I guess that it will increase the glow time by about 33 – 50%. The power went on at 7:14pm today.

I don’t have any data on the LED power consumption.

Next image is at 8:30pm

Definitely less bright after 1 hour 15 minutes of operation.

9:30 and some of the LED are dark and overall, much less light output from the array.

I kept the LED array powered all night and there was still a very faint glow in the LED after almost 12 hours. Not enough light for anything practical and almost invisible … but still going. I would say that the acceptable level of light was after 1 hour 30 minutes of continuous running. So, this means that either I decrease the number of LED in the array or increase the number of batteries (2 x 9v for instance). The most practical approach would be reduce the number of LED to, say 6 LED per “lens” rather than 10. That works for me. So now the next task is to design and build the PCB for the lens.

That’s not going to happen very quickly at the moment, as we are moving house in 3 weeks and I have a shitload of stuff to pack.

Steampunk Electronics–LED Goggles

I’ve had an idea for embedding 12 LED into a ring structure that will fit into goggles.

The idea is fairly straight forward, 12 x LED, 12 x 100Ω resistors on a PCB ring with a power supply. I want to make the LED array into a single solid unit.

The LED will be arranged in parallel, that is, all of the anodes will be connected to the positive side of the battery and all of the cathodes will be connected to a 100Ω resistor and each of the 12 100Ω resistors will connect to the negative (ground) side of the battery. Also, the LED and resistors will be arranged around a PCB that has been cut into a ring shape.

The battery leads and  the resistors will be soldered onto the bottom of the PCB so that only the PCB and LED will be visible from the “top” of the board.

I will make a silicone mold that will embed the LED side of the project and this will be filled with a clear or slightly opaque resin. The other side of the project will be filled with a black resin (so that the light from the LED doesn’t come back into the eyes).

I’m going to need to make the PCB layout a bit more elegant and the LED equidistant so that it doesn’t look too crappy.

I want to make the LED ring sit inside of the ocular tube of the goggles so that they cast a bright light where the goggles are facing.

12 LED should drain a 9 volt battery fairly quickly, so I don’t expect that this will be a suitable torch, so I’m going with colour instead.

The battery leads will come out on the under side so that they can be attached to the inside of the goggles. I’m going to make a battery clip /pocket out of leather that will attach to the back of the goggles strap. But, first things first. Make the prototype, then make the molds, then see how the LED like being in resin.

The goggles will be another article much later. First I’ll be making the LED ring.

Steampunk Electronics–Heartbeat Part 3

Well now … I have duplicated the circuit that Charles Platt shows in his book.

The circuit makes use of direct component soldering rather than using jumper wires or using routes from a printed circuit board.

The resulting circuit works fairly well, although I believe that the capacitors are shorting somewhere in the circuit as the LED does not pulse as the prototype board version did, rather, it pulses on and flashes off. When the power is removed from the circuit, the LED powers down completely, without any capacitor leaking.

Anyway, this is a prototype and I am working on that basis.

As you can see from the picture, the circuit is very small.

You  can see from  the under side, that the legs from each component is used to connect to the next component(s) in the circuit.

I am using some very cheap circuit boards that I bought from eBay. I neglected to clean the board first, so the soldering job wasn’t all that successful (part of the reason that I think that there is a soldering fault). However, as the components are directly soldered, the perf board is used merely as a strata for the circuit.

And here it is.

I need to make a printed circuit board next to improve and refine the prototype.

Steampunk Electronics–Heartbeat Part 2

In the first article, I was talking about using the Charles Platt design for creating a pulsing LED using a 2N6027 PUT, a couple of resistors, a couple of capacitors and an LED.

Today, I took the schematic from Make: Electronics (by Charles Platt) and built it on a prototype board.

The first thing that I did was to transfer the resistors from the schematic onto the prototype board. It’s a simple design with not many components, so I decided to have the resistors spanning the separation channel in the middle, and then use jumper wires to connect them all.

Next, I put the capacitors  in place along with the transistor and the LED.

Finally, I jumped the components so that they were connected according to the schematic.

I connected the battery (9V) to the board and waited … and waited. There was something wrong.

I needed to get out the multimeter and work out what was wrong.

I tested the battery … it was measuring 8.94V so that wasn’t the problem. Next I tested continuity on all of the jumpers … they were working fine.

Test the resistors, also OK. Interestingly, the resisters that I bought from eBay … all within the stated tolerance, so, Yay.

Test the capacitors … also fine.

I tested the LED and it was also peachy keen … so what had I done wrong?

I noticed that the prototype board power rails had a break in the middle and that I needed to jump between the gaps (d’oh!) I should have realised that this was the case, but then, this is the first time that I’ve used the prototype board in earnest.

After putting in the jumpers, I powered it up and … presto! it works just like is says on the box.

I’ve colour coded the jumpers so that I know what is going where.

White jumpers connect to a resistor, Green jumpers connect to a capacitor, Blue jumpers connect to the transistor, Yellow jumpers connect to the LED. Black and Red are Negative and Positive power respectively.

I’ve just been playing with the circuit a bit and I’ve decided that the timing for the LED was wrong. The LED flashed too quickly for my taste with a cycle of on-off in about 1 second. I’ve replaced the capacitors in the circuit. Now the capacitors are:

C1 – 220 µF electrolytic capacitor; and

C2 – 470 µF electrolytic capacitor.

The on-off cycle is now about 2.5 seconds and much more pleasing for me.

Next, I’m going to transfer this to a perf board and put it in a project box. I think that this will work well for the Steam Punk prop. The prototype perf board will be larger than the one that I will use with a PCB, simply so that I have space to wire it. I will be using a standard copper padded perf board and the holes are all pre-drilled, so there won’t be much opportunity to compress the design. Also, because I will be using wire between the components rather than copper route, I will need some extra space for soldering and general jiggery pokery.

Anyway … it’s time to go and play with perf board and project boxes.

Steampunk Electronics–Heartbeat

I’ve been playing around with making a pulsing LED that I will use in the body of the Steampunk gun. The LED will be mounted in the back of the gun and I will make a resin shell that will go around it … kinda like a dome on the back of the gun.

The circuit is basically a series of resisters, a couple of capacitors and a 2n6027 PUT (programmable unijunction transistor). The arrangement of resisters and capacitors shape the voltage through the circuit so that the first capacitor takes a short while to charge up, and then leak out. The result should be a gradual increase in the light emitted from the LED and then a slower decrease in the light.

I’ve seen some circuits on the interweb that use a 555 timer IC (integrated circuit) to do the switching from on to off, but this one from Charles Platt (Make: Electronics) is much more straight forward and should do what I need it to do. Plus … this circuit is cheaper than a circuit using a 555 timer.

I’m using a pin header for both the power connection as well as the leads for the LED so that I can have the LED on a flexible connection. I’m fitting the connecting wires with 2 pin DuPont female connectors so that I can easily connect the battery (9v) and the LED.

Parts:

• C1 – 100 µF electrolytic capacitor;
• C2 – 220 µF electrolytic capacitor;
• J1 – Generic female header – 4 pins;
• LED1 – pick whichever you like … I’m going to use a 5mm white ultra-bright 20000mcd that I picked up on eBay from (vendor bobpwaytoway);
• Q1 – PUT Transistor 2N6027;
• R1 – 33k Ω 1/4W 250V Through Hole Carbon Film Resistor;
• R2, R3, R4 – 1k Ω 1/4W Metal Film Resistors;
• R5 – 330 Ω 1/4 W Metal Film Resistor;
• VCC1 – 9V battery block;
• FR7 single sided copper clad board.

After jiggering around with the circuit for a while using Fritzing, the above PCB is the design that I’m most happy with.

The top two pin of J1 are connected to the battery. The bottom two are the LED.

I’m going to mount the LED in a ping-pong ball so that the light is more diffuse.

I’ll prototype the board this weekend and post any updates and photographs.

You can see that this is a very simple and small circuit, so it won’t take long to prototype or solder. I’ll make an intermediate prototype using perf-board so that I can see how the rats nest works out for me. The board is about 4.5 x 3 cm so the size should suit my needs too.

Steampunk Firepower–Electronics

I bought some lighting electronic kits from an electronics store that perform some of the lighting jiggery-pokery that I want to put into the Steampunk props, such as the flashing light and chasing lights.

These are not particularly difficult or complex circuits and they fall within the ambit of my level of skill with electronics (i.e. not much).

The kits were pretty cheap ($7 – $15) and the printed circuit boards are very paint-by-numbers so it wasn’t very hard to build them.

Here is the chasing lights circuit, the red LED light up left to right and then right to left continuously. In the Steampunk prop, the LED will be mounted around the barrel when the trigger is pulled.

The flashing light circuit simply oscillates between the green and red LED. In the prototype, the lights will be mounted in the body and be viewed through a bunch of resin ports in the side of the gun.

The next trick is to duplicate the printed circuit in a wired circuit so that I can make sure that I understand the circuit properly. I also need to be able to change the shape of the boards so that they fit into the prototype better and run from a single 9V battery.

I’ve ordered all of the components that I need to be able to build these circuits, and I will make some modifications to the design by including some trimmer potentiometers (so that the frequency of flash and speed of chasing lights can be tuned). I’ll make these on the prototype board first and then transfer the design to a strip-board PCB.

Steampunk Firepower–Prototype Encased

Well, I think that I have given the prototype gun enough coating to make it sturdy enough.

There are some small bits that still need touching up due to the fact that I can’t give it an all-over coat at once, but have to build the coat up in stages (I have to hold it somewhere while I apply the filler). But, overall, I’ve given the prototype 5 coats of filler. There are also some coats of 2 part epoxy and paint under the filler, but I’m not counting them.

The last couple of coats have been very thin so that the finished surface is as smooth as I can make it. I’ve rubbed the prototype with 120 grit sandpaper between coats to knock off some of the grainy bits in the filler and to smooth out some streaks left by the paintbrush.

You can see the overall shape of the prototype now too. Large body, thick barrel, chunky pistol grip, wavy bottom of the body and flat top.

Next I’m going to be drawing the design onto the prototype to mark out all of the areas that I’m going to etch with the Dremmel rotary tool and the cut-line where I’m going to cut the prototype in half.

Etching the surface is going to be another experimental stage. I know that the directions for the filler say that it can be drilled, sawn and sanded, but the subsurface has a lot of give and the vibration from the rotary tool may cause the filler to lift from the prototype. If it does, I’m going to go over the whole thing with a clear acrylic paint to help to stabilise it.

When the etching is done, I will be moving on to the next stage … making the prototype ready for investing. That’ll involve cutting it in half, removing the polystyrene core using acetone, building up the interior surface with more filler (so that the shell is at least 5mm thick), and of course … fixing anything that goes contrariwise to me.

So far … so good.

I’ve now ordered a truckload of electronic components from eBay (resistors, transistors, capacitors, timer IC, decade counter IC, LED, potentiometers, PCB, e.t.c) so that I can do some more work on the prototype electronic gubbins. I want to have a pulsing LED glowing through some cut-outs in the body and some lights chasing around the barrel of the gun. Here is a crap visualisation of the lights.

The cut-outs will be covered with some inset resin panels and will have a single large LED with a pulse circuit while the chasing lights will be some 3mm LED. Chasing just means that each light comes on in sequence (kinda like the “eye” of a Cylon). The above picture is pretty bad … just something I knocked up in MS-PAINT in a couple of seconds.

The body will not be that colour when it is in the final material, so don’t worry about that!

I want the circuitry to be fairly simple and I’m going to use trim pot resistors so that the cycle time can be varied manually.

Steampunk Firepower–More Prototyping

Today I bought some water based multipurpose filler … Agnew’s Water Filler. This is a great filler and works on lots of different materials, but, importantly, it works on polystyrene.

The filler mixes 3 parts powder to 1 part water to make a thick paste. I made a mix of 1 to 1 to make a thin slurry of the putty and applied it directly to the polystyrene with an artist paintbrush. So far, I have applied 3 layers and it takes about 10 minutes for the putty to dry sufficiently to apply another layer. So that’s about 30 minutes to get about 2.5mm thick coverage over the polystyrene.

The putty can be sawn, sanded, drilled and carved, so I’m pretty pleased with the scope for the putty as a modelling medium.

I needed to extend the grip on the gun as it was about a finger too short. To do this, I used a hacksaw to cut the end of the original handle off and then carved a 1” polystyrene block and glued it on to the end. The putty slurry was then painted on to the stock to start building it up and blending it in. I also painted the slurry on to the new barrel of the gun and started to smooth out some of the lumpy bits.

Now I’m waiting for the putty to cure entirely so that I can start to sand and smooth the surface. The putty is still very thin on the gun, so I’ll probably need to give the surface some protection. I will use a clear matt finish acrylic paint to achieve that.

Soon, I’ll be able to start carving the detail into the surface.

I have an old urchin shell on the veranda, I’m going to fill the interior with some plaster to make the shell less fragile and then I’m going to cover the outer surface with some silicone moulding medium. The shell has such a fantastic texture, and I reckon that, if I flatten it out, the texture will look awesome as a surface on the gun … maybe on the grip.

When the prototype is all surfaced and carved, I’ll need to cut the gun in half along it’s length so that I can remove the polystyrene from the middle. I will also need to make the shell a bit thicker by adding more filler on the inside of the shell. When I’ve done that, I can start making the transparent sections of the gun. Oh well, that’s probably a long time into the future yet … how many chickens do I have now?

Steampunk Firepower–Design Sketches

As promised, I have compiled a bunch of scans of the sketched designs that I have done. These are designs inspired by various sources, mostly science fiction fantasy novels, television and movies.

I’ve tried to honour the feeling of the sci-fi genres that I have drawn from while still thinking about how the props would feel in the hand.

I must stress that these are NOT real guns, they will not work.

This is the Rocky Horror design, it’s a basic shape. The movie version was such a lovely and slick design. The ray gun here seemed to have no moving parts and was a simple shiny metal object.

The Marshall is a pistol design based on the Colt Navy. The addition of a bayonette onto the end is a bit of a unnecessary hardware, but it gives the impression that the hand holding the gun is resolute.

This is a plasma gun. The idea is that the panel at the rear of the gun would be a transparent plastic panel with glowing swirling lights.

A personal flamethrower is always something to pack when you are heading out for a night on the town. Especially when the likes of Nyarlhotep are about.

The Angels Wings is a personal cannon for the fashion conscious lady adventurer.

Another in the personal cannon range. The Big Mumma packs the kind of punch that even Dagon would envy. This is the kind of firepower that would be handy when the odds are stacked against you.

The third in the personal cannon range, the Heavy Handed is simple and straight forward. Point and Kablooie … problem solved. The Heavy Handed is the sort of gun that makes even the smallest adventurer a force to be reckoned with … although an enhanced arm would not go amiss when trying to cope with the recoil.

The Duelling Pistol is a reproduction flintlock pistol, this sketch is more about the lines and the dimensions. The old duelling pistols were pieces of art.

As were  the trigger plates for the duelling pistols…

I am very fond of the design of The Ray Gun. There is a very satisfying balance to this sketch, when I have completed the Unearthly Power, this will be my next project.

The Unearthly Power is a fairly simple design and the overall shape is based on a Bosch drill. This is my first design that I am producing as a physical prototype. So far … so good. I’m going to have to remake the prototype as I am also experimenting with materials, but … meh, whatever. The prototype is based on the sketch, I will be making deviations from the design as my skill limits are reached.

I also plan to make a backpack device that can plug in to several of the designed guns.