Night at the Cathedral

So I had a thought about a fun little 3d printing project. I picked up a few cheap night lights when I was at the hardware store, then after a little measuring got a Gothic-style window design off of Thingiverse, bent it into a semicircle, added a base so that it would fit onto the light the way the original transparent cover did, and then did a little stone texturing after printing it out. With a "lead" grid draw onto a clear plastic strip, it doesn't look half bad.

And when the light comes on, it continues to look right.

Pretty happy with this, at least as a small project. May try something more ambitious with a more elaborate rose window.

Philco

After I built the Themyscira-themed picture frame for certain persons to whom I am married, I started thinking about what I could do with a larger-format tablet I've got, larger than an old picture frame or phone, but not so big that the frame won't fit on the be of my printer.

I started looking in particular at old TV sets, notably the Philco Predicta line of the late 50s and early 60s, with their midcentury-modern styling and picture tube separated from the main body of the TV. What I ended up with was this:

The frame is 3d printed, as is the top part of the console, which has a wood veneer facing. The whole thing is attached to a cheap craft store box, which in addition to reproducing the look, more or less, of some Predicta models, provides a necessary counterweight to the 7" tablet. I may print out a few knobs and such to stick on it, but it's kinda fine as is. It is, as with much else on this blog, pointless, but nifty.

Her Own Private Themyscira

When the recent Wonder Woman movie came out, just about every woman I know wanted to go to Themyscira right now (except my mom, who doesn't go in for movies), and I suspect a good many of them would have wanted to stay. But, of course, it's difficult to get plane tickets to places that don't exist, so none of them got to make the trip.


But I got to thinking about how I could get my lovely and talented spouse as close to Themyscira as I could. The answer was a 3d-printed frame. It was back to the Classical architecture of my grad school days: fluted Doric columns, a simple entabulature (those are Ws instead of triglyphs, of course), and so on. Finished, of course, with a little paint to give it an aged look and some terra-cotta-colored "roof tiles."

 From behind, it's hollow.

And there are cutouts on the top and right side.

They're sized to snugly fit a small digital picture frame while leaving the ports and controls open.

It contains a memory card with screen shots from the movie as well spots on the Amalfi coast on which the movie Themyscira was based. The result:

A slideshow providing a window to the island of the Amazons. It's not a one-way ticket to a mysterious island, but it does fit nicely on a table or desk. And certain persons to whom I am married seem to like it.

And it just now occurs to me that I could do the same thing for her on a Rivendell theme...

A Clockwork Mouse

Had an old mouse. Had a broken mechanical clock. So what do I do with them?

 I cut the body of the mouse in half down to but not including the base and removed the rear part. When chopping up a mouse body, if you want to use the original buttons, it's important not to take off too much from the rear. The buttons attach well back in the body.

For the front of the mouse, I painted it copper, then did the middle button in gold for contrast. The remaining section of mouse behind the buttons is upholstered with a scrap of leather, while the sides are veneered with wood. The key is something I picked up at the craft store.

The rear is the workings of the old clock, cut to fit with a Dremmel and decorated with a variety of additional and repositioned gears and other components.

One of the nice things about this one is that when it's plugged in, the red glow of the LED is visible from the rear, but there's not a glare because it has to reflect through several layers of gears and structural bits.

Another Victorian-esque Drive

Similar approach to the last one: Start with a small block of wood (this a little section of 1" x 2" lumber), hollowed out with drill and tiny router bits. There's an additional hole in the top, drilled with a half-inch drill bit. The whole thing got stained and coated with shellac.

The half-inch hole got filled with a large-sized clothing grommet lined with a little square of brass cloth. The leather upholstery on the sides is cut from a disused glove and nailed/superglued in place. The gear is from a bag of old watch parts, while the corner piece and the "crank" are fashioned from scrapbooking and cheap jewelry pieces from the craft store, superglued in place.

After the drive was epoxied in place, I traced around the end of another USB plug on a scrap of wood veneer (collections of assorted samples are available cheaply on-line from veneer suppliers). Cutting the outline with an Xacto knife, I had a bit of veneer with a hole that fit snugly around the plug. Putting that on the end of the drive, I then traced around the end of the casing, removed it, and cut around the outline so it matched the dimensions of the casing as well. I found that sticking a bit of masking tape on the back while I was cutting greatly reduced splitting. Then I put it back on, glued it, and finished it with matching stain.

The nice bit about this one is that the amber LED attached to the drive, visible through the grommet, is designed to slowly fade in and out while the drive is plugged in. It gives a nice warm light reminiscent of a tube radio, which the finished casing vaguely resembles.

Brass and wood thumb drive

So I made a decorative thing out of an old thumb drive. This is the less interesting side.



The electronics, such as they are, are cannibalized from an old thumb drive. They're cheap, and the case can be pried off easily with a screwdriver or cracked with pliers, leaving you with a circuit board attached to the USB plug itself. The whole thing's about the size of a stick of gum.

The heart of the case is a section of 3/4" wooden dowel. Most of the work on it was done with a Dremel drill press and a bunch of different bits. To make space for the drive, I drilled a bunch of holes in the end, more or less outlining a rectangular hole. A lot of material was removed by that alone, but I enlarged the hole with the aid of some router blades and a few others. By the end, it was nearly just a thin wooden shell.

The bands around ends are from a short section of copper pipe, removed with a pipe cutter (maybe $8 at your hardware store). Since they almost-but-not-quite fit over the ends of the dowel, I used a sanding/grinding bit around the ends of the dowel, shaving down the diameter just a bit, until the copper rings fit. The dowel was prepared for the other metal fittings by a lot of drilling, from tiny, tiny bits in the drill press for the parallel wires to a 3/16" bit (attached to a full-sized drill) for the top "window."

Once all the holes were drilled, the dowel got a coat of dark stain and then one of polyurethane to seal it. The various bits (decorative square brads and long bronze-ish pins from the craft store, a small grommet from the fabric store, and the aforementioned copper rings) were put in place and secured with garden-variety cyanoacrylate. The only unusual bit is that the grommet "porthole" has a layer of woven brass "fabric" behind it. I cut a tiny square, a bit larger than the diameter of the grommet itself, snipped off the corners to make sure they wouldn't project as much, and pushed the grommet through the hole in the dowel, wrapping the fabric over the end and helping wedge it in place.

The bullet end is made from a plastic gear (ordered in a large, cheap bag years ago) painted copper and secured by nailing a decorative tack from the hardware store into the end.




And when the drive is in use, you can see a bright red light through the porthole.

Across the mousepad with leather and steam

The usual technique on the body of the mouse: a coat or two of gold, then a quick spritz of another color, quickly smudged with a paper towel or sponge. I used black for the USB gear drive, but brown for this one. Black is good for a dirty industrial look, but I like brown for elegantly aged brass. After drying, it got several coats of polyurethane for durability.

Wood veneer was cut to fit the mouse buttons, stained, and epoxied on. Close, but not quite there yet, I think. The epoxy is too thick, so there are noticeable gaps around the edges. Next time, I'll try superglue. The facing side of the mouse, where the thumb rests, is covered with leather, cut to fit and superglued on. It's actually very comfortable.

The smokestack on the far side is a bendy straw, filled with epoxy to stiffen it and sprayed with a thick "aged iron" paint. OK, but I can do better. After the bend, it goes through a hole drilled in the side, just far enough forward not to interfere with the grip on the mouse.

USB Gear

Saturday, we went to see Stephanie's parents near Asheville. They were having a garage sale, selling off the bits and pieces their next door neighbor had left behind when she moved into a nursing home. What they didn't sell, we could pick through to see if there was anything that interested us which, given our retro tastes, was considerable.

In addition to a few tiny old books (like a history of the US up to its pub date in 1824), Stephanie grabbed a lot of glassware, and I got my hands on about a dozen old wind-up clocks and a couple of old cameras. One of the clocks has already been broken up for parts, some of which I used.



This was pretty easy. The functional part is a cheap USB drive liberated from its case. The bulk of the new casing is a pair of cheap plastic gears. A little careful work with the Dremmel routed out a space for the thumb drive.

The gears got a coat of gold spray paint, then a very light coat of black followed immediately by rubbing with a sponge to give it that rough, tarnished look. After that, a spritz of polyurethane to make it all a bit more durable.

Then, assembly: the two gears like a clamshell around the drive, then a gear liberated from a broken clock atop that. Several squirts of superglue and bob's your uncle.

This went well enough, but I'm a little dubious about durability. For my next project, I'm looking to start working with epoxy.