(10) Thomas A Edison Commemorative Table Lamp

During Xmas 2009  I did a quick brass table lamp makeover.  I had an old lamp with a treasure chest/knick-knack holder mounted on a wood base.  Off went the chest to become a Thomas A Edison Commemorative Lamp. 

I had bought 2 ceramic Jim Beam '100 Yrs of the Light Bulb' commemorative whiskey decanters (empty) from Ebay for $5.00 - cleaned them up, mounted them on the wooden lamp base, added a decorative steam pressure gauge (thanks to Capt Lyerly of the Upper Chesapeake Steam Defence League) as well as a copper connecting spring between the 'light bulbs', and that was that.  A nice steamy effect for a fairly small amount of effort. 

 

 (9) Steampunk Office Cubicle Makeover

THE ULTIMATE* STEAMPUNK OFFICE CUBICLE

  (* Until Someone Does A Better One, Which Would Not Be Terribly Difficult)

The ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots - if you are interested in more information, read on. 

 WHY DO IT

According too much Googling there are neither images nor articles out there on how to imagine, let alone construct, a steampunk work cubicle, and there’s only a brief note on an individual who made his cubicle into a ‘woody’; http://gizmodo.com/5016794/

While the most likely reason for this is no one really cares, that’s clearly never stopped anyone before, so it won’t now.  And after all, this is a much nicer environment to spend 9-10 hrs each day than the typical Dilbert-esque gov’t office.

BACKSTORY

I’ve been hooked on Steampunk/Neo-Victorian themes since I saw the first black & white TV episodes of the “Wild Wild West” as a 10 yr old kid in 1965, a show my father said the NY Times described in a review as ‘historical science fiction’.  Fast forward to today.  After the 12 year old building I worked in was demolished to make way for a parking lot, a 58 yr old gymnasium replaced it and was renovated with new cutting edge (if it was 1980) grey mouse-fur colored office cubicle furniture.  Since my 64 sq ft of new office décor was already obsolete, it seemed a good time to take the next step, backwards an additional century.

OVERALL TURN OF THE CENTURY DESIGN THEMES

> TORCHWOOD 1899

> PERIOD FAKE SCIENCES 

> BRITISH WHITEHALL GOV’T OFFICE

The overall design themes I picked for the makeover were, from a hardware perspective, fairly well related – Torchwood 1899/Turn of the Century Fake Science, and, since this is a real government office, Neo-Victorian-ize it into a semi-proper British Whitehall office of the period.

The Dr Who spin-off Torchwood had a small number of episodes which took place from the late 1800s through the WWI timeframe period, and as they represented a British gov’t office using advanced technology it seemed like it had the correct look for this exercise.

Some pix echoing the BBC vision of ‘Victorian Men In Black’ (to quote BG member JRingling from a quarterly meeting of the Upper Chesapeake Steam Defence League) are below;

  

For the cubicle makeover, mixing Victorian era office design cues with 1899 Torchwood-y ‘high tech’ devices would make for both an interesting and coherent theme.  Note there are not many full props in this project, essentially all are functional in one way or another - (*) means it was a mod or build;

Items Making Up The ‘Torchwood 1899’/Fake Science Theme

> PDA/Automata *  (functional mechanical hand that moves & plays music, a ‘Personnel Digital Assistant’)
> Boiling tube lamp *  (functional, both as a tube lamp and a closed system 2 stage liquid boiler)
> 50 gear clock *  (functional, all display gears move simultaneously)
> Fowler Phrenology Head (holds Atomik Fabrik goggles)
> Retro telephone headset *  (functional – a 1930s hands-free unit used with the PBX land line phone)
> Corona Typewriter (c 1907 & functional) resting on/hiding a Dell PC laptop
> Flat screen monitor with brass horn speakers *  (functional brass horn speakers for the Dell laptop)
> Candlestick telephone, 1970s era (functional, used for office calls)
> Telegraph key (works as a functional stapler)
> Vacuum tube multi-band wood radio (functional AM/FM radio, white display LED ‘vacuum tubes’ light up)
> Vacuum tube radio amplifier for the brass PC speaker horns  (functional radio, red display LED ‘vacuum tubes’ light up)
> Necronomicon sketchbook (thankfully the Necronomicon is not functional)
> Mousepad / Ouija board (also thankfully non-functional or spirits would be confused by all the messages to them from the mouse movements)

Items Making Up The Turn Of The Century ‘Victorian Government Office’ Theme
> Bare brick walls *
> Wood & brass desk *
> Brass inkwell holder
> Victorian writing blotter
> Victorian date/date/month perpetual calendar replica
> Restored circa 1900 Knights Templar long coat ‘wall covering’ *
> PC wire routing hole doubles as stand Sherlock Holmes umbrella
> Victorian portable writing desk replica (holds PBX-ish landline work telephone)
 

WALL & DESK COVERINGS

The desk covering in particular turned out MUCH better than expected, and the costs were surprisingly small.

LOWER CUBICLE WALLS

The 3D Victorian brick wall effect came via high school prom stores which sell large quantities of what is essentially gift wrapping paper, which they sell very cheaply.

The paper, which is an enlarged photo of an old brick wall, came in a 4 ft wide x 50 ft long roll for $15.00 USD.  All these stores seem to have regular sales on their wares, so keep an eye out for reduced prices.  I bought this paper roll from Stumps, which currently lists for $20.39,  25% than their spring sale price.  http://www.stumpsprom.com/prom/Dark-Brown-Brick-Flat-Paper.cfm?caid=664866

I reinforced the upper edge of the brick paper with wide brown tape to simulate ‘molding’, then positioned Velcro bits on the brick paper and on the cubicle walls.  

Now on ‘dress down Fridays’ not only do I look retro rustic but so does my work area - I can erect the brick wallpaper panels in 5-6 minutes by lining up the Velcro dots on the back of the brown  tape with their opposite numbers permanently attached on the cubicle wall.  Breaking it down at the end of the day takes < 2 minutes.  

I only used about ½ the roll, so many Xmas presents will get wrapped in bricks for years to come.

UPPER CUBICLE WALLS

Nothing says Victoriana like stained glass, and it can be done with a minimum of fuss and cost.

The tops of the cubicle walls are ‘frosted’ translucent plastic panes.  I bought a 6 ft roll of ‘stained glass’ window static cling material (similar to the link below) for $11 on Ebay, then cut into 3 strips of 8 inches wide x 6 ft each, creating a period Victorian window border.  http://www.glassdecorandmore.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?item=26

One translucent stained glass panel was an indulgence – I had a cling made (Starfish Girl on Ebay) with the year ‘1899’ to stop people from walking by and asking me what timeframe the cubicle was supposed to represent.  A bit pricey at $20, but far and away the best twenty bucks spent on this project to date.  To paraphrase Prince, ‘Party Like Its 1899’.

DESK COVERING

The short answer – contact paper.  The long answer is there are some very thick, durable papers out there replicating all sorts of wood types – teak, maple, oak, and another half a dozen I found at various websites, and many of them were described as ‘repositionable’ (ie, non-permanent, a key to this exercise since it is a gov’t office).   But there are also metal contact papers, and that was the primary reason I decided to change the cubicle desk surface from lowest cost contract bid dingy white fiberboard to wood & brass.

I ultimately selected an oak (cheaper compared to other wood contact papers) with a brass trim combination - ‘Ultra Honey Oak’ and ‘Metal FX Brushed Brass Contact Paper’, 2 rolls of wood contact paper (though there’s a large bunch left over) and one of brass, which was cut into strips for the desk edging.  
http://housewares.hardwarestore.com/37-188-contact-papers/ultra-honey-oak-contact-paper-105300.aspx
http://housewares.hardwarestore.com/37-188-contact-papers/metal-fx-brushed-brass-contact-paper-105306.aspx

I takes a bit of time to lay it down properly, spreading it out with an 18 inch office ruler to minimize trapped air bubbles.  The entire job took about an hour during the course of a week, and the process was basically trouble & bubble-free even though I had never put contact paper down over such a large area before.  And what a great shine the brass metal contact paper shows!

The holes at the desk in each corner for the PC wires to route through were sprayed metallic copper, and one of them is used as a holder for my Sherlock Holmes umbrella/walking stick (photo note – pictures often lie, but not in this case. While the wood and brass really pop in the photos, in real life it looks far  better).

FUNCTIONAL OFFICE CUBICLE DECOR

50 Gear Clock (mod)

This Homeloo commercial product (www.homeloo.com/shop/product_info.php?products_id=348 ) uses 4 ‘D’ batteries supposedly good for 6 months but are still going strong at this writing (11 months during Nov 09)). Two batteries drive the hands and two move the decorative gears, each of which turns twice per minute and are not linked to the clock hands, which are nearly silent in an office setting.

Since I enjoy kinetic desk toys this keeps me amused quite nicely.  A few minor retro mods were added to it in order to reduce the modern appearance;

> The clock hands with older styled ones, which were themselves given a rusty appearance by spraying and rubbing with steel wool.

> A rusty decorative spring was added at approx the 3PM position.
 
> Brass washers were adhesived to each of the 50 gears’ central rotating shafts, and the whole clock itself was mounted like a photograph or drawing on a Victorian photo/drawing/silhouette easel type of holder.

MECHANICAL HAND (mod)

A 2009-09 commercial product ($15 USD) from ‘What On Earth’ (no longer sold), very turn of the century automata even without any mods.  

The multi-joint/geared fingers move and play ‘air piano’ tunes – 5 classical music snippets, such as Beethoven’s 5th,  of approx 20-30 seconds each.  Considering it only has a couple of very small holes near the heel of the hand to vent the sound and is powered by 2 AA batteries, it is actually quite loud.  

The hand is attached to the end of my unused PC monitor arm, and usually it has a hypodermic needle/ink pen between its fingers ready to take notes on the portable Victorian writing desk.   Since it is located in a US gov’t Human Resources office, it is dubbed a ‘Personnel Digital Assistant’.  

The decorative mods were;

> Installing a brass sleeve with a leather ‘wrist’ band over part of the brass which serves to hide hiding the attachment point to the PC monitor stand

> Brass washers (leftovers from the 50 Gear Clock) glued on each ‘knuckle’

> Brass straight & coiled copper wires attached along outside of hand from wrist to fingertips look like mechanical ‘tendons’

BRASS BOOKENDS CONVERTED TO PC SPEAKERS (mod)

Toning down the modern appearance of my work PC was a high priority.  The mods involved were easy but fairly time consuming;

> Used brass trumpet bookends ($5.00 Ebay) were turned into functional PC speakers by removing the innards of a set of earbud headphones from their casing.  They were placed into the hole drilled into the base of each horn, then the hole was sealed and the wires run underneath the horn base.

> The speaker wires were plugged into the laptop and they worked extremely well from day one – much louder than simply maxing out the earbuds sound level if the horns were not used.  Since the horn mouthpieces turn upwards and run underneath the flat screen monitor,

> Between the 2 horns a used ‘Radio City Valve Radio’ ($7 Ebay), an AM/FM radio with red glowing LEDs mounted in the 3 ‘vacuum tubes’.  It gives the appearance of a tube amplifier on a breadboard powering the brass horns.          
(http://www.redferret.net/?p=10571)

BOILING TUBE LAMP (mod)

Nothing adds to the ambience of turn of the century fake science/mad science Victorian setting like a tube lamp for writing.  This unique variation on the common ‘Yet Another Tube Lamp’ theme doubles as a piece of kinetic art as it boils when the tube lamps are lit.

 > Home Depot parts: Two socket electrical box, copper decorated rheostat, plastic pipe segments, gold automotive pinstriping roll, & two Sylvania 25T10 bulbs

> Decorative springs and a ‘love meter’ toy (two connecting / closed vessels filled with a low boiling point liquid).  

Even at the lowest rheostat setting providing a dim but visible red filament, the liquid continually boils, emptying the lower container and bubbling into the upper one.

STEAMY TELEPHONE HEADSET (mod)

The build was described on Spare Goggles when BG was off the air,
http://sparegoggles.forumotion.net/tactile-f7/headset-what-do-you-think-t58.htm#3492

BG member M Wells customized this 1930s telephone operator’s headset, first rate work with nicely faded copper and brass.  The Brit equivalent of our RJ11 phone plug was too wide for USA phones, and even after whittling it down to size there was considerable background humming.  Splicing off the old plug with a new RJ11 did not fix it, not surprising as mating old electrics to modern electronics is dicey.  

The innards of the antique's electrics were replaced by Radio Shack (model # HS-149) bits.  The 4 photos show the ‘before through using it at work’ sequence of results.  The pix at the bottom left shows a nearly completed product, with the plastic cord sprayed copper and the as yet unblackened boom mike sticking out of the bottom of the (formerly hollow) speaker horn.  

Odds & Ends

- Wood & brass portable Victorian writing desk replica ($6 USD Ebay) holds the office land line phone and coiled cords.

- The PC cable routing hole in the corner of the desk was painted copper and perfectly fits my Sherlock Holmes umbrella / walking stick

- Fowler Phrenolgy head ($9 USD Ebay) holds my Atomik Fabrik prescription brass goggles and the 1930s era telephone operator headset with new Radio Shack mechanicals.

VIEW FROM THE KEYBOARD

Brass inkwell/PDA phone stand, retro wood radio with LED vacuum tubes, Ted Arnold telegraph key/stapler.  

Still to be worked: PC stuff (monitor surround, mouse, keyboard) and some sort of period-ish chair covering. 

We can assist the Kraken in making a comeback by simply boosting its ability to recognize others of its own species through the ever increasing murky media of the air.  It is well known that the tiniest of ‘baby’ Air Kraken do not live in the free air, but rather exist in a nutrient filled egg sack which blows in the wind, sometimes settling on the highest mountains and sometimes remaining aloft until it is time to emerge from their ‘cocoon’.  Only at this early stage of life we can place them in a water-filled nutrient media and transform their species self-recognition ability.  While it is extremely difficult to find an atmospheric egg sac, even finding a single one would results in tens of thousands of potential reinvigorated offspring.  From its time in the egg case though the very fast progressing hatchling/larval/sub-juvenile stages of life  we will briefly intervene to promote the population of the species.(http://www.shim.bc.ca/species/Images/OPLSQUID.GIF ).

 

By placing the youngest of the Kraken into this life-sustaining aquaculture hatchery we keep them well fed and imbue them with Telluric rays from the dual Tesla Coils. 

  

 

The effect has been impressive in prototype testing – the natural bioluminescence inherent in all Kraken was enhanced by a factor of not less than 9X.  When placed in a darkened laboratory the increased luminosity of the pre-juvenile Kraken allowed them to be readily viewed from more than 20 meters distant, up greatly from less than 2 meters prior to the engineered enhancement.  One can only imagine the magnitude of this effect in the adults. 

 

 

Fortunately Kraken can control their levels of luminosity from zero through maximum to avoid predation, and effect of one or more enhanced (in the luminosity sense) males ‘courting’ females would be a spectacular light show in the evening sky.  Perhaps one way we could test the validity and effectiveness of a post-prototype, full-scale working Augment-o-tron would be if there was a significant increase in UFO reporting in the post-treatment juvenile release sector.  Operation of the device is very straightforward. The newborn are sex-typed by chromosome count and are placed in either an all-male or all-female water column to minimize cannibalizing predation. The dual Tesla Coils are tuned to ‘electrify’ the bioluminescence photoreceptors on the Kraken’s body with telluric energy, and after a 4-5 day treatment period the effect becomes permanent. See their 'zero setting' of no luminescense here (http://www.gombergkites.com/update/338-50.JPG)  

 

 

This is a totally natural way to enhance the survival chances of the species, as the twin Tesla Coils ‘terrestrial currents’ amplify an ability that the Kraken already possess.  Long term testing to confirm the ability of the Kraken to pass this new ability through chromosome modifications must wait until a larger control population exists.  The only major negative to this process, besides the obvious monetary costs and commitments of supporting resources, is a significant increase in the Krakens’ appetites - they must eat much more to offset the large energy expenditures caused by their increased luminosities.  This will likely increase the number of, to date anyway, relatively rare daylight attacks at ground level.