Building a Mechanical Cryptograph

January 8, 2010 by Kurt

This year I’m building an encryption device for my Retrotechnology Society. If you recall last year 6 of my friends/relatives were “antecedently” inducted into a secret society. The only down side being that the society was so secret that I never heard back from anyone. This year I’m going to change all that by providing them with this encryption device, so they can communicate with me (and one another) in cipher. Functionally it’s based on the 1850’s Wheatstone Cryptograph, design wise I’m working on spicing it up a bit.

These images are of the very first prototype. It’s totally rough. I want the basic shape to be the Retrotechology Logo of the 11 toothed gear with an eye in the middle. I’m trying to design the eye so that it “looks around” as you encode/decode messages. You turn the thumbwheel at the upper right, and that drives two gears which turn two rings of letters which are visible though two openings in the face of the device. The eye design is really rough, and various spacings will be adjusted, but this is mostly just a proof of concept to make sure things are actually going to be functional.

These were laser cut out of clear 1/8″ acrylic. Later versions will have to have clearance areas etched into various parts, etc. (to prevent binding) and I’ll have double brass sleeves acting as the bearings. (right now it’s all just jammed in 1/8″ brass rod to hold it together enough to make sure things were working out.) I like how it’s coming out, but I think the aesthetic of the eye design really has to be worked out some more. Still I think it’ll be fun. The final color scheme is going to be black, with white disks inside. I haven’t deiced yet what to do with the back. I could add some cutouts that would expose the gearing a bit. Kind of a skeleton Cryptograph, but that might make it less functional. “keep your fingers and crud out of those holes!” so I haven’t decided. Maybe just a redux of the eye.

I wrote the code to generate the gear profiles in python, and then imported that into illustrator and did all the rest of the work there.

Ok, so then it was time to cut out real versions in the right colored plastics, etc. I used black for the outer casing and “Ivory” for things like the friction wheel, and the lettered discs. In the design the black front/back called for gold and white lines. I thought this was going to be a real pain to do, but I came up with a trick. I used a little rubber squeegee (cut from a Speedball rubber pad) and was able to squeegee gold paint down into all the lines and curves in a jiffy.

This squeegee system reduced the amount of paint used, and really speeds up the whole process. The fills are more uniform too. I don’t want the fills to be perfect because the device is supposed to look sort of old, but the amount of time I was saving painting all that stuff made using the squeegee super important.

Once the splops were on, it was just a couple of strokes to fill every line.

I did have to manually clean out the center hole. It doesn’t matter if there’s a bit of extra gold paint in there since it’s going to have a brass tube pressed in, but we can’t have a thick blob.

If you look closely you’ll also see that I have scraped the outer ring free of most of the gold paint using a paper towel and my fingernail. Then I painted white over the top.

These are the faux Ivory thumb wheels with their special strate knurl, and inlayed arrows. (Done with the same painting technique)

I would have rather had the gears be “ivory” but since they’re not actually visible, I was able to cut them nested inside the other black components, and save a lot of material. I’ve toyed with the idea of making a fancier gear and a “skeleton” version of the Cryptograph, but decided to punt. The dark rings and little “tabs” you see in this are places where I’ve etched extra clearances on the gear/outer wall of the device so that friction wheels can run more smoothly without their knurl making their action feel “notchy.”

I also did some initial tests of burning a deep deep hole in a book. I’ve had people tell me it’s impossible to laser cut books, but you can. You simply have to clamp the pages together so they aren’t as prone to catching fire. I laser cut a clamping jig, and the first cut went well. (Probably 1/4″ easy) but subsequent cuts are bad because the loose paper and forced air cause a lot of burning. (I remove the inner paper, but the walls aren’t as well clamped as they were before and there’s a lot of smoke and mayhem. So I think I’m going to have to change the way I index the rig and flip pages/reclamp after each cut until I get to the needed 5/8″ inch depth. Still here you can see a piece inside a book with only minimal effort. I don’t think I’m going to glue or do anything extra. Just cut the hole so the device can be tucked into the book for safe keeping.

I did this test on a volume of a Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. (Millions were given away free in super markets back in the day, and it’s hard cover with gold outer trim, so it seemed like a good call.) I really need to find some uniform nice looking old hardbound books that no one wants/cares for. Not sure how I’m going to do that, this thing was $4 at Goodwill. I have no idea why anyone but me would buy such a thing, and that’s a kind of steep price! If I could have snagged 10 volumes of this F&W I might do that, but I’ll have to keep looking.

So this morning I started assembling a final unit. Here’s the parts mostly laid out. They gray part of the eye is supposed to look a bit rough like that. I want the device to seem a bit old, not super crazy snappy new.

Here’s the body assembled with its 11 pins in place. (11 pins! I have to cut and deburr all those by hand, 1/8″ is a bit small to automate on the lathe. (Kill me.) You can also see the super fancy inner pin that drives the middle disc via a square drive shaft that passes though the center of the other gear.

Here’s a closeup of the friction wheel on it’s shaft. You can see it’s inner brass sleeve.

Here you can see the most complicated brass part for the project. Most of the 18 brass pieces are just bits of rod or tube, but the central drive shaft is made up of a brass rod, and square brass tube, and then a custom machined brass tube (the needed to be machined so that it nested to the outside of the square tube and then nested properly inside the 1/4″ brass tube sleeve that is in the center of the upper gear. This shaft lets the bottom gear smoothly drive the lettered disk that is on top of the upper gear.

I was originally going to solder the bits together, but they pressed together so nicely all I really had to do was add a dab of JB Weld to eventually fix the central rod to the inside of the square shaft. This let me adjust things up/down slightly on assembly. Which was nice.

Another device nearing completion.

Here you can see four of the devices, three done, and one just needing to have the bottom paper pealed off. You can also see last years wax seal, and some sealing wax because I’m about to put the devices in their books and package them up for shipment.

The process of cutting the books was a real messy pain. In order to be able to cut a lot of pages at once I had to make this book press which clamps 80 some pages at a time, and lets me do alignment of the cut. You can see the little ‘L’ shaped page alignment guides for positioning the corners of the page.

The problem with cutting so much paper is that you have to go slow, and the compressed air blowing in the machine makes the paper char a lot more then it would for cutting just a few sheets. So there’s a lot of char and mess, and although you only spend maybe 3 mins in the laser doing each cut the time it takes to do a cycle (take out the old paper, clamp up the new paper, and tape things up so various pages don’t fly around while the laser is cutting, etc. eats up a lot of time, and you have to watch the cut like a hawk to make sure it doesn’t go to open flame, or something comes untaped and is flapping around, etc. Nothing I’ve ever done on the laser before was “messy” in this way.

In the end I did manage to cut 6 books before Christmas.

I was lucky to get this 1909 lavishly illustrated 12 volume set of “Adventures in Bookland” which was great because they were all the same size, which simplified alignment. I got all of them (plus some more books) for $5 at the Friends of the Library book sale. So it was a great deal, but I paid a heavy price in terms of guilt. It was horribly Fahrenheit 451 and I felt awful cutting though all the stories I knew like Robinson Caruso, etc. I’ve kept all of the cut out illustrations for possible future use, but my hands have run black with the blood of many an old book and that made me feel bad.

Here is an image of the device in a book. I love the way it looks like the device has burned its way into the book.

Here’s a close up of it in the book. The “top” page here is quite burnt because it was exposed to the most compressed air laser action. Intermediate pages were much less burned looking, but every sixty pages or so theres are a few really burnt ones because that was the next layer I cut. Alignment between the layers isn’t perfect, but it’s decent. You can see I added a faux window reflection that holds still as the eye looks around. I’m really proud of the way this turned out. Now to see if I get an encrypted messages!

Spider Costume Halloween 2009

October 30, 2009 by Kurt

Sometimes back in the day I’d just put up a bunch of pictures without a writeup. So sorry, no write up.

Paper Lanterns for Mom’s Birthday

September 29, 2009 by Kurt

The other day my son Pioneer brought home a paper lantern from preschool. Around that time we also got some pastries in an interesting paper to-go box that had four sides and folded up into a nice curved shape. That got me thinking that I hadn’t done any paper projects in a very long time.

As a kid I had access to a few super useful project resources. There was scrap wood out in the shop, the pile of used twine loops in the neighbors barn, and a drawer that had a never ending supply of 8.5″x11″ paper. These were great resources because they could be used on a whim to make anything I wanted. I once even tried to stretch a piece of paper around the outside of the house buy cutting it into a very thin spiral strip. I only made it about 2/3 of the way. Paper cranes, paper palm trees, expanded paper mesh, paper chains, paper, paper, paper. It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized our miraculous bottomless “drawer of paper” was closely tied to the fact that that my dad was a high school teacher.

So early on I did a lot of paper projects. In high school I got into origami, and did a lot of book driven Origami projects. Probably the best book I built out of was John Montroll’s Animal Origami for the Enthusiast. Then my work with paper more or less ceased for a long long time. So suddenly seeing Pioneer making a paper lantern made me think back to all my early paper cutting/gluing days, and I realize that the laser cutter at TechShop would be an incredible paper cutting tool. I resolved to make some paper lanterns for my mom’s up coming birthday.

The first prototypes with a few sheets of legal paper and some scissors.

I initially thought I’d make a lantern a bit like the one Pioneer had made, but with much more detailed cut outs. I produced a few little prototypes out of construction paper. I didn’t get a picture of the better lighting bolt themed one, but I did take a picture of this green and yellow one, but wasn’t satisfied with the way they looked kind of spindly. So I thought maybe I’d make a more enclosed lantern a bit like the to-go box I’d seen, but with nice patterns formed by using two layers of paper with the pattern only cut into one of them. I experimented with various patterns, and also started looking for the right overall shape. With paper, scissors and tape I made a number of 4 sided prototypes, and then a 6 sided one. That seemed more pleasing, and I second 6 sided one that I eventually went with.

It’s a joy to do prototyping with paper. Want symmetry? Just fold it over before cutting. Want three exact copies? Just stack the paper up before cutting it out. Wrong position? Unstick the tape and try again. You can try out a lot of major design changes in a twinkling.

I knew I didn’t want to deal with actual candles, and thought LED candles would be excellent replacements, without the risk of fire and design constraints that would impose. I found Pier 1 Imports selling 4 small LED Candles for $5, so that’s what I went with. When folding up the various paper lantern shapes I realized it was important to do that with a light inside the paper so you could see the patterns that the paper overlaps where forming. I eventually made a prototype where the overlaps formed a flower, but because I was later constrained to some fairly opaque paper for the colored layer of my lantern I didn’t take that prototype any further.

I did however decide on some nice flared fins on the outer edges both because they looked nice, and because I was starting to have fantasies about the lanterns spinning in the breeze.

Paper paper who’s got the paper?

I went to the local art store and found nice colored paper, but it was all very opaque. Not ideal for fairly dim LED Candles. I looked a bit on-line, but it’s nigh impossible to determine a papers opacity from a web page. The only paper listing opacity was Shoji paper (used for Japanese screens) but it didn’t seem to be available in bright colors. So eventually I just went with the art store paper even though it meant that the lanterns weren’t going to be as bright as I’d hoped. I did buy vellum for the inner layer of paper to at least maximize the amount of light getting out though that part of the lamp.

Multi Colored Laser Cut Confetti.

Time was running out, so I did a quick pattern design based on a leaf, and thought I’d get cutting/gluing in no time. However I ran into a problem. The super detailed pattern took about 30 mins on the laser at it’s highest speed. (Enough pieces for two lamps) I thought I could avoid this bottle neck by stacking up a bunch of paper and cutting it all at the same time. However the massive amount of air flow in the laser chamber and the direct stream of compressed air at the cutting point made it so the paper would not all lay perfectly stacked up, they’d puff apart and chads would fly, and all this mayhem made it ineffective at cutting more then two sheets at a time. I ruined 3 extra sheets of paper on that first run because the lower sheets were somewhat cut, but not well enough cut that the chads would drop out. It was horribly time consuming to try and hand poke/trim out all these suck pieces, and so I decided I really could only cut two sheets at a time.

I had to reserve the laser for extra time to try and make up the difference. I’d originally wanted to do 20 lanterns, but only ended up making 14 because of these problems.

Two kinds of paper and three kinds of glue.

Then I had to assemble things things. For each lantern there were 6 pieces. Three patterned colored outer pieces and three vellum inner pieces. I used a glue stick to attach the inner and outer pieces together in pairs (only gluing at the top/bottom). I did this because glue stick doesn’t cause the paper to wrinkle/warp the way Elmer’s glue does. Then when I had 3 pairs glued up, I’d glue the base rings of the 3 together with yellow Elmer’s wood glue. (for strength) I’d glue the LED Candle to the center of this stack with hot glue. (Quick, and with good gap filling.) Then after that had set up I did the final gluing of the upper sections. (again with Elmer’s) The final glue step was the most painstaking, but not too horrible.

Pivots at the last possible moment.

My friend Ken pointed out that the lamps would look nice either sitting up, or hanging upside down. And with them up-side down they could spin in the breeze. The trouble is that I was having trouble tracking down the fishing line pivots I’d imagined using for this, and I was running out of time. I had struck out at K-Mart. As luck would have it on the 4 hour drive to Cambria (where my mom’s birthday party was going to be) we pulled off the highway to get some coloring books for the kids, and I dashed into a sporting goods store, and finally managed to find the swivels I’d been looking for. I used some chain nose pliers and gold colored wire to bend up nice hangers for the lanterns as we drove down. We arrived in Cambria with the Lanterns done without a moment to spare, but they were totally untested.

Thankfully they spun easily in the light breeze in the yard. Success. *phew*

Here is a video of some of the lanterns spinning in the breeze about half an hour after we got down to Anne’s:

Here are some photos of the process:

And a few photos of the final results:

I ended up making quite a few of these lanterns in a short period of time and I was pleased with the results. This last photo isn’t mine, it’s one by Laura Mappin. I have a bunch of other shot-in-the-dark photos, in groups, and not, but this one seems to just have a nice glow. I’ve been toying with building a bigger led lamp based on this design using more powerful leds and and Arduino. My friend Lawrence and I have done some interesting software prototypes for a virtual candle based on info we’ve collected from actual candles. Hopefully I’ll get around to writing that up some day.

The original page in the Internet Archive.

A Totoro Step Stool for my Son

January 18, 2007 by Kurt

The japanese director Hayao Miyazaki has produced some of the world’s best animated films. His “My Neighbor Totoro” is one of my favorite kids’ films. It came out in 1988, but didn’t really make a showing in the US until much later. Around 1990 a friend of mine who is an Anime fanatic introduced me to Miyazaki’s work. We would watch the movies, and someone would read the text translation as the movie progressed. How primitive! One of the great things I noticed about Totoro in that setting was that it was universal. Pastoral beauty, kids being kids. It needed no translation.

Disney has finally decided that Miyazaki movies have a market in the US and has produced some decent dubbed versions of his movies on DVD for the US market.

Now that I have a son of my own I want him to grow up loving Miyazaki’s work too. So for his second Christmas I gave him My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki’s Delivery Service on DVD. I also decided to make him a wooden step stool that looked like Totoro.

The Sketch

So I did a sketch. That’s the problem with a lot of the projects I do. I’ll do one or two quick sketches, and then I’m off slavishly producing that exact thing in wood/metal. Not exactly going with the flow and following the inspirations provided by materials at hand, etc. I did the sketch. I went down to shipping and receiving at work and snagged some cardboard boxes. I blew the sketch up on the photocopier and used that as a pattern to cut out a full-sized mock up. Doing a mock up is good. It’s something you can do in 30 mins with office tape and scissors that’ll warn you about things that you wouldn’t otherwise discover until 2/3 of the way though the project.

I decided on an overall scale for the project, and I was off to the races.

Totoro’s an Owl?

I took the cardboard Totoro home. I sort of hid it by tucking it vertically under the bench, but the next time my son came out to the shop he went straight to it. I guess even the clutter and chaos of my shop has enough pattern to it that he was able to pick out the “new” object in a flash. He went right over and grabbed it. He was 20 months old at this point. “Whaz that?” He said excitedly. He put his arms around Totoro’s neck. “Eye. ‘nother eye!” he said with his face only an inches away from Totoro’s eyes. “Ear. ‘nother ear” he said grabbing the ears. “Owl?” Apparently Totoro was an owl. I hadn’t thought about it before, but he does rather look like an owl. At this point, he’d never seen the movie. He had no idea what Totoro was, but I could tell by his excited reaction that the Totoro project was going to be a success.

The construction plan

I wanted to use natural wood colors for the various bits of Totoro. I don’t know why I do this except that I rather like wood’s natural beauty, and many of my staining projects seem to come out somewhat blotchy. So I went to the Minton’s lumber to get some darker looking wood. I settled on Alma Rose. I have no idea what kind of wood that is, but it was brownish, with even grain, it wasn’t heavy, and it was comparatively cheap. (Less then $2 a board foot) So I was all over it.

I biscuited it together, and low and behold the joints weren’t that flat. So I spent a good chunk of time hand planing and then random orbit sanding with a 60 grit disc to get it flat.

I hate veneer

I had originally thought I’d do his belly using some spare white formica that I had left over from a counter top. Then I had this “good” idea. Instead of using formica I could put a light wood veneer on, it would look more natural, and I’d still be able to route through to produce the darker chevrons on Totoro’s chest. I got some veneer and some veneer glue, and I stuck it on. Now it is at this point dear reader that I noticed that the clamping force recommended in fine print on the glue’s label was something like 200 lbs per square inch! Now that was going to be something like 14 TONS of clamping force. I started to get a bit worried. I noticed that the piece’s shape made it hard for me to get clamps to reach many of the edges of the veneer. I worried more. I put the board on the shop floor with a board over it, and then piled layer after layer of concrete block on top of that. Still probably had less then half a ton total on the board. Not good. The next day I unpiled the stack only to discover that the veneer had rippled horribly. I had to sand it all away again using a 60 grit pad. Tediously back to square one.

Resawing is hard

So I thought I’d glue down thicker wood. I had some nice figured maple and I thought if I resawed it into 3/16 boards it would look really nice. However I didn’t have a resaw blade, and I quickly discovered that resawing figured maple is a lot harder then just sawing thin strips of wood off a pine 2×4. The blade wandered and pretty much destroyed the piece of wood I was trying to resaw. The smell of burnt wood, the destruction of one of my nice chunks of maple. All the hallmarks of a “learning experience.” What the heck was I going to do? Time to go back to the wood store. I finally decided to go with some very thin plywood. It looked nice, and glued down without a ripple. Not as nice as solid wood, but hey Christmas was coming and I was working with a deadline.

Totoro starts to take shape

His belly was on. So I traced and cut out his outline. I cut the outline on the bandsaw. Now he was starting to look like like something! I used the belt sander to round the various contours, and then a drum sander chucked in the drill to round some of the harder to reach inner corner edges. Then there was lots and lots of hand sanding to refine what I’d done with the belt sander.

My son wasn’t in the dark about this project. If I’d been spending this much time out in the shop without him getting to see what was up, he would probably have exploded. So he came and checked out how things were progressing.

Router templates are fun

So then I made a router template to cut the chevrons on Totoro’s chest. I did a sketch on paper, cut the outline onto some 1/8″ acrylic sheet, and drilled/filed the shape out. Then I’d clamp that into position for each of the chevrons and routed away. I used a ball end bit, and would do a “once around the outside,” and then a series of evenly space vertical passes to route out the interior. I didn’t want to have to finish the bottoms of those things and I figured that sort of pattern would provide an interesting look that wouldn’t need much touching up.

I also used a router template to route the recesses in the back of Totoro that would hold the treads of the step stool. That exact pattern took quite a bit of trial and error filing because the treads were somewhat cupped and I wanted the holes to match the boards rather closely. I also did a routing trick on the feet to make it so that they overlapped the bottom of the belly plywood. That way there was no visible edge just above the feet.

At this point I also needed to work on the other side of the stool. I didn’t quite have enough Alma Rose left to do it out of that, so it was back to the wood store for the third time. They didn’t have a nice Alma Rose board, so I opted for some Australian Blackwood that was a similar hue, and quite a bit denser. That had the advantage of counter balancing the bigger Totoro side of the bench.

I cut the treads from more figured maple that I’d snagged by picking carefully through the boards at HomeDepot. It’s amazing what you can find there if you keep an eye out. Don’t tell anyone! I cut a nice curve out of the upper tread, and echoed it in the piece I put underneath to provide more diagonal reinforcement.

Horror and Heartbreak

So I routed the Totoro side. Then I took careful measurements and routed the hole for the treads on the other piece. I SHOULD have taken a piece of paper and a pencil and made rubbing of the routed recesses to make the pattern on the other side. What did I actually do? I took some careful measurements and laid out the other side. After routing those holes I tried putting it all together only to discover that the bottom tread was off by exactly 1/2″ back to front. Horror! I was forced to route another opening, and make a 1/2″ curved patch to put into the extra gaping hole on that side. I don’t know where that 1/2″ went, but it was so big, and so exactly 1/2″ I can only assume I screwed up my measurement somewhere. So some time was lost making the patch, but the end result isn’t that bad looking. It’s not easy to pick out at a glance. An imperfection to show the hand of the maker and placate the gods.

Burn your face

So I used a wood burning pencil to burn Totoro’s face on. Always a bit hairy because with a wood burning pencil there’s no erase. (Well short of gouging out a fair amount of wood.) So that was a bit ticklish. Thankfully I was able to follow my original sketch’s lines reasonably well, and his face came out fine.

I had decided to burn on of the Soot Spirits on the other side of the stool, but then decided that such a spirit would be much more at home hiding in a dark corner on the underside of the stool. That would have been a lot easier had I done that before gluing the whole thing up. Oops. Still I managed to burn it without any big screwups. Even if it was 3 times harder because it was in a corner. He just feels safer and more comfortable down there.

Finishing “Sticky …. sticky… sticky”

So then it was off to put various coats of polyurethane on the project. The hard part was that I couldn’t finish it out in the shop. It was too cold and damp and dusty to have it finish in any sort of time, and I only had a few days left before Christmas. So I put the finish on it in the house. That seemed to be going reasonably well. I had put on the last coat and was kicking back when I heard a bad sound from the other room. “Sticky … sticky… sticky…” My son was saying “sticky” over and over. I could only think of one thing is that room that was probably still sticky. A great big half-dried Totoro. Oh no! So Cheryl and I went in there. Cheryl washed off his hands while I tried to deal with the hand prints. I ended up putting on another thick coat right then and that mostly hid them, at the cost of a few drips that cleaned up with a razor blade.

Ready for Christmas by a Whisker.

Well Christmas came, and our son was flooded with gifts. The Totoro had been a more or less constant presence at our house for the past few weeks, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise. Still he was excited to be able to clamber all over it (finally). He used it to get on his new train table. Thank goodness it was done, or very nearly done. There were a few finishing touches that I put off until the new year. Felt pads on the feet, painting the background of his eyes white, and putting on his whiskers, but by Jan 3rd it was well and truly done. phew.

Here is the original page in Internet Archive.

Halloween Costumes

November 2, 2006 by Kurt

I like making Halloween costumes. When I was little my mother did a lot of sewing, quilting, embroidery, knitting, crochet, tatting, etc. She showed me how to do the basics. How to sew on a button, and encouraged me as I worked on various projects. A square of cathedral window quilt, a lion embroidered a lion on my lucky sock, a counted cross stitch bear. I can remember arriving at a friends house, only to realize that the embroidery hoop was unexpected affixed to my knee. I’d stitched through my pant leg during the drive.

So I knew the basics, but had never gone very far with it. Then for many years I didn’t do much more then hem a few pairs of pants. Then my son Pioneer was born, and when Halloween rolled around I realized that I was interested in making him a costume.

I had seen a cute baby dressed as a pumpkin, and though “I can do that.”

I discover I have a super power

Well, I wasn’t exactly bitten by a radio active spider, but I did spend many hours sifting through the mixed buttons bin at “Finche’s Fabric Farm” while my mother shopped. I’d spent untold hours in the sewing room listening to the whir of the sewing machine, playing with the snap pliers, pinking sheers, tracing wheels. I remember the smell of the sewing machine oil in its little can.

As I started in on Pioneer’s pumpkin costume I discovered that all those hours in my childhood had instilled in me a mysterious power. I was totally at ease at the fabric store buying materials for the costume. I knew exactly what to do, just by going with what felt “right”. I made paper templates. I folded them in half before cutting to make the symmetrical. I cut test pieces, left seam allowances, added piping. I knew how to lay things out, pin them up, sew them, turn them inside out and stuff them with fiber fill. It all felt totally comfortable. Like I’d done it a thousand times, even though I’d never actually done it at all. It felt like coming home.

Best of all, the results were actually pretty good. Now it may seem like silliness to spend 7 hours making a costume that Pioneer only ever wore for 5 minuets (seven month olds aren’t big on wearing hot heavy outfits with hats for very long) but once you’ve discovered a mysterious power, who wouldn’t want to try it out? To give it free reign and see where it takes you.

Why Costumes?

Halloween costumes have a lot to recommend them. They’re 85% aesthetic. If they look good, they are good. They only need to be sturdy enough to survive a few hours of trick-or-treating. They have a fixed deadline, and a short schedule, and a very short lifespan. These are ideal conditions for getting in touch with ones inner seamstress. If I’m not sketching, cutting, pinning or sewing every minute. I’m not going to finish, so I don’t have time to second guess. It turns out to be ridiculously fun.

I try making an owl costume.

For his second Halloween I had Pioneer choose what he wanted to be. He chose an owl. He likes owls. He points to them in our bird book, makes hoot hoot sounds with me when we see them in his “Animals Showing Off” pop-up book. We’ve stood together on the deck, under the stars, listening to their deep calls. Yup. He wanted to be an owl. It wasn’t until I did some web searching that I discovered how difficult a task k this was. These human owl hybrids are tricky, and every owl costume I saw on the web looked either sad or ridiculous. I had my work cut out for me.

Rule 1. No mortar boards

One thing my research into owl iconography made clear was that if you’ve failed to get people to recognize your owl you slap an mortar board on top. Owls are very striking birds. I was hoping I could get the owl idea across without resorting to whacking people with a board.

The pumpkin had been all about fleece, but in my book owls are corduroy. Something about the the texture and softness. So I went off to the fabric store and bought three kinds of corduroy. I also started making some sketches and paper mock ups of what the owl might look like. I got in the zone, and cranked out the owl costume in one weekend (plus two weekday evenings.) I knew I was going crazy when I considered making a lining for the costume. I had to remind myself that I’d be lucky if he’d wear it for more then 5 mins.

Lessons learned from the corduroy owl:

Never mark white corduroy with a sharpie unless you’re ok with both sides being black. Doing lots of sewing in a shop littered with sawdust and metal shavings involves the fine art of never dropping anything, and perhaps most importantly when you’re son pulls out some polyester fiber fill and puts it under his chin and says “beard… beard!” it’s so cute that it is very nearly fatal.

I had done a nice mock up in paper of what I wanted to do. However when it came time to make that vision a reality it turned out that toddler heads are pretty darn big, and in order to make the owls eyes/face the way I’d originally intended I’d have had to make the head HUGE. I think this a problem many of the web owl costumes were suffering from. A too small head perched on top of the kids face. Weird and distracting. I don’t think Pioneer would have dealt with a full owl mask because that’s just too much face coverage. Besides his face is super cute, so putting something over it, or right above it seemed like a tragic waste of cuteness. So I opted for a more stylized treatment of the head. Just a kind of owl horns hood stiffened with sheet plastic and welding wire on the inside. As it turns out he actually likes wearing that part of the costume. He didn’t want to take it off.

So on Halloween he wore the main part of the costume pretty much all day. It looked great. He came to work during lunch time, and then we went out trick-or-treating with his baby group pals at night. We couldn’t quite get him to say “track-or-treat” but he kept saying “candies” and motoring on to the next house. He did freak out a little at one house when a motorized disembodied hand started crawling across the porch towards him, but we distracted him with a kitty that was right there, and he seems to have not been to scared by the experience. He loved all the lights and decorations. We went to quite a few houses, and then our friends/neighbors Carl and Rita invited us in and gave us dinner, and he got to see some old school stop motion dinosaurs in “The Lost World.”

All in all it was a very successful Halloween. I’m hoping next year he’ll be willing to try some things on before the big day. After I’d seen him wear the thing, I realized there are some alterations I’d like to do. The lower back section is pretty square, and could really use a couple of seams to take out some of the extra material and make it more form fitting. Also the Velcro flap that holds the front closed isn’t sewn all the way to the top, and that made it so it was free to flop out a bit at the top. I was going to hand sew that section, but didn’t manage to get around to it.

Hey, I even have a picture of Pioneer clearly contemplating how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop:

The original web page in the internet archive.

Building a Bar Themed Lamp

October 10, 2006 by Kurt

I like making lamps. You get to have fun playing around with light and shadow, they’re useful, and as long as you do it right you don’t burn down anyones house.

My friends got married, and I wanted to make a wedding gift for them. They are into bar paraphernalia. They even provided the wet bar at my wedding, so it seemed like a natural to make them something with a bar theme. I’ve made a number of lamps so I built them this lamp made from 4 jiggers, 4 martini glasses, and a martini shaker. Pushing the cap on the shaker acts as the off/on pushbutton for the light, and the glasses are not fixed in place, so the lamp can be used to serve drinks!

The basic idea is sketched out

At first I didn’t have a plan, so I poked around the web looking at various shakers, jiggers, tongs, juicers, strainers, etc. I noticed that the bell shaped jigger looked like it would make a nice bulb enclosure. I wanted to do a low voltage halogen lamp for it’s nice warm light, so I needed something big enough to hide the power supply. A shaker fit the bill nicely, and it seemed like glasses could act as the light diffusers. I also realized that maybe the glasses didn’t have to be fixed in place so people could actually drink out of them! I originally thought of making a base out of a serving tray, but had trouble finding one that looked nice, and was thick enough to hide the wires. So I eventually opted to fabricate a solid wood base.

Building Details

I used a push button toggle under the shaker’s cap to provide the on/off switch. I routed the circular recesses in the base so that the whole base could act like a big coaster. The recesses are stepped to form 2 concentric rings the inner matches the base on the glasses, the outer adds a nice additional detail. The recesses help keep the glasses in a nicely aligned position. I needed a way to put the shaker up above the base (so it would be at the right hight above the glasses) so I opted make a faux rubber bellows by cutting disks from particle board, gluing them up, turning them, and then painting the whole thing mat black.

The bulbs are 10W halogens that plug into ceramic sockets that are riveted into the jiggers using rivets I formed from lengths of brass tubing. There was a lot of fiddly small hole drilling through the jiggers since I had to drill 2 holes for the wires, and 2 for the rivets. I also had to avoid drilling out the spot welds that held the jiggers together. The wiring is co-axial 16 gage power cord wire from the surplus store (from a laptop power supply.) I just wanted nice black circular cross section 2 conductor wire that was thick enough. That fit the bill.

Building The Arms

I had to build a special jig so that I could center drill a passage into each of the jigger handles. I also machined some tubes that could be bolted together to form a + shape with each of the jigger handles sliding over an arm of the plus, and wires going through channels inside the + to meet at the center. That’s what keeps the arms from drooping, and keeps then at a nice even 90 deg spacing.

The wires emerge inside the jigger and meet up with the fuse, switch, and power supply. The wire passes through 2 small grommets, and the whole jigger handle feeds through a big grommet into the main body of the shaker. That gives all the connections a nice professional feel. I hope the rubber doesn’t degrade to quickly because the final assembly of that sucker was a lot of octopus wrestling.

The base was made from some nice figured wood that I found by picking through the boards at Home Depot. Hey, only $2.80 a board foot for wood with a lovely figure. I biscuit joined two consecutive sections of the board to make a sort of pseudo book match. The recesses were cut using the router, a circular template, and a collar. I made the template by cutting a hole in some particle board using one of those single point circle cutters. Actually I think I cut 5 holes before I got the diameters just right.

A few rounds of sanding and polyurethaning the lamp was basically done. I bead blasted the interiors of the glasses to make them a nice diffuse white. It wasn’t that complicated a project, but the stainless, and the grommets really give it nice professional feel. About the only thing I’d change is that the push button I used was one I got at Radio Shack, and frankly the action on it is clunk-clunky. Not that slick a feel. I could have gone around to the various surplus places and found one that had a nicer action, but hey it works.