Steampunks : Shoveling Clean Coal for a Better "Tomorrow"

BEFORE THE age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.

Even if we had to make it all up.


And thus begins the introduction to Steampunk - the genre, the lifestyle, the subculture, and dare I say it? The brand?

Here comes Steampunk and the neo-renaissance wanna-bees dressed like Grandpa Potts from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang all assuming this hilarious posturing of modern, 19th century characters from an H.G Wells novel.



Steampunks like to embrace an alternate history - I call it the Futuristic Past - whereby they envision a world that was once all dark and brassy and filled with pipes carrying pressurized steam to run everything from their wristwatches to the analog computer systems which powered their space-age blimps around. And, it seems, they like wearing old-school, gas-welding goggles and scarves and such to get the full effect.



Whole websites are dedicated to the accouterments that Steampunks surround themselves with. Things like pseudo Victorian furniture and patterns. Analog-looking anything (including ripping apart modern computers and re-manufacturing them into a laughable Edwardian dandy meets the Industrial Revolution contraption THAT STILL WORKS!) are highly prized. (See above.)

Steampunks love their anachronism.

Steampunk, as a literary or theatrical genre, has been around for quite awhile. But it took the Internet (of course) to promulgate the goofy subculture of ding dongs who actually live a derivative lifestyle based upon these works of fantasy fiction.



The above photo illustrates what is, evidently, some kind of Steampunk bluetooth thing.

What we are shown, and what the steampunk media projects, is a hilarious romp through junk yard cheese and the utter buffoonery that now comprises Steampunk as a modern phenomena.

What we are left with are ridiculous computer mods, a fashion trend that causes uncontrollable giggling, a spate of crappy movies (I.e. The Golden Compass, et.al.), and ultimately, shit like this:



which looks to be some coat hangar wire fashioned around an old Timex.

Once the imaginative and romantic realm of Jules Vern, Mary Shelly, and yes, even William Gibson, has now been co-opted by the dweebs that brought us "industrial" fashion (also known as "cybergoth"), who then got all sappy about the Futuristic Past, and turned into a simple one-liner, complete with Victorian-inspired petticoats, bedazzled with fakey rivets and looking like the extras from Enter The Matrix. Stupid.

What , exactly, is upward?

A new beginning. A time to put the nebulous New Year's resolutions into place. I, for one, have used them effectively in the past.

I find myself thinking, "Whatever you were just doing, you need to do the opposite now." The opposite? Isn't that a little drastic? We'll soon find out. I think it may be time to just look up. Maybe just look at what I have not seen in awhile.

Happy New Year. For whatever reason you need.

This is a fun book to read and is full of handy little ideas and tips. It is pretty old-school but most of these techniques are the same today as they were way back in the day. The only thing we aren't doing too much of nowadays is using hot rivets to bond steel plate and beams.

All My Living Friends

I have recently become infatuated with my past. No, not my ancestral beginnings in Ireland or Japan or wherever the hell I'm from... but in the relatively recent era of what I am calling my "Party Days." We are talking about a brief era circa 1980 through about 1990 (yes, I understand that the era in question - the Party Days - lasted 10 years. I know math.) roughly encompassing my years as an undergraduate college doofus at the University of Colorado in Boulder through my weary years after graduation from San Francisco Art Institute. This would also include my stint in Los Angeles right before my decision to "do something" and making the life-altering decision to return to Colorado. Yeah, that era.

Those of us who grew up in the days where you had to maintain what cultural anthropologists refer to as "address books," those thick, tattered bricks of paper bound together with tape, paperclips and rubberbands, bursting with folded envelopes and napkins, business cards and other various scraps of paper which, due to a certain "I-gotta-organize-this-thing-someday" mentality, never actually was organized, that the we-before-outlook (WBO) crowd relied on for all-inclusive personal information management (PIM), quickly became an obsolete piece of memorabilia the second your friends changed addresses or got a new phone. Yes, the analog PIM was destined for a trash can once you realized that every friend worth keeping that you at some point in the history of the friendship, raised glasses and high-five'd in a mutual BFF ritual that was a verbal contract of sorts, resulted in a process of said friend's name written in some well-meaning attempt at alphabetical ordering and followed by a list of scratched out former apartment numbers, cities and zip codes, and the corresponding multiple phone numbers that ultimately - if you did things correctly - had the most recent number at the bottom of the obsolete pile of useless information above it.

It has been nearly 10 years since I have had a physical manifestation of an address book. I had long-ago lost or failed to "update" that growing list of former addresses and phone numbers for nearly everyone who I had BFF'd and swore contact allegiance to. Many of my former BFFs simply disappeared. Lost. Gone. We all seemed to move on. Lives progressed, marriages took place, children were born, marriages dissolved, homes were bought, second marriages took place... and time did what it does.

Enter the Internet. Enter email. Enter Outlook and Google and mostly, enter Social Networking.

I am jealous of college students today. Now, you meet in school, exchange email and that's all there is to it. BFFs forever (redundant, I know). Tracking via pencil and paper is a thing of the past. Add a few social sites and some profile pictures and you will never be lost again. Now, you are a digital presence that is forever traceable, trackable, and locatable.

That said, my generation - not being complete technical slouches, unlike my mom, who still gets all fluttery when she hears "You've got mail!" mysteriously emanate from that box-thing she begrudgingly purchased 12 years ago at the insistence of her children who, at the time, thought that email might be a good way to communicate with mom if she would only check it once in awhile - has finally incorporated these new social networking tools by backwards-adapting to what is now just a common tool in your human-functioning arsenal. We are now savvy at SEO (fucking hate that term) and blogging and social computing and because of this, Google has now found all our lost souls. We are emerging from the postal wasteland and are now indexed and ranked, logged in and available.

A straight Google search might hit the target if your friend still has the same name or has a website or a fairly up-to-date blog or has done something cool, but that is still a shot in the dark. Facebook and LinkedIn seem to have become the more acceptable tools for finding our lost contacts. Classmates.com is just annoying, sending obnoxious come-ons to entice you to activate your "Gold Membership." MySpace is kind of dorky for anyone over 40 unless you are an actor or musician or somehow involved in Entertainment. Other than that, let's be honest, the days of sparkly profiles blasting annoying sounds at you are numbered. I am getting off-message....

Here is the gist: Thanks to our new connectivity, I found those lost friends. Those BFFs who never left, who only changed addresses but, in doing so, effectively dropped off the face of the planet, have been found alive and well. Party Days aside and the fond lack of memories I don't seem to retain from that hazy, late-night era, I am delighted I found them. We can now write on each others' walls and share the photos and send dumb birthday cake icons and show each other our kids and families. All that crap. And, truth be told, I don't feel stupid either. A bonus.

Yeah... we all get there. My kids will read this post eventually and probably just think, "Douchebag."

Oh Joy!

Oh Joy! is a design blog worth perusing. Her coverage of Urban Outfitter's new, incredibly cool store, Terrain in Concordville, PA is awesome! Go to her Flickr pages to see what I would call pure, luscious retail garden store porn!

My "Always-On" Land Cruiser Project

Reposting this blog entry from here.

Between design projects for clients that are willing to pay for my services, and the projects I choose to do for fun, I also do things that are a combination of fun AND necessity. One of those projects it the rebuilding and "restoration" - I am using that term loosely - of my 1987 Toyota FJ-60 Landcruiser.



This project is one of those that always seem to take a lowered-priority in the project cue but nevertheless, is one that becomes "critical" once it has been determined that, "this simply MUST not go on any longer!" So, with that, I am making a huge push to finish this job to at least get the truck back on four-wheels.

It all started with a front brake job...

The Culprit: My front brakes were getting worse. I could hear the beginnings of that ugly sound of metal sliding on metal. Ugh.

Now, many of you are probably wondering why I just wouldn't drive my 'Cruiser into Just Brakes or someplace like that and toss them the keys... well... you need to know me I guess. See, true Landcruiser aficionados cringe at the thought of some 21 year-old dufus hacking into your truck's internal systems. I get nervous when someone younger than my '87 is attempting to "work" on it. Reverse age discrimination? You betcha! Dumb kids...

At any rate, I pull into the driveway in front of the garage, get the floor jack under there and get it up onto the jack-stands. I pull the front wheels, exposing the hubs and brakes and take a look. Wow. Worse than I thought. No problem, I think, this is just a day project. The first thing I notice is the gouges in the disks. Okay... a two day project. (granted, this is not a true two-day project in a brake shop, but, they don't take as many beer breaks as I do while working...)



I take off the pin retaining clip, remove the lower pad retaining pin, pop out the anti-rattlespring, and remove the upper pad retaining pin. Now, the brake pads simply lift out. I inspect them. Yikes! It is kind of amazing I could stop at all... I proceed to go ahead and start pulling the disks off too. Now, you hear all the time, "you gotta' machine the rotors." from the ding-dong at the brake shop. Always...

And, here is something a lot of you overlook and why I like to maintain control over the maintenance process: Brand new rotors are cheaper than the "re-machined" rotors from the brake shop. Yep. It is easier and cheaper to just buy whole, new rotors. And quit calling them "rotors." They are "brake disks" or a "brake disc."

While I have the truck up on the jacks, and the wheels off, I give the whole wheel compartment a look-see. I notice that I probably could use some new shocks too. No big deal, I will buy a couple of new ones when I go pick up the new brake pads. I pull them too. As I am laying out the parts in an orderly fashion on my workbench in the garage, I hear a loud SNAP! I quickly look back at the truck, fearing I have just heard the sound of a jack pin shearing, and expecting to see my truck falling over on it's side... Nothing... silence... then, SNAP!

What the hell?

I slowly walk towards the front end where I heard the disconcerting noise. The jack stands are alright. No forgotten brake/wheel parts are laying on the ground. But I notice something: The front axle is about 6 inches closer to the ground than a few minutes ago. I lean in for a closer look.

After some curious wondering, I finally see the problem. And it is a big one. The front leaf springs have both broken and are now disconnected from the front shackles and are now un-attached, allowing the full weight of the front axle to now hang on the tie rods. Because I removed the shock absorbers, the axle as drooped way down and is putting a bunch of dead weight on the flexible front stabilizer bar and bushings. I quickly run the floor jack under the differential and throw some wood blocks under there to temporarily relieve the pressure on the front-end components.

Now, I am looking at two completely broken leaf springs and asking myself how on earth could that have happened?? I look closely at one of the broken springs... at the fracture and see that half of the kerf is rusted, the other half exposed, clean metal. I nearly freeze in the cold realization that my leaf springs have been fatigued and cracked for awhile. I have been driving around on nearly-broken leaf springs. The force reversal that acted upon the springs was all it needed to crack the steel the rest of the way... I immediately thought of what might have been the result of those leaf springs coming off as I flew down a highway at 70mph... can you say, "Nose dive?"

Once my heartrate subsided, I was now looking a a much larger project than I had originally intended.

But, the big question was why? Why did those springs fatigue-fracture like that? And why right at the shackle? The first thing I looked at was those suspect shackles...

You see, for proper suspension action, the leaf springs not only flex themselves, but rely on a pivot at the front and rear shackles where they connect to the frame. There needs to be movement at that joint. I tried to flex the remaining chunk of spring at the bushing, where it should easily pivot. No go. The pin that holds the springs through the shackles was frozen solid in there. I couldn't even budge it with a 48" cheater-bar. Egads! No wonder.



The entire weight of the front-end and resulting force from going over bumps and dips was being transferred right to the spring metal at the very end of the outer (longest) spring that attaches with the spring shackle. So, instead of that bushing absorbing and flexing the shackle to relive the strain on the leaf, the leaf itself was taking all that vibration and absorption directly at a singular plane. KABOOM. Airplanes have fallen out of the sky because of similar metal fatigue breakdown. This is going to be more than a two-day project now. Time for a beer...

Next: Putting it all back together.

On a mission...

Ok... so I need to go on a high-priority mission now. Will return soon with either the goods or a frowny face. Wish me luck.