Making with Style

Last week on two separate occasions whilst surfing the net I came across the impressive craftmanship of Jake Von Slatt.  The first was the Maker video profile which is embedded below and the other was the latest ARRL Surfin’ installment from Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, called Do-It-Yourself Retro.  I am so impressed with Jake’s projects I thought I would share what I found here to inspire some retro homebrew.  The ‘style’ I mention in this post’s title is steampunk, which is a mix of Victorian-era technology and aesthetic blending with modern technology.  This sub-culture grew out of a science fiction sub-genre that arose in the 1980’s.

As you can see from the video and the website the craftmanship in Jake’s projects is excellent and I am interested if any radio amateurs have any steampunk-style modified equipment.  Send me details (a link to a photograph would be good) or post a comment to this post.  Projects of interest on Jakes site for amateurs are the etched altoids boxes, modified headphones (by Molly ‘Porkshanks’ Friedrich) and a telegraph sounder.

It is interesting to see how steampunk has evolved to very clearly influencing people’s lifestyles.  I remember reading some of the early books of the sub-genre, like Tim Powers’ ‘the Anubis Gates’ , back in the early to mid 1980’s when I was heavily reading science fiction by authors like William Gibson (Neuromancer), Rudy Rucker (White Light), Brian Stableford (The Empire of Fear) and Brian Aldiss OBE (Helliconia Trilogy) to name a few. Seems today I read mostly science fact.  Maybe it is time to return to science fiction.