hey look at this thing i made: IX

Historically, when I'm asked what my dream project is, I say a custom computer case. I think it's born out of the same sort of thing that makes people want to customize their car. Not necessarily any value in it, but when you love something that much, when it's that big a part of your life, you want to make it your *own*. It's actually been quite some time since computers were that big a part of my life, in fact they're a pretty small part these days, which is why I say, historically when I asked. And when I say, when I say, I mean no one has ever asked me that.

Anyway, custom cases can be divided into two types. The first is a scratch build. It is exactly what it sounds like. Here's an example I recently came across. These sort of projects tend to feel more impressive as it requires a much larger skill set to do correctly. Of course it also makes it easier to do a terrible job, making everything by hand doesn't necessarily make it impressive. Same sort of idea applies to HJ1. That would be an example of a scratch build. I wasn't proud of it because I had made it all by hand, I was proud of it because it looked how I wanted it to.

The other type is a case mod. This is taking a pre-made case and modifying it to fit your design. On it's surface it seems like a cop out and inherently less impressive when compared to a scratch build, but, why reinvent the wheel? If you have a starting point that does a lot of what you want, what do you really gain by doing everything by scratch? Possibly my favorite custom case of all time was a case mod. It's often a very different skill set, being able to look at something and see how you could change it.

Like I said, HJ1 was a scratch build. This is the story of a case mod.

I guess this story starts around the christmas of aught nine. I had finished HJ0 and had come up with the general plan for HJ1. It was sort of a, every tool's a hammer, time. Not familiar with that saying? It goes (depending where you read it): when your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. HJ0 was made out of a found object, so to speak, and I really loved the idea of making things that way. This put me in the mindset of considering any given object as far as how it could be turned into a watch.

That year for christmas I received the book Vietnam Zippos by Sherry Buchanan. I had seen this on some blog and the pictures of the zippos really struck a chord with me. Luckily the book explained exactly why:

Popular culture has forgotten that many GIs in the latter part of the war were as anti-war as the long-haired hippies, the draft-dodgers on U.S. campuses and as the young Viet Cong, like Nguyen Toan Thi, they were fighting, some of whom had been in the field for clsoe to nine years. The draft lottery, Vietnamization - Nixon's plan to hand over the fighting to the South Vietnamese Army and achieve peace with honor, the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals and the My Lai massacre, all contributed to low troop morale. In-country, Vietnam Zippos became the ideal protest vehicle. They escaped brass' attention more easily than Afros, Buddhist swastika medallions, Tibetan prayer beads and the Make Love Not War slogans on helmets that incurred the disapproval of the powers that be. Peace Signs, Love, Flower Power and Hearts bloomed on the chrome-plated lighters. Ingenious Vietnamese engravers used the much loved pop-art swirls. In a meeting of mainstream and counterculture, combat slang blends with anti-war and anti-establishment sentiment. Any one GI might hate the enemy, dislike his CO, love his country and desire peace - and etch all of these emotions on his Zippo.

Later, this sentence sums it up:

I began to understand what these Zippos were: art without ambition, a real and honest venting of feelings, invaluable evidence of an experience, heavy juju.

Art without ambition. That was it exactly. The Zippos would not be impressive as works of art if that was their intent, but given that all they were ever meant to be was a primal outburst of emotion, they are somewhat stunning in their ability to convey that.

Naturally they seemed like the perfect vessel for a watch. The system I had come up with for watch design was to break it up into three parts:

1. The case: When I say this I mean the body of the watch, but not including the dial/hands. On HJ1 this would be the brass box and glass top. Here it would be a Zippo.

2. The dial/hands: You could say that the movement is included in this category, but I have yet to come up with a design where the specific movement is actually relevant. For this project I liked the idea of finding whatever watch was standard issue for a solider and then doing any modifications it would take to fit it in the Zippo.

3. The strap: Much in the way HJ0 used only parts from the camera for the case/strap, I wanted to stick with the idea of staying thematically there and not just making a strap from scratch. The idea I came up with was to get a army jacket from the era and turning the cuff into the strap.

I had this design pretty much entirely finished in January of this year, but never started on it. I guess I wanted to finish HJ1 first, but it's hard to say for sure. Of course HJ1 finally did get finished, which made this the logical place to go next. I never wavered on my design, so the biggest thing was sourcing the parts.

The Zippo:

This was in some ways the easiest and hardest part to source. I did know the general thing I was looking for, but it's not as though there's a big box store selling the exact one you want. I ended up just watching any auctions that came up on ebay until I found one that looked good. This is the one I got.

This had a lot going for it. Great saying one side and delightful middle finger cartoon on the other. While I didn't like the idea of cutting off the soldier's name, it would serve as a perfect place to fit the watch in.

The Watch:

This was tricky. I had just been assuming that there was a standard issue watch. When I say standard issue I mean, handed to you along with your boots and uniform. Apparently there was no watch in that package. After some searching I managed to find that the Benrus MIL-W-3818B was the watch you could get if you wanted one (which, I'm sure is a gross oversimplification of the process). Luckily they are not too hard to find.

The Jacket:

If I recall correctly (and, as I'm sure you know, I like to think that I do) I did an an ebay search for "vietnam jacket." I didn't bother to do any research as to the type of jacket I should be looking for, just browsed the pictures until I found one that seemed to be in line with what I was looking for:

As with most of my projects, I had created a design in my head, but didn't take time to write anything out to try and figure out logistics. This meant that when I got into making it things would have to be tweaked. Luckily it was nothing major. The original design called for the lighter to be vertical with the watch and have the stop sealed shut. This just didn't work with the way the watch would need to sit in there. There was an added bonus here though, when the lighter was turned sideways, it ended up being possible to keep the top portion intact, which meant the lighter could stay functioning (well, functioning in terms of opening/closing). The only other real change was the strap. I had wanted to simply cut the cuff off the jacket and modify it as necessary. When I tried to cut the cuff off, it looked absolutely terrible. The other problem with the original plan was I wanted to be able to see the bottom of the Zippo. Not really such a difficult proposition, but I didn't want to use anything that wasn't part of the jacket to make the strap. A lot of cutting and sewing later, this came out.

Let me break the strap down a bit for you. The base of the strap is just a strip of cloth I tore off the back of the jacket. It was then wrapped around and sewn to a piece of the liner I cut out. On top of that was sewn a lapel. The idea there was I could then attach the actual watch to a strip of cloth, put a button on it and then it would stay put, but you could still easily see the bottom. The strip that I used was the U.S. ARMY embroidered part from the left breast pocket. To secure the band, I removed every bit of velcro from the jacket and then attached it to either end. I was skeptical at first, but it ended up working quite well.

It's big. The strap itself is 2.25 inches wide. The watch/lighter is 2.25 inches wide. Since the watch is mounted off center, that part spans about 3 inches of wrist.

I was pretty happy with the final product. This is once again a case of, love it or hate it, it's almost exactly like I had originally conceived.

This isn't much of a making of, but it does have other shots of the watch.

Sidebar: To get in the mood while making this, I listened to the entire Phil Ochs discography. It occurred to me that at some point people stopped making good protest music. It's possible that this is due to there being nothing on the level of Vietnam to protest, but I think there's a simpler explanation. Vietnam is easy to work into songs, it's a very lyrical country name. I mean, take Iraq, how the fuck are you gonna put that in a song?

So there's a war in Iraq

I don't care too much for Bach

George Bush is someone I mock

A good soup starts with a good stock

And it's like, what the fuck does that even mean? It's easier if you mispronounce Iraq, but still. This was especially in my head when I heard I Can't Write Left Handed off the John Legend/Roots album, which, while great, it's a Bill Withers song, so the general drought continues. This brings me to my next point. I'm going to start giving watches like this names. This watch is called "I Can't Write Left Handed." After the song. Get it?

hey look at this thing i made: VIII

There's a battle going on. I can say with absolutely no hyperbole (or wait, maybe that's with ONLY hyperbole) that this is the greatest conflict known to man. Or woman. I say woman, because, I of course speak of the godparent power rankings.

Need some background? Well, that's why I'm here. See, it had been impossible to reach a consensus decision about who bel's number 1 godparent was. The only logical thing to do was implement a completely impartial system, sort of like the BCS. It's actually almost identical to the BCS, except it only takes into account one human poll and there's only one computer. Although, having now typed that out, it doesn't actually seem anything like the BCS, well, except that they both cause endless controversy. Check out this historical data:

Week ending 8/15 (2009) - Week ending 12/11 (2010)

1. MikeyK

2. D

I mean, that's unbelievable dominance. We're talking almost 16 straight months without a single change in the rankings. Some people would point to that and say there must be a flaw in the system, cause how could that possibly be right? Well, the thing is, I'm really just that great. This past year, was there a single (sane) person arguing that boise state should be ranked ahead of auburn? Fuck and no there wasn't. You know why? Cause greatness like that just can't be denied. Same principle applies here.

You don't just get to the top and say "well, that's that." Shit takes work. Take this Christmas. There didn't seem to be anything worthwhile out there, so I decided I needed to make something for her. Given my strict no gifts of clothing for anyone ever policy, the only other thing I could think of was a stuffed animal. Teddy bear seemed like the way to go. I had remembered seeing some crocheted things on some craft blog that looked delightful, so I found a pattern and I was off. Here's step 1:

Row 1: Sc 8 times into a loop (8 sts) - tighten the loop.

...

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN!? SC? HOW AND WHY DOES SOUTH CAROLINA COME INTO PLAY!? Oh wait, there's a key, let's rewrite that.

Row 1: Single crochet 8 times into a loop (8 stitches) - tighten the loop.

...

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN!? SINGLE CROCHET? WTFBBQ!?!

I guess I should go back in the story here. I don't (didn't) actually know how to crochet. This project was started under my unwavering assumption that given sufficient time and motivation I can do anything. Of course a big part of my plan here was that the pattern would be more intuitive. /sigh. Guess I better get a fucking book. The book I got had a section on deciphering patterns. It listed a number of things to look for that were not present in the pattern I had. Sure I could've gotten a different pattern, but as El Fuego would say, I was in too deep. I think I tried to do this ten times and was on the verge of seeking outside help, when it all just clicked. I went back and was off. It all came together pretty quick after that.

See, a nice adorable pig, just like I had planned on making all along. I totally didn't just do that because after making the body and arms it looked nothing like a bear.

hey look at this thing i made: VII

The important thing to understand about the nate dogg is he knows how to play casino. Which, I suppose, doesn't really tell you anything.

Are you familiar with casino? See it's a two man card game where cards are laid and subsequently picked up. Know what happens when a guy puts an ace on a seven, then the other guy drops the two of spades to make it a ten then the other guy picks it up with the ten of diamonds? All hell breaks loose. Tables get flipped.

I'm sorry, that didn't actually explain anything did it. I'd send you to wikipedia, but it doesn't actually explain any of the relevant parts of casino. The relevant part of casino is that it's apparently big in jail (though, not so much in prison).

This is really just getting more cryptic isn't it? Let's go back in the story a bit. I can say for sure that I knew nate in junior high and it's possible as far back as elementary school, but it's hard to say. We weren't especially close, but we ran in the same circles, so we saw each other a fair amount. One of those circles included donnyk (is that what I called him before? It's hard to keep the aliases straight). Donny visited jail and brought back casino. A whole lotta casino got played at his apartment. Fast forward some amount of time. I was hanging out at this apartment a lot (crestwood anyone?) and every day I would go pick up nate and we would sit in the kitchen and play casino for hours and hours. Of course the whole time we'd be bullshitting about whatthefuckever and by my estimation, that was when we really became good friends. Went on to be my first roommate, lived with the guy for years, countless misadventures, etc. etc.

THE POINT OF THE STORY IS!

It was no surprise, at all, that he would be the first person to commission a stained glass work. The guy is big up on planes you know and so he sent me a picture, which I promptly lost, but I had some memory of what it looked like and dug up this:

This was a really interesting change of pace for me. I'd been used to just making these things up as I go because I didn't need to have a set end point and since they weren't being necessarily made for anyone it didn't matter *so* much how they turned out. This was different, if someone's putting money down and they have a specific thing in mind, then I need to deliver.

I've talked in the past about how with stained glass, since you're necessarily losing detail, the important thing is to just pick some details you know you can nail, that really define the thing, and go with that. With this picture he had mentioned he really liked the view on the wings, so I wanted to keep them as intact as possible. I broke the plane down as simple as possible, with the breaks mainly being done to allow for some semblance of shading.

As far as the sky went, that's where I added the trademark mosaicyness. I wanted to make sure there was a clear break between the ocean and the sky so beyond the horizon I went with some plain blue glass. Then for the ocean I bought all the different shades of blue that hobby lobby had that I didn't hate and just alternated them.

Quick aside here. In past stained glass posts I've talked about my ongoing quest for a good pattern material. Apparently posterboard+3M 77 is the way to go. Worked like a dream.

Assembly of the picture went a bit different from normal. The typical system is to lay out the whole picture and solder it all at once. Here, since the plane was the most important part, I assembled it piece by piece to make sure that it lined up perfectly.

This worked really well for this piece because the shape of the sky was completely irrelevant, which meant if I needed to alter any pieces to fit around the plane, then so be it.

The last thing that was different about this piece was the framing. The book I got had talked about using cames, which are, I guess, U-shaped pieces of metal that you can use to build a frame. Of course they don't sell that shit at the 7/11 so I'd been out of luck. On a recent trip to the stained glass store however I noticed she had some hidden away. Definitely the way to go and is how all future pieces will be framed I think.

All in all this was probably the most painless window yet. Apparently practice makes something something. This was interesting because I feel like I always say "it looks better with the light going through it and the picture doesn't do it justice." It does look good with the light going through it, really brings out the shading int he plane, but it looks pretty good with no light too I feel.

I know I know, this whole time you've been reading this post and thinking, "Mike, how can I get my very own stained glass masterpiece!?" Well I feel like if you're reading this blog you must know how to contact me, but if not, shoot an email to highjack@fyadiaf.com. Let me know what you're thinking and we can discuss my ridiculously complex pricing system.

hey look at this thing i made: VI

I tend to say that I'm the least objective judge of anything about myself. People often misconstrue this as me saying that I think I suck (I've been, historically, a pretty negative person) but it isn't that. It's just really rare that I ever think about myself, I don't think about how I act, I don't think about how other people perceive me and I don't think about myself in comparison to others. The result of this is that while I don't put much thought to it, in some abstract sense I think of myself as normal. That, it seems, is a word that rarely describes me. The corollary to this is that I rarely create something that stands out to me. Often I never give these things a second thought and just move on. A good example of this is a poem I once wrote. I had typed it up and had a printed copy for some reason and years after writing it I stumbled across it somehow. At first I completely forgot that I had even written it, I just thought it was a poem that I had printed out for some reason (I do that sort of thing). I read it and thought, huh, this is pretty good.

This isn't always the case. Sometimes I'm just forced to say "Mike, you done good." SG2 is an example of that. This poem is an example of that. Aaaaaand that might be the whole list. Well, until I made this anyway:

I like to quantify things, which is often a really annoying habit for people that are around me when I fixate on trying to find the right number for the right thing. This is one of the reasons I like listening to music on the computer. Looking over the play counts in my itunes library is fascinating to me. It's one thing to say "like, I totally listened to that song a hundred times, for reals." It's another to be able to look at this and say there are 789 songs I've listened to 10 times or more and 33 songs I've listened to 100 times or more. The play counts rack up most when I fixate on some song for some reason and it paints an interesting picture to look at those top songs and remember what got them there. It's also interesting to see things such as, I've listened to 1 to 31 by J-Live 27 times in the past week.

Why is any of this relevant? Well 1 to 31 is stuck in my head and since I'm sure you've never heard it, I'll tell you that in the song he's using a fake interview to tell a story, which is what I'm going to do today!

What makes this the best thing you've ever made ever?

Well two things go into that. The first is the degree of difficulty. This watch is entirely handmade and not in the sense that you might say putting together a kit is handmade. It's hand cut brass, hand cut hand sewn leather, but that's getting a little ahead of myself. The other thing is, while it might be impressive to make something that complex even if it looked like shit, I like the look of this quite a bit. Beyond that though, even if you hate how it looks, it's true to my vision. Almost a year ago I started this project with a very specific look in mind and only strayed from that in some very minor ways. Thus, if you don't like the look of it, that's due to me being a shitty designer and not any shortcomings as an artisan on my part. I feel like that's impressive.

Hold on, you don't really mean every part of that is handmade do you?

That, I suppose, is a semantics debate. There are three parts that aren't a base item (base item being the building blocks used to construct, sheets of brass etc.). The watch movement, the hands and the winding stem. Of course there compelling reasons why I didn't/couldn't make those. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, the watch movement is the assembly inside the case that makes the watch go. It is the gears and shit that move the hands and let you know what time it is. If we say hypothetically that I could teach myself how to make a movement from scratch, it would take a long time for me to get to that point and once I had, having a hand made movement would add nothing to the watch. The hands I was actually pretty upset that I couldn't hand make. Here's another quick lesson on watches for ya. The movement has a pole sticking up in the middle of it. The pole consists of a couple concentric circles. The hands have a specially sized hole that fits tightly on one of those circles. To hand make the watch hands I would need to be able to drill holes to the very precise size of those circles. My workshop doesn't have the capabilities to adhere to tolerances that tight. The winding stem I suppose should really be counted as part of the movement. It's the little rod that sticks out that you can turn to to set the time. It would be more accurate to say that I made a watch case, in which case I did hand make every part, but saying that is needlessly confusing.

Agreed. You mentioned before that you started with a very specific vision, what was that?

In the post for HJ0 I talk say that two of my ten most prized possessions are watches. I don't actually have a list. Saying something is in my top ten whatever is just a thing I say to indicate I feel strongly about it. The idea is that, while I don't have a list, if I sat down and tried to write one out, those watches would without a doubt be on it. Specifically this watch is almost certainly my single most prized possession.

When I think about watches, it always comes back to this. If you go back and look at the gallery for HJ0 you can see that the strap was very much modeled after this one. After I finished HJ0 and started thinking about the next watch I would make, I almost immediately decided I wanted to do a tribute to the above watch. I didn't want to re-create it at all, but something that was stylistically inspired. Alright so hmm. There were going to be three major changes. First I was going to up the size a bit. It was meant to be designed specifically to my wrist size, which is important to remember that I have giant hands, so as big as it looks in that picture above, it's probably bigger than you think. Second, partly because I was upping the size and partly because I didn't have a great idea of how to do a round case, I was going to go to a rectangular shape. Last I wanted to go to a leather strap. I thought leather would look good with the vision I had and since I was upping the size I would need to widen the band too and a nylon band would probably look silly that wide. Most other things were to stay the same. I wanted the watch face to be painted pretty much the same way and I wanted hands that looked pretty much the same as that.

Where does one begin?

It really *has* to start with the case. I was confident that I would have no trouble with the strap and kind of wanted to start on it right away, but I couldn't be sure how long it would need to be until the case was done. Sometimes I just walk around Hobby Lobby hoping to be inspired. On one such trip I stumbled across all these bits of metal that they sell for making architectural models. Well I had the raw materials, but how do I turn these sheets of brass into a box? This is as good a place as any to point out that this project was started back in January. Back then I was even worse than I am now at documenting steps, you can check out the making of shots at the end and they might tell some of the story (but, really, not very well). All I remember is that it took a lot of tinkering to get it to work. The problem was that brass transfers heat really well, so when I would heat up one part to solder it together, it would often melt other parts and the whole thing would fall apart. I ended up getting a pop rivet gun, then making 90 degree angle pieces, riveting the four walls together, then going back with solder to fill in the cracks.

There was really only one specific constraint in the construction of this, which is that there needed to be a way to access the battery. The tragic flaw of HJ0 is that, while it's possible to change the battery, the procedure to do so consists of first being me and then using my magic powers to precisely disassemble it. A big part of that is, as I mentioned in the original post, I had no room for error, which meant no experimenting to figure something out. This time I had a blank canvas though, which meant I could just build something in from the jump. I ended up riveting together 8 pieces of brass in such a way that a ninth piece could be slid through them and subsequently removed should a battery change be necessary. I wish I had some construction shots to give a better idea of this, but here's the final product.

The lighting isn't great (it never is) but that recessed piece of metal in the middle there can be pulled out. The original design actually had just that very middle square exposed, but during assembly solder got into the channel and made it impossible to slid the battery cover in. To clean that out I ended up cutting out that smaller rectangle on the top there. This was actually a fortuitous mistake as that extra opening makes it so much easier to remove the cover.

At this point, I ran head first into a wall.

Literally?

Naw, see I had been working on this for about two months and I got to a point where it was time to move past the case. I cut a piece for the watch face and started making the hands, when I realized I couldn't make the hands. That stuff I said above about why I couldn't make the watch hands? Definitely did not know those things going into this. It was heartbreaking because as near as I could tell, if I couldn't make my own hands, it would ruin the whole look of the project and at that point, the fuck was the point? Between that and some other things, I ended up putting the project on hold indefinitely. It would be another five months before I picked it back up at all.

I guess life sucks for everybody huh? What took the project off hold?

Well at the time that I started this as well as the subsequent holding pattern, I was living in an apartment that I hated (for a number of reasons, none of them relevant here). I often say that I like to be surrounded by things that inspire me. All that apartment inspired me to do was be depressed. My creative output ground to a halt. This was a big problem, because so long as I'm creating, I will be figuring shit out. Since I wasn't making anything, my brain was never in the right mindset to figure out how to get past that problem. Then I moved. Then I started making shit again. Then one day out of the blue it occurred to me that there *had* to be pre made watch hands out there that either matched my vision, or I could modify so that they would match my vision. In the story about the table I mentioned how I rarely stop to think about the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's good that I didn't think about that here, because I probably would have never gone through with this plan.

I ended up going on ebay and ordering a thousand or so vintage watch hands. At the time I didn't possess the knowledge that watch hands aren't a generic interchangeable thing. Out of those thousand, I bet only 5 or so actually would fit. After an incredible amount of trial and error I just ended up using the first two hands I found that worked. They're not exactly what I wanted, but they work.

My only real complaint as that I wish they were longer, but they definitely work.

Wait wait, I thought the dial was supposed to resemble that original watch.

/sigh yea, it was. The magic of computers hides this fact, but I have abysmal handwriting. This meant when it came time to paint numbers on the dial, I just couldn't do it. I made probably a dozen attempts at doing it freehand. Then I tried to find a stencil, then I tried a metal stamp. They all looked terrible. I thought about putting an ad on the craigslist for a calligraphist, but I really didn't want to bring in outside help. In the end I painted it matte black, then did some precision dremeling to give it some character. I was pretty happy with how it looked and while it would be nice to have numbers, I would contend that you don't wear a watch like this because you want to be able to tell the time at the drop of a hat (not that it's really that hard to read once you're used to not having numbers). The last part of the watch movement/dial assembly was the winding stem. For reference, this is what a generic winding stem looks like.

The stem is just the straight part. The knob on the right is called the crown. Given how precisely the stem is machined, you can see how I couldn't recreate that, but even if I had wanted to use the crown that came with the movement, the stem wasn't long enough to reach the outside of the case I had made. I removed the crown and stuck the stem inside a piece of brass tubing. Then, once that was through the side of the case, I took a piece of square brass stock I had, drilled a hole in it, put it over the tube and soldered in place.

I'm sorry, as near as I can tell you've assembled the whole case at this point, but you never addressed how you were attaching the case to the strap.

Ah yes, I am getting a little ahead of myself. The original vision called for a leather strap the exact width of the watch. The problem was that to attach the band, I would need some posts or something attached to the outside of the case, which I couldn't figure out a way to do that didn't just look awkward. I ended up taking another design cue from the inspiration watch (as I'm apparently now calling it). I drilled holes in each of the four corners, then bent some brass tube and soldered it in place.

Wow, that's a much better shot of the battery cover, I'm not really sure how I missed that when I was looking for a picture before.

And then you made the strap?

The problem I often have when telling these stories is that a lot of these processes happened at the same time. I would work on the strap for a bit, then get tired of sewing leather and go back to the case. It probably just makes more sense to finish the story of the case first.

The ending of that is?

During the story of SG1 I mentioned how I got the idea of cutting glass in my head when I cut a piece for a watch I was making. This is that watch. It's kind of funny, the stained glass was definitely birthed from this and then in turn I took a skill I got from the stained glass to finish this watch. I attached the glass to the watch case the same way that I make stained glass. First I put a strip of copper foil on the top and bottom edges, then flux and solder to attach. Worked perfectly.

Revisionist history time: Case in hand you decided to start on the strap?

Sure, why not. As I mentioned before I knew I wanted a leather strap. I was at Michael's (hobby lobby is closed on sundays) and saw they sold little bags of "leather remnants." These are apparently made by a company that does all kinds of leather work and so when they have scraps from making whatthefuckever they just bag em up and sell em. There was a bag with some nice looking black leather in it, so I went with that. For HJ0 I took the buckle and loops off a watch band I had lying around. That wasn't going to be acceptable this time. I got out some pliers and bent some brass rod to make the buckle and the loops.

The downside here is that they aren't the sturdiest things. You do have to be actively trying to bend them, but they can be bent by hand. Quick aside here, sewing leather sucks. I mean really. The eyelets were the next thing. For HJ0 I had gotten some eyelets that are used in scrapbooking somehow. In addition I bought this cheap tool for setting them. As a result of the cheap tool, they looked like shit. Now, they worked fine and honestly anyone but me might not ever notice the perceived shittiness, but real or not it wasn't going to be ok for HJ1. The problem is the top o' the line tool that hobby lobby sells is 29 bucks, even with a 40% off coupon, that was more than I wanted to spend. I was at menards looking for something and saw a tool they sold for setting eyelets. It was designed for bigger eyelets than I'd been using, but it was also two dollars, which seemed like a winner to me. I was initially hesitant to up the eyelet size because I was worried it wouldn't make as tight a connection with the buckle. Some preliminary tests indicated that it wouldn't be a problem though and the more I thought about it, it probably made sense to up the size of the eyelets given how much bigger the strap was.

See, I think that's a good size. The last thing to be worked out was how the watch would actually attach to the strap. It was obvious there would need to be a second strap that went through the loops on the case, but how would that attach to the main strap? If I sewed it on at both ends, then you wouldn't be able to get that the bottom to change the battery and all the work I put into that design would be for naught. I ended up sewing one end to the strap and then putting a snap on the other end, which I feel adds a bit of flavor.

And that's that?

And that's the whole show, pushing that snap together was the last act in completing the watch. I often say success is all in how you define your goals, but even beyond that, success is contingent on having goals. If you don't know what your goals are, how will you ever know if you succeeded? So what were the goals. Well, the primary goal was just to make a good looking watch and do it from scratch. I think that was a success, as I explained at the start that's what makes this the best thing I've ever made ever. The other main goal was to pay tribute to the inspiration watch. There's some room for debate on whether or not that was a success.

I mean, I suppose just the fact that I say I'm paying tribute to it makes that true, but I had wanted them to be immediately recognizable as kindred spirits. I'm inclined to say if I'd been able to replicate the dial it would have been like that. Beyond that I'm happy with the connection. The main difference (to me) is that while the inspiration watch is subtle in it's way, HJ1 beats you over the head with what it is, but I'm ok with that.

Any future plans?

HJ2 has been designed and should come together pretty easily. Hopefully it doesn't take a year. See you later space cowboys.

Making of, featuring a ton of close up shots of the finished product.

hey look at this thing i made: -XVII

I have put serious work into a halloween costume exactly once in my life. This is that story.

For reasons not always clear to me, I'm very good at competing. No specific type of competition mind you, but anytime a situation arises where a winner can be declared, I'm good at figuring out how to win, if not actually succeeding in my plan. Long time readers of this blog might remember this story. In it I talk about how I put my amazing competition skills to use to get a job. Let's expand on that.

The at the time president of Eureka was a big believer in United Way and he pushed that shit hard. For a whole month there was this huge company wide focus, with one big event each week. Week 1 was a kick off picnic. There wasn't a ton going on, mainly just food, they also had a don't forget the lyrics contest. Is that show still on TV? Can I just assume people know what I'm talking about? Well the concept is they play some snippet of a song and then you have to not forget the lyrics. This struck me as a no brainer for me to sign up for. After hearing a song more than five or so times, I can usually remember a substantial amount of the lyrics with just a small prompt.

That, apparently, didn't help me round one. I think I got some sort of country song? Luckily round one was apparently just a practice round. Round two I got Love Shack, which, if you didn't know, is a little old place where, we can get together. There was apparently only one round of actual competition before the finals. Four people were supposed to advance from that round. Only two people (including me) managed to make it out of round two. They really wanted four people for the finals though, so they let two random volunteers get back in, which seemed unfair to me. In the finals, instead of just being assigned a random song, you got to pick from a list. Instead of some sort of random selection process, or, I don't know, rewarding the people that actually remembered the lyrics in round two, they just asked for volunteers to go first. Well I jumped on that shit right away. I mean, what if there was some super easy song, was I gonna let some sucker get it? Fuck and no.

A quick perusal of the lift left my choices at summer of 69 by bryan adams and some other song. I'm tempted to say the other song was thunder road by the boss, but I feel like there's a 0% chance I would have passed that up. Summer of 69 was a song I was briefly enamored with, I think because of a punk cover of it I have. This meant as opposed to songs I hear on the radio and sort of know, I knew the lyrics to this song and could have gone off with no prompt. The format for the finals was you just kept going as long as you could and whoever got the farthest into their song won. The prompt they gave I think just went through "I got my first real six string" I went from there all the way to somewhere around "standing on your mamas porch" before forgetting some small thing. That was more than all the other contestants combined. pwnt!

Week two was some sort of oktober fest thing. The only competitions involved cooking. Good news for me! I entered in the desert category. German chocolate cake made from scratch (with scratch made frosting) cause that's what winners do.

Week three was a costume contest. My thought process going into this was that a costume somehow vacuum related would win. I suspected no one would come in anything truly spectacular, so a vacuum costume would win entirely cause it'd seem clever (CAUSE IT'S A VACUUM CLEANER COMPANY, GET IT!?). For reference it looked like this:

Let's break it down

The base of the outfit is the cheapest black sweatsuit wal-mart sold

The helmet is made out of the top of a Capture

Glued to the pre dust cup filter cover off a Surface Max

The mask was the exhaust filter cover off a surface max with some elastic glued to it. It was quite painful.

The chest piece was a bag cover off a Smart Vac

The hoses you see holding it on are two hoses off the above mentioned Capture, here's a closer look

The belt buckle is the spin duster cleaner control dealy off a Capture (we were doing a ton of testing on those at the time, which meant parts were plentiful). Tragically I couldn't find a good picture. That thing on my left is a spin duster. I pulled it out like a sword on stage to the delight of all gathered there. The belt is made out of vacuum belts. CLEVER! The knee pieces were dust cups off a pet lover lite cut in half with foil glued to the back

It's unfortunate that the picture doesn't show the cape very well as it is, by a wide margin, the best part of the costume. It's three cloth bags off sanitaire commerical units cut up, sewn together, then sewn onto the hoody. If I were less lazy (and, to be clear, I'm very lazy) I'd goto my storage unit and dig it up to get a better picture, instead, just imagine if the bag on this was a cape.

I called the character The Boss, see cause it said the boss on the chest plate. Did you know The Boss has a tagline?

"Who knows what dirt lurks embedded in carpets, The Boss knows."

Guess how many people at work got that joke. Did you know The Boss has a backstory?

In a world

Malcom Magnificent had spent his whole life in the Sad Meadows Orphanage. It had always been hard for Malcom to make friends, anytime he did they ended up getting adopted while poor Malcom was left behind. He was not a very attractive child. To curry favor with the Orphan Keepers (is that what you call someone who runs an orphanage?) he would clean the orphanage. All too often, vacuums were his only friends. Sometimes, it seemed he could hear them talking to him, but he had enough trouble fitting in and knew that mentioning this to anyone would only isolate him more.

On his eighteenth birthday he was called into the orphan keepers office.

"Malcom, it seems your time here is at an end and I have something to tell you that I should have told you long ago."

"What's that Orphan Keeper Sir?"

"Malcom you have parents, they never wanted to give you up for adoption, you got mixed up with the child of an unfit mother. Sadly by the time we figured this out you were already ten and you did such a good job cleaning that we really didn't want to lose you. The council decided the best thing to do was to not tell you and glue fake sores to you in your sleep so that prospective parents would think you had leprosy."

"So I'm not hideously ugly?"

"No, Malcom, you're a winner, now go and meet your parents!"

Malcom managed to suppress the unbelievable rage he felt towards the Orphan Keeper and ran off gleefully to have the tearful reunion with his parents that he had always dreamed off. He was just blocks away from their house when tragedy struck. Some sort of ray came out of the sky, demolishing what was to be his new home and vaporizing his parents. Standing in the wreckage in tears, he did the only thing he knew how to do. As he stood there, vacuuming up his parents ashes, something changed inside him. He could feel powers welling up inside him and for the first time he acknowledged the voice of the vacuum.

"Today you are no longer Malcom, you are The Boss. Go forth and fight crimes with whatever powers you feel a vacuum bestows upon you!"

Did you know The Boss has a theme song?

...

Guess what the odds are that you'll ever hear it. Here's a bonus picture of me accepting my award: