hey look at this thing i made: III

I like watches

...

that's pretty much the whole story.

That used to be this:

Apparently I was wearing jeans when I made that watch. Remember when I used to wear jeans all the time? No? Then I remembered I really like black dress pants. I'm weird apparently. None of this is relevant to the story.

I used to really want to go to school to be a watch maker. That's not to say I don't still want to go to school to be a watch maker. It actually strikes me as a job I would very much like, plus it's increasingly in demand (true story, look it up). Remember earlier when I said I like watches? Love, watches. It's kind of funny, I would say that on average I spend at most 30 seconds of my day considering my appearance. Getting dressed consists of grabbing the first shirt and pants I find. Yet I have a number of watches and every single one that I've bought was the result of an exhaustive selection process. When I wear a watch (I don't ever wear watches to work, don't want to get them dirty) I spend more time picking my watch than the rest of my outfit combined. Two of my ten most prized possessions are watches. My point here is, I love watches, but if you grilled me about it I'm not sure I could really explain why.

The innards of manual watches fascinate me. Something about these incredibly complex machines that have been rendered so incredibly obsolete by modern technology. I would direct you towards William Gibson's phenomenal: My Obsession. On it's surface it's a piece about ebay, but he discusses his watch collecting love and does it better than I ever could. There is one quote in particular that I adore:

"Mechanical watches partake of the tamagotchi gesture: they're pointless, yet needful, comforting precisely because they require tending."

The tamagotchi gesture is a concept that after reading I deeply wished I had written, alas. While the how behind watches fascinated me, hence the desire to go to school for it, I eventually realized that it wasn't the innards that I was interested in learning how to make.

The great boon of the internet age is that now should someone want to make a watch (or whatever random thing), but is uninterested in making the innards, they need only find a suppliers website and can get everything they need. While I'm sure schooling could help me learn to design the case and such of a watch, I didn't need it, I could go to plan b (which is always, i'm wingin' it). This was a custom job for a photographer I used to know. It doesn't bear the trademark stamp, but, this is HJ0, the first watch in the Highjack Watches line. It was far from perfect, as first projects often are, but it was very important in that it taught me a number of things that I'm putting to use in HJ1. I'm sure there's more of a story behind all the steps, but this happened awhile ago so much of it is lost. Here is a link to the photo gallery of all the progress shots I took.

hey look at this thing i made: II

So I, for awhile, had a job that required me to take apart a number of non-functioning vacuums. For reasons I can't really explain, I would see these parts laying out on the table and for some reason would put them together in my mind to make shapes. I think it started because I think the armature in a motor looks like a muscle. Anyways on a vacuum that we call "Old Style Upright" internally, there is a part that for some reason really stuck with me, so I uh, made a thing out of them.

I wish I had more of a story about this, but the thing is almost 2 years old (if not older) at this point. It was sitting up in the old apartment, but I guess we never did a post about it because Raz was constantly trying to stifle my creativity (note: at no point was she ever trying to stifle my creativity). I think what first got this started in my head was I saw one that had a black circle on it and felt it looked like an eye.

Of course that ended up being the mouth, but that black ring there was the natural wear of belts over the life of the vacuum. This is made out of 70 or so of those motor pulleys. It got to a point where I was really actively hoping that these cleaners would die so I could get the part. The arms and torso are removable, so it has some really small amount of articulation.

The screws are the sawed off ends of motor armatures. The whole thing is held together with a metric ton of JB Weld. The bulk of the construction is based round 2 of the parts being glued together and then using that as a building block. I know at the time I had a name that I felt was really clever for them, but uh, again, 2 years ago, I've slept since then. I made one other one that there will probably be a post of eventually. I had created in my mind the plans for 5 or so more of these, but I lacked a way to construct them. While the JB weld was plenty effective for this one and the other one (which is really very small) it wasn't suitable for a larger scale construction. But um, my new brazing technique is ultimate, so I'm gonna start making these again. This was the start of it all though.