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?
1 comment:
This is freaking amazing.
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