hey look at this thing i made: XII

And then I said, "huh, haven't made any stained glass windows in awhile." I quickly came up with three projects. This is the story of none of them. During the concept phase for one of them, I came up with this idea and decided to make a weekend project out of it. Sadly I can't tell you the story without revealing part of the story of one of the three projects, which is strictly against company policy. So here's a story that has nothing to do with this stained glass window, with pictures inserted at random.

I find that there are things in my life I'm not capable of objectively grading. The movie I saw with someone, that song I heard at the exact right time. Hip Hop Hollas by Jerry Quickley is without a doubt one of my favorite poems of all time, but I don't know that it's necessarily that great or if it just speaks to me on a level past rational thought.

A scholar recently asked me about

the relevance of hip hop

I didn't know what to say to him

Let's do a by the numbers thing real quick here. My favorite album of all time (I'll sleep when you're dead by El-P) is a hip hop album. Twenty-two of the thirty-four songs that I've listened to in itunes more than a hundred times are hip hop songs (more on this in a bit). Every single album highlighted in, this thing i bought, has been hip hop (mark ronson, not entirely, but quite a few of the songs are). I'm listening to some right now. This is, I suppose, just a very drawn out way of saying that, I really like hip hop. Definitely was not always like that.

and there be moments like this

custom coach with 12 *people* on their first tour

gliding at 70 across the desert floor

and there be 12 faces pasted to the windows

instead a arguing about watching how the money goes

they be checking out the blooms of desert rose

and Arizona lightning smells of ozone

and sudden rain washes rocks that dwelled in the sea

and there's only the sounds of the engines rotary,

the bright cords of lightning

as heaven manifests subwoofers

ain't all that make the shit mad exciting

it's the snap crackle pop of Tupac

pushed out of Bose cubes

pressing the heart into this moment

and the scene is music

and this moment is an organ

and somewhere there is a

custom coach with 12 *people* on their first tour

For reasons I couldn't possibly explain, I like to trace things back to their start. The point at which everything changed. Seminal moments. The moment that me and hip hop intersect goes like this:

Growing up I can remember always telling people I liked all music except country and rap. I had no very compelling reason for this, but that statement covered all the music I was ever introduced too and since this was coming from people I took seriously, I had no reason to argue with it. The only rap I ever heard was what gets played on the radio. It's never a good idea to pass judgement on things based on what you hear on the radio.

Then one day I was driving somewhere with my brother and he tells me I should check out this group, Jurassic 5. I got home and listened to their song Quality Control and everything changed. That song gripped me the way almost no other music had (I'm gonna say this was when I was fourteen). I remember listening to that whole album and falling in love.

That's where it began, but the change really didn't happen for awhile. At first I reacted in the way most people do when being presented with something that goes their held beliefs, such as, that rap is bad. I remember thinking about it years later when I was leaving my apartment and I heard music coming from my roommates room, which, would normally not stand out, except it was the exact album I had been listening to, two floors down, not five minutes before this. The album was Dungeon Master of Ceremonies by MC Chris and when I went and asked The Godfather about this, someone who has always held that he does not like hip hop, he said "well this isn't really hip hop." Hey, whatever gets you through the night my friend, but make no mistake, it is hip hop.

and there be moments like this

four girlfriends driving out of the hood

going to a party in the oranges

this is the first time the youngest has been alone

in a car with her friends

they zoom across the GW

canopy of steel beams

paints the hoop de in fast blurs of shade and sun

and tires roar from the grates

and up front there's the sound of

bracelets and nails on the dashboard

and there is laughter and

there are no box cutters or police

and L'il Kim jumps through the speakers

and the youngest girl pushes herself

deep into the rear seat

as straining speakers conjure halos

she watches the world sway past

the tiny rear window

and this fat bass line will forever mark this turning point

and she has never felt so free

and she has never felt so strong and so loved

these are her *people*

and somewhere a young woman is going

on her first ride with her crew

It's all well and good to try and deny these things, "it's not really hip hop," but I couldn't really think it was the only album of its kind, there had to be others out there that sounded like it. I searched. I went through all of J5s offerings. I heard all of the collaborations they did. Looking around, I found some artists that sorta sounded like them, but there was a big problem. In addition to me fighting the hip hop, I still had this outcast mentality that popular things were bad. Ignoring even just the popular music I might have liked had I given it a chance, having that close-minded mentality runs over into other things. If you badly enough want to, you can find a reason to dislike anything. Having any kind of criteria like that meant that all too often I wouldn't give something a chance and maybe not because it was popular, maybe it just had one song featuring an artist I felt was too mainstream. Maybe for no compelling reason at all, but irrational things like popular is bad lead to other irrational criteria. Enter BobbyT.

In the internet age I am a person who can, uh, find things. Bobby had asked me to find him a copy of Kanye West's Late Registration. I can remember bringing him the cd and on the way I popped it into my cd player and wow. I mean I knew who he was, sure, but I didn't listen to the radio all that much and I had never been that big a fan of Jesus Walks. This was like J5 all over again. The album grabbed me. This was pretty close to the time when I had switched to using itunes almost exclusively. Heard em say, touch the sky, gold digger, roses, hey mama, celebration and gone are all part of the above mentioned songs that have had more than a hundred plays. Once again I dug through everything of his and then kept looking for other things. The difference was that this time I stopped having any preconceptions to guide, if I had any even the slightest reason to listen to something, I'd give it a shot. I'd check things out just because of the name. That lead me to getting I'll Sleep When You're Dead, because let's be honest, that's a name that stands out.

and there be moments like this

Nebraska farm boy sitting

on the edge of a quarry pit

all his crystal powder gone

he wonders about gravity

he wonders about his family

his sister writes to him from

a small town in the north

tells him of jesus and fewer black eyes

how he should visit in the summer time

because her boyfriend should be out of rehab

and how the yellin' ain't so bad

his pops tells him next year things will be different

and he wonders if he will ever escape next year country

and he feels weak inside his strong body

and gravity is making moves

and Jay-Z's Hard Knocks crow from the cab of his pick up

and for a few minutes he's lost in it

tales of a life closer than you think

close to the bone it unfurls like his own

runs to a neighboring corn field

he splits stars with his scream

he stands breathless in headlight beams

he smiles and he's high as a kite

and he knows that moonlight and beats have saved his life

and somewhere a farm boy

sits on the edge of a quarry

Atmosphere was one of the artists that cracked the original run of hip hop (interestingly enough, also by way of BobbyT). There's a hidden track on his collection of EPS, The Lucy Ford Eps that feature El-P. I always really liked the song and was sad I could never find any more songs of his. The thing was he was mainly a producer and didn't rap that much. Between that and the great name I was pretty much sold on I'll Sleep When You're Dead form the jump. Wasn't exactly love at first listen though. Up All Night was an immediate winner (we might have been born yesterday, sir, but we stayed up all night). It took awhile for the whole thing to really sink in, but that had more to do with me just not giving a very thorough listen. Even when I did it wasn't like those other albums. It took awhile for it to really click with me. Eventually it occurred to me that when I couldn't figure out what to listen to at work I was picking it. At home, it was the only cd that I really never skipped tracks on. Probably more than any other album, I was trying to learn the songs and having trouble with it (you'd probably have to have lived with me at some point to understand that that's really saying something).

In case you're curious, the title is a lyric in what may be the best song about suicide I've heard.

So how dare you assume that I'll sleep when you're dead

This is well outside the boundries of acceptable behaviour

I will not give you the go ahead and you will not be remembered fondly

I'm throwing down the gauntlet, fuck you this isn't your decision

and for all the holy fuck I give, your little spectacle is ended

But dont think for just one second you've honored your obligations to me

I'm serious look in my eyes, I don't find this funny

or whatever you imagine poetry and justice feels like when you combine them

I am not going to allow this on my watch buddy, nobodies impressed

with your imagined sacrifice device or insurmountable regret

You are not uniquely pained and if you go we won't be sorry

and who the hell are you to put me through the banality of watching this

Cause many better men have gone for clearly better reasons and I

starkly must remind you that you have not even been trying

And that's the only thing remarkable about you, stop me if I'm lying

and there be moments like this

with family and friends in the front room

a woman washes dishes at the sink

a mother with missing heart

buried earlier that same day

in the same casket with her young son

and across from their house

a yard party has broken out

and in this moment

her first moments alone

her chest is imploding

failure and loss have arrived

and they will stay for a very long time

and she didn't know hearts could break this hard

or what black magic makes her still draw breath

and in this moment

her first moments alone

De La Soul trickles in the window

and she begins to cry

as the brothers from the east

preach about how the Stakes is High

and somewhere there is an empty mother

washing dishes in a sink by a window

Hip Hop Hollas tells all these touching stories of people in these moments touched by hip hop, but the truth is it could be any kind of music. If country music is your thing I'm sure you could tell some story of when you heard a certain song at the exact right time. Or if for you it's rock. Or punk. Or jazz. Or what-the fuck-ever. For me I went from once upon a time thinking Weird Al was the only artist worth listening to and growing to where I love it all. Hip hop blew those doors open.

It's funny now. Of all those Kanye songs off Late Registration, roses, hey mama and gone are the only ones that still get any play. After listening to that album so many times, it sees almost no play these days. I honestly couldn't tell you how good I really think it is. Maybe it was good, maybe it was bad, maybe just average, but to me, whatever it was, it was important.

he don't know the price of the ransom

and doesn't recognize slippery slopes

or the sound of hope dipping out through the transom

swollen knuckles drift toward hip hop radio soon

as your hear it ump up the volume

pump that beat

pump that beat

pump that beat

and that's the fucking relevance

of hip hop

hey look at this thing i made: XI

I will often, when bored, browse watch auctions on ebay (more on this soon!). I have no real direction with this, just search for random things. Some years ago I found a watch on there that was apparently the movement from a pocket watch transplanted into a wristwatch case. For some reason this was entrancing to me and I really wanted it. Sadly so did a number of other people and it went way out of my price range. I wish this hadn't happened three years ago and I could bring up the auction, because it's hard for me to do it justice with the above description, but I don't have much to say for it beyond that. I have yet to see another like it.

I was on ebay the other day when that watch popped back into my mind. While I (currently) didn't have the means to make a watch like it, it occurred to me I could just take a pocket watch, then modify the case to make it a wristwatch. I was really high up on the idea because this was something I could do a line of, find some vintage pocket watches, attach strap dealies and make a strap. Of course I had no idea if that would look good, because I don't have a ton of control over the overall design of it. First I wanted to just get a pocket watch to do a proof of concept sort of thing. I ended up just getting the cheapest wrist watch I could find (that wasn't a cheap pos outta hong kong). It looked alright. There's not really too much to be said for the making of process. No real modification was done to the case, I just bent some brass stock and soldered it on. The strap was made in an almost identical process to the strap for HJ1.

It was actually pretty maddening. This managed to prove to me that it could be done, but while I think it looks pretty good, I now have to buy a pocket watch that I think looks really good and try again to see if it's actually a good idea. MY LIFE IS SO HARD.

hey look at this thing i made: -XIX

XIX is a money roman numeral. It got me thinking and I made a power rankings of 1-20 in roman numerals:

1. V. V is a strict upgrade over 5. Not only does it look better, but it's written in only two movements instead of three. Also V is for vendetta. This one time we were watching V is for vendetta at the big house and b was like, hey remember that scene where you see natalie portman's panties? No one did, so we watched and for less than a second you see it. Man has a sharp eye.

2. X. The thing that knocked X down was that it's not a strict upgrade over 10. Both require two movements to write. I suppose I'd argue that it wins in the aesthetics department, but the really compelling thing about X is it adds mystery. For example, if you see Rocky X, do you think it's Rocky 10? Or is it a mystery Rocky, like hacker X. See, I took this web design class in high school and we had to code some stuff in html. I went into other peoples code and while I didn't change anything, I added a comment that said "hacked by hacker X." I did this because my dream was one day someone would say "who is, hacker X?" Which they did, sadly without the news anchor inflection that it had in my head.

3. XIX. This was hurt by the fact that it sort of looks like an emoticon (you know, like, a dead guy with a big nose? I guess it would mean sorrow? I'd be sad if I was dead with a big nose). I'm morally opposed to non standard emoticons.

4. IV

5. VI. The main value in roman numerals is using them to up the epic quotient of something. For example, the only value of the new trilogy is to be able to write: Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope. FUCK AND YES. This doesn't necessarily scale though. In the roman numeral epic quotient power rankings, 1, 2 and 3 are V IV VI. I II and III are weak shit, stay tuned!

6. XIII. This might be entirely because I thought Red XIII in FF7 was badass.

7. XI. The great thing about XI is it's the name of a guy who visited my work from china. Somehow he didn't get any of my puns with the number 11 (no part of that story is true).

8. IX. I was really excited about Ledo and IX when I first read the description. Then I watched it and it was terrible. I just kept sitting there thinking "this has to get good eventually right?" It did not.

9. VII. This tends to be the limit of value when using roman numerals to label volumes in a series, after VII it's all downhill. Interestingly this is also the point where all the rest are downhill.

10. XII. A common theme in this bottom half is they're almost strictly worse than the number they represent. XII offers no improvement over 12.

11. XIV. Little too close to HIV. HIV is a touchy subject, don't let your numbers create unwanted drama.

12. XV. God that looks dumb. Doesn't that look dumb? God that looks dumb.

13. XX. While I've never tried dos equis, I hate it with a passion. As a result I hate things that I associate with it, like XX or interesting men.

14. II

15. III

16. VIII

17. XVI

18. XVII

19. XVIII. These all have the above mentioned problem of being strictly worse than the number they represent, especially XVIII. HOLY SHIT THAT'S DUMB. II almost gets a pass because I like to call people who are juniors the 2nd. For example, big KB II. Almost would warrant moving it up in the rankings, sadly it doesn't come up that often.

20. I. This is just terrible, if it wasn't necessary for making other numbers I'd question it's very existence. First of all, nothing warrants having the I talked on to indicate it's the first of something. You don't ever see Rocky I, that'd be dumb. Expanding on that, one of the other big problems is it duplicates an incredibly common part of the english language. Imagine if Rocky saw something that said Rocky I on it and since he's dumb he thought it was an unfinished note "Rocky I...am leaving you? Rocky I...need you to take out the garbage?? ROCKY I WHAT!?!" Underrated part of the Rocky movies is their lack of taglines. It's not Rocky II, The Rematch. Rocky by itself tells you all you need to know, someone is gonna get punched.

*ahem*

I have some sort of primal need to mod video game systems that I own. Here's the list of all systems I have/had that were able to play pirated games (not all instances required actual modding).

Playstation 1

Playstation 2

While I don't own it, I did mod a Playstation 3

Playstation Portable

Gameboy Advance

Gameboy DS

Nintendo Wii

XBox (original)

Xbox 360

There were three motivating factors in me buying a 360:

1. I thought Blue Dragon was gonna be awesome (it wasn't)

2. I had this coupon for 20% off.

3. It could be modded and as such was taunting me.

Of course the real appeal of modding it wasn't just winning another battle in the ongoing war of Mike Vs. Computers, it was a chance to practice for my dream project. Early 360s were plagued with something called the red ring of death (they might still be plagued with it, I'm no longer current on these things). This meant that your 360 stopped working and the ring of light on the front went red. There wasn't anything to be done about it in those days besides send it in to microsoft. I believe this was free, but took a long time, plus modding it voided the warranty, which meant I was kind of boned if that happened.

The overwhelming belief in the community at the time was that the way the heat-sink was clamped to the motherboard, it put undue stress on the soldered joints and when it got hot enough they would come apart, resulting in the RRoD (I'm not sure if this was ever proven conclusively). This led to a ton of after-market cooling products, fans you could strap on the back of it, replacement fans for in the unit. As far as I know they were mostly snake oil, but a sound premise in theory. The problem was that while heat might have been the nail in the coffin, the real problem was the stress put on the board by the X-Clamp (colloquialism for the clamp holding the heat-sink). People that I take seriously felt that the following things helped prevent RRoD: Replacing the x-clamp with a less stupid thing, replacing the thermal paste (thermal paste goes between a processor and heat sink to aid in the transfer of heat) with less shitty thermal paste (arctic silver baby!), replacing the in unit cooling fan and (and this is the part I kinda like) watercooling the system.

Computer chips get hot. That's bad. To combat that heat sinks are attached that wick away the heat and dissipate it. Different materials have different levels of effectiveness in this regard. Water is really good, but of course a sitting thing of water wouldn't get rid of the heat. The idea then in a water cooling system is that the water is continually pumped through a radiator, so that the water over the chip is always cool. In a normal desktop computer there's no reason to do this unless you're a serious over clocker (over clocking your CPU makes it get much hotter) really there's not a ton of reason to do it in a 360 either, but, fuck, it's cool innit? Ever since the first computer I've ever owned I wanted to have a water cooling system, just something about it made the whole thing seem more high tech to me I guess. Since any custom computer case I made would have a water cooling system in it, I figured this would be good practice. The to do list ended up like this:

1. Mod the dvd drive. This is how you play burned games on the 360, change some sort of software on the dvd drive, this is why you need to open the case up.

2. Replace OEM fan. People seemed to feel that this was a big plus in the fight against RRoD and if you have the case open anyway, it's really easy to do.

3. Move innards to a "custom" case. There are a number of replacement cases you can buy. I went with a clear one for two reasons. First, I've always loved visible man type shit, I like to be able to see what's going on inside. Second, I wanted lights in the thing (I ended up not doing that).

4. Install a water cooling system. Reasons described above.

Let's cover those in order. The modding of the dvd drive was an unbelievably nerve racking experience. This was pretty close to when it first became possible to mod it, so no definitive guide had come out. I was forced to cobble together bits and pieces and despite my best efforts managed to brick the unit. *Luckily* I had taken the necessary back up precautions and was able to fix it. Took a break, came back and managed to get it done. It was infuriating because it ended up being an incredibly simple thing, but I just couldn't find the exact right guide.

Again, the fan replacement is very easy when you have the case open. I don't remember the specific fan I bought, but it was recommended by people I take seriously.

God the clear case was a bad idea. I mean, it looks alright and wasn't terribly difficult to do, but the quality of materials is so bad. The OEM case is a quality piece and when I bought this replacement I was expecting similar things, alas. If I could do it over I would have just installed a window into the side. The main that made me end up so soured on the case was the decision to not put lights inside. I had bought some EL wire and I was going to line the edges, and, in my head, it looked awesome. In practice, when I had finally sat down to do all this work, between pitfalls of the dvd drive and the unexpected difficulty of the water cooling, I just wanted to be done.

I believe I've talked before about my inability to accurately gauge the difficulty of things (or rather, my ability to do things) I tend to either grossly under/overestimate how hard something will be. I believe I thought it was going to be very simple to install the water cooling system. Depending on how you look at it, there are a total of five components. The two blocks that go on top of the CPU and GPU. The radiator/fan assy. The pump. The reservoir. Putting those together outside of a system is easy, just a matter of attaching tubes. Working within the constraints of a case though, it becomes tricky. The physical logistics weren't so bad, I had based my "design" off something I'd seen online. The real problem was power. The pump and fan both required power and of course the 360 didn't come equipped with plugs that you could just attach them to. After a ton of research I came across a diagram some guy had made that told you what points you could solder on the motherboard to get various levels of power from. I then later read that you shouldn't do that because it's bad to sap power away from the system. This, once again, was an area lacking any definitive guide. Eventually I found that the thing to do is draw power straight from the plug. Of course then I was thwarted by my puny soldering iron. /sigh.

At the point I had finally done all this, it was very very late and I just wanted to be done, so having accomplished most of the list, I put it all back together. Looked like this.

Hopefully those aren't too dark, it's always hard to tell on this computer. All in all I was pretty happy with how it turned out and it certainly got plenty of use at that apartment.

hey look at this thing i made: X

My last apartment was well furnished. Oops, forgot some commas. My last apartment was, well, furnished. I mean, it had furniture, in fact the ratio of open floor space to furniture was probably pretty close to optimal (almost certainly a bit too much on the furniture side, but it was an awkward place). Of course when I moved into my current apartment, which is easily twice the size, I didn't have anywhere near enough furniture. The original plan was to goto Ikea, not because I have a great love for their furniture, but I really wanted to get a couple detlofs (still do I suppose).

That pretty quickly fell apart. I didn't intend to start making things when I moved in, but I did and it created a somewhat perfect storm of distracting me from my desire to have an apartment that was conducive to anything besides making things and sleeping and eating a lot of my disposable income.

Then I made a table. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that I could just make my own furniture. I couldn't envision making chairs as I had zero desire to upholster anything, but a lot of what I wanted was tables and shelves and that was well within my abilities I felt.

So there I was, post christmas sunday night wing night. Donnyk was asking what I got for christmas. It occurred to me at that point that it's kind of hard to describe what an oscillating multi tool is. It's um, well just follow the link. It like, vibrates and shit and um, harnesses the power of vibration to uh, cut shit and uh, sand shit. Listen, it's awesome and I love it.

"What are you gonna do with that?" says Donnyk. "For that matter, what are you gonna do with the rest of those fucking tools you for some reason own?" (He didn't actually say that).

"You know, makes tables and shit"

"That's interesting, because I need a tv stand."

He had gotten a sweet deal on a tv, problem was, it had no real way of standing up on it's own, it had to be mounted. I told him if he didn't care how it looked, if random mismatched wood was fine, then I could probably make one for pretty cheap. And then it was go time.

The plan was to go as simple as possible. The stated requirements were a) mount the tv, preferably as far from the ground as possible b) have a shelf for video game systems. Given that a shelf would be easy to attach wherever, I decided to start with the mounting setup and build off of that. My idea was to get a 4" x 6" x 12' then cut it in half. If the tv was mounted at the top of those two posts, that would put it right at the ceiling of the room it would be in. I felt confident it would be strong enough to hold the tv up (it weighs about a hundred pounds). Then I figured it would need a base, which led to me thinking, why not just make a box and then that'll account for the shelf too. Slot the 4 x 6s into the top, screw it all together and BOOM. Then I had this conversation (with myself, natch).

"I dunno mike, that seems like it's gonna be a bitch to move."

"I don't actually recall asking for your opinion and furthermore.....that's actually a pretty good point."

It certainly would have been possible to move it, but it woulda been tough. When designing things I try and stay within the confines of what I can do by myself. With the 4 x 6s sticking out, there's no way I could have moved it by myself and not with any of the vehicles available to me. I decided to make a slotting system. The posts would still slide in through the top, but instead of being screwed to the frame, they would be held in place with some guides. Observe.

And zoomed in on the guides.

ISN'T THAT COOL!?! And all for like a quarter of what it woulda cost to buy one at the store.

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.