Homemade steampunk neck-brace

[doctorow]

[Read the post]

[WearySky]

Man, I read “Homemade” and thought “Hrmm, that seems like the kind of thing I’d happily let somebody make for me” - then I realized that you really just meant “self-decorated”

[stephen_schenck]

I see chest-gears and I think:

[shaddack]

The steampunk gears… could they be lasercut? Using actual metal cogwheels for cosmetic purposes comes to me as a sort of a waste of good parts.

[glenblank]

Can anyone tell me how a hot-glued scattering of apparently-pointless gears came to be the default representation of ‘steampunk’ as an aesthetic?

I mean, I’m familiar with the literary antecedents of the genre, but… why gear wheels hot-glued onto hats and the like?

(And which is more curious: the lone, unengaged, unpartnered gear looking sadly pointless, or the three (or more) triangulated gears, interlocked into total immobility?)

Is it just that modern-day folks don’t understand how gears work or what they’re for? Or is there something more complex going on here?

[shaddack]

@glenblank

Is it just that modern-day folks don’t understand how gears work or what they’re for? Or is there something more complex going on here?

Maybe it is a metaphor about being a useless cog in an useless unnecessarily complex malfunctioning machine?

[renke]

@shaddack

a useless cog in an useless unnecessarily complex malfunctioning machine

[adonai]

Snark aside, it’s a nifty way to decorate what I presume is a pretty crappy thing to have to wear.

[Vanwall]

Then there’s the ur-steam-punk-neck-brace worn by Gabriele Ferzetti as Morton, in “Once Upon a Time in the West”…wonderfully complicated, and on a steam train…

[L_Mariachi]

Oblig.

[L_Mariachi]

[adonai]

I’m not sure if Hark! A Vagrant is obligatory the way XKCD is, but it should be.

[daneel]

I know steampunk is just an aesthetic, but I still wish it really was people making steampowered/clockwork equivalents of electronic items.

[shaddack]

@daneel

I know steampunk is just an aesthetic, but I still wish it really was people making steampowered/clockwork equivalents of electronic items.

Even pressurized air instead of steam would be fun. It can be retrofitted later and air-only is easier in some ways.

Hope 3d printing of things like mechanical linkages, gears and valves will help here.

[renke]

airpunk. dunno, feels too soft to me.

[shaddack]

Mechanics, pressure tightness, condensation issues and water hammers, corrosion issues… too much for everything at once.

Start with air. Graduate to steam.

Also, steam is too hot for most of the printable plastics. Air systems will allow parallel development until 3d printing of metals becomes an at-home mainstream.