I recently found out that there is a huge collection of random spare parts that might serve to provide the next essential pieces of my steampunk artwork. One of the local junk yards, specifically Pull-A-Part here in Charlotte, turned out to be a great place to discover raw materials for conversion.
The sheer number of different cars, trucks and various other vehicles opened up all sorts of possibilites as what I might find that I could use. Of course, you have to pay a small fee just to get in to look through the derelict transports and then once you find what you want you have to pay for the individual items themselves. So I tried to focus on things that I could tell were broken or just really small because intact larger car parts might cost more than you really want to pay just to take it home and destroy it for art. This is how I found the horn assembly that I wrote about before that got treated to a good coat of rub n buff. I also got an old dash instrument cluster which included the speedometer, tachometer and a few other things that I thought might look good once disassembled. In fact, the numbers that you normally see scrolling to show how far your car has traveled turned out to be very cool looking on their own.
They very much appeared to be like dials that you could use adjust the seetings on something so I used one of these for my gun. I picked a spot on the housing of the gun and drilled a very small hole through to the inside. Plastic is pretty easy to drill so this didn't take very much effort. Then I bought a tiny screw with matching self locking nut from the hardware store and just put the screw through the middle of my new dial then put the nut on the inside to hold it in place. The dial still turns and gives the impression that you can adjust a setting on the gun before firing.
I think the effect turned out really well and the dial isn't going anywhere since the locking nut will hold it in place.
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