ARMSTRONG GOGGLES ON EBAY

I just listed a new pair of goggles on eBay for sale. These are called the ARMSTRONG BULWARK VISION ENCAPSULATORS. Check out the link below to see the sales listing and let me know what you think. I have started making these as a sort of standard design so I can have a regular type of steampunk goggle to put on eBay and to try to keep a regular stock on hand. To be honest, the biggest challenge to starting a business of making and selling steampunk items has been finding a regular supply of the goggles needed to do the artwork on in the first place. Like any new venture I will just have to work out the kinks as I go along. Wish me luck.

The Blaylock Steamworks Emporium

I am testing out a new web site for showcasing my Steampunk items called The Blaylock Steamworks Emporium.  I am using webs.com to build the site and it seems pretty straightforward so far.  I plan on listing images of goggles that I have already made and giving people an idea of what they can purchase from me that I have designs for now or essentially what they can request from me.  The site is somewhat sparse right now but I will grow it more as I have time. Hop over and check it out if you have a chance and comment if you have suggestions for me.  Thanks as always.

http://blaylocksteamworksemporium.webs.com/

The Faraday Pathfinder Visual Enhancers

At last, the Faraday Pathfinder Visual Enhancers are ready for deployment into the Aether.  I have the goggles finished and most importantly for my blog I have the pics ready for display.  It took longer on these to get everything ready because I did more experiments on somewhat new features.

I think one of my favorite features is the hand painted red lens that really gives the goggles a different visual effect.  Plus the armature on the right side was really pretty interesting once it was finished.

The pathfinder element in the name goes right along with the attached compass on the left side plus the loupes that can adjust to help find things that are a little too far away.

I never really solved the whole stickiness issue with the flexible areas of the mask but I am sure that if these were placed on a hat, like my own goggles are, then it wouldn't matter much.  I have been watching a store on eBay where they sell lots of goggles like this style that have the mask part in black so I could probably avoid painting them altogether.

New Goggle Project: Part 5

Eventually I will have found a name for these goggles and it won't have to be "New Goggle Project" all the time.  For now, I am going to focus on the items I decided to use on the sides of the goggles.  I want to explore more of the armature type items and this one I built from various different parts.  I took an arm from a lot of spare clock parts I had, a couple of gears including a really large plastic gear from a broken card shuffling toy, a long brass screw and one of the springs out of the clock stuff.  I had to switch out the location of the spring a couple of times and finally settled on it being right out at the end under the head of the screw.  This applied enough pressure against the other parts to keep the clock arm from falling down and it can be adjusted to any angle.

The other side was a little easier to set up because I just added some holes to a small compass I had in my stuff and screwed it onto the outside and then painted it with a clear coat to keep it from being too shiny and new looking.

I was very pleased with how these turned out and it makes for an interesting visual appearance overall.  This pair of goggles started out as an experiment (of course) then turned into a requested item from someone that lives in the same apartment as my friend.  It looks like now, however, that it is going to be up for grabs as I am not sure he is interested in them anymore.  I'll have to keep posting on how it turns out.

New Goggle Project: Part 4

The next thing that I decided to try on the new goggles was to make one of the lenses a different color.  That may sound easy but I had to try a couple of different methods first before I settled on one.  I used a piece of colored plastic to try to make a colored side of one of the clear lenses but the glue that I used did not really stick very well.  Maybe if I find a strong spray on adhesive I can try this again later.  I then used an acrylic paint for glass and brushed it onto the clear lens.

Red seemed like a good choice to make the goggles really stand out from some of the others that I have made before.  It has a rough sort of look but overall I think that it works well.  The tinted green lens is behind the red mostly to make them fit the ring the way they are supposed to and so they don't rattle around.  The lenses in place and the individual pieces painted and clear coated the goggles have already started to take on a life of their own.  Of course, there is still the issue of the stickiness which I cannot seem to get rid of.

New Goggle Project: Part 3

I forgot to post images of the screw pattern that I drilled into the body of these goggles when I was working on them before any of the paint was added.  You can see that I just used small Phillips head screws in regular intervals all around the face of the goggles.  This was pretty easy to achieve because there was a pattern of plastic fins on the inside of the goggles presumably to make them a little stronger near the lens plate.

The next find that I added came from a couple of old cameras I found at a thrift store and then disassembled just for the parts.  The cameras were from the '80s and, in fact, one was a disk camera.  A sort of a camera technology cul de sac to be sure.  There might have been more useful stuff inside an older camera but these were cheap to buy and I didn't feel bad about salvaging what I wanted out of them.  Warning: these things consumed quite a bit of time just trying to figure out how to take apart fully.  It sounds much easier than it really is.  These are the gears I took out and sanded a place on the lens plate to glue them down onto.

One of the gears is plastic and the other two are metal of some sort and after attaching with 5 minute epoxy I will paint back over with the metallic silver to make everything look like one mechanism.

I'm going to use a longer screw to put through the hole in the middle top of the plate to both secure the two sections of the goggles again like the plastic rivet did before but I am going to leave enough sticking out the front to give a way to add loupes later on.