If you got here by following a link from an old advertisement on the Girl Genius website, I’m no longer making the Little Clank kits. It was fun while it lasted, but they never sold very fast and the molds were getting old. Rather than upgrade the molds (which would have been expensive), I shut down production.
For a while, I made Ceramic Tak Stones for the Worldbuilders charity.
After I had made over 10,000 pieces, I realized that I wasn’t cut out for that kind of production work. The most interesting part (beside meeting Pat Rothfuss) was developing the right tool to slice the extruded clay into individual stones. There were several iterations of the slicer, finally ending up with guitar hardware and brass half-rounds to keep the cutting wire tight enough to do the job.
Tolkien’s Red Book of Westmarch was a project I did for myself, creating my own leather-bound copy of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It’s still in English, but everything is written phonetically with the Elvish characters.
I’m afraid that copies aren’t available. I have queried the Tolkien Estate and they have no interest in licensing the text for this particular application.
I relettered all the maps and figures with Elvish characters and wrote an extensive software library to perform the text manipulation and conversions. The pages were printed on a sheet-fed laser printer, then grouped into fake signatures before being hand-stitched and bound. Here are some of the stages of binding the book once the sheets were printed.
The Nomocal Calorie Slide Rule started while I was ramping up to the Red Book of Westmarch. I was severely overweight and my doctor put me on a strict calorie limit. (“1800 calories,” she said. “No problem,” I replied, “I get that much in Cokes and Snickers.” I was lucky she had a sense of humor.) Tracking calories is a pain, though, because food information labels say things like “37 calories in a 29 gram serving,” but your scale says “4.7 ounces.” The math is simple enough, but it’s tedious. Laziness is the mother of Invention, and because the conversions are entirely multiplicative, I designed a slide rule marked in calories, grams, and ounces to do the math for me. I called it nomocal for reasons I’ve forgotten, probably some combination of ‘nomogram’ and ‘calorie.’ I think it started as a nomogram and turned into a slide rule, but I don’t remember the details.
The nomocal in this picture is kinda beat up after years of use, but it’s set to 70 calories (on the slider) for 2 ounces of food (on the right-hand column). Now you can look up the weight in ounces or grams anywhere on the scale and find the equivalent calories. For example, 6 ounces has 210 calories and 150 grams has about 185 calories. I even listed common foods on the back so I could slide the food name to the blue arrow and put the slider in the correct position.
Of course it’s horribly tedious to make a slide rule by hand, but the Tolkien project had driven me to learn PostScript, which is actually a programming language. I wrote a PostScript program to draw the nomocal, including all the logarithms and stuff needed to make a slide rule. I could print it on card stock, do a little glue and trimming, and update it as often as I liked. There’s a PDF of the nomocal in the Downloads section, along with a second PDF that shows the PostScript code. WordPress won’t let me upload an actual .ps file, which is probably for the best, but if you’re curious, you can copy/paste the code and have at it. Learning PostScript was one of those odd little side skills that kept coming back to save me, a two-week investment that paid off again and again.
This Police Box/TARDIS Planter was made in a plaster slipcasting mold using a cone 6 stoneware slip. I made the mold from scratch, starting with an original wooden sculpture of one side of a police box. I made a silicone mold (negative) of that side, then a resin casting (positive) from the silicone. I used the resin and some melamine boards to make a negative mold for the four identical plaster slabs that make up the final slipcasting mold.
This image shows the progression from original wooden sculpt to silicone mold to resin casting to plaster mold to a fresh casting from slip:
Merida’s Bow (from Disney/Pixar’s “Brave”) made for a cosplayer friend from Comic-Con. The wood is oak, shaped with spokeshaves and drawknife, then steam-bent and pressed into a custom-built form. The bow is non-functional, but has two strings – one heavy, solid string for wearing the bow across the shoulder, and one elastic string for posing with the bow “drawn”.
This image shows the steam-bending form and the heat transfer of the celtic knot pattern:
The Intrepid Girlbot by Diana Nock. The model of the title character was made as a gift for the author.
This image shows several of the successive masters I made to create the final mold. The final piece is urethane resin, brass, and a commercially-made raccoon.
A Little Clank from Girl Genius (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com) This was made as a gift for the creators of the Hugo Award-winning comic Girl Genius by Phil & Kaja Foglio. This piece was machined out of brass stock. Even the screws.
This image shows some of the internal structure.
Here’s the Dingbot with the face plate removed. The white material is HDPE (high density polyethylene) machined to fit inside the brass ring. It’s just thin enough that it diffuses the glow of the LEDs that I mounted behind the “eye”, which is a 10mm black bead. There is a cavity in the back of the HDPE that holds a button battery to power the LEDs. The light is turned by screwing down the winder on the top.
This layout shows most of the individual pieces of the Dingbot. Each segment of the arms and legs is a pair a brass slabs with machined hollows to accept the ball joints and a small slab of HDPE that provides tension on the balls, keeping the Dingbot in position once it has been posed. Here’s a look at a great pose (scroll down when you get there).
This is 1:72 scale architectural mockup I built over one weekend (rush job!) to help churchgoers visualize the child care center they were being asked to help build. Unfortunately there are no good pictures. The mockup was discarded after the building was constructed. The tall figure with the children is a 1:72 scale Friar Tuck. The children are 1:87 (HO) scale because the center mostly serves preschool children.
This is a yarn bowl I threw on a wheel in school.
Madame’s Civilising Influence is a steampunk-themed prop pistol made for a friend who is Lakota Sioux. The medicine wheel was a requested part of the design.
These images show some of the design and construction steps.
Buttergerbil Stained Glass Window Hanging from Shaenon K. Garrity’s Narbonic. The Buttergerbils (or Gerbilflies) appeared at the very end of the comic when [spoiler] and [spoiler] were living on the [spoiler]. There is a printable pattern for this on the Downloads page.
