As seen in the film of the same name, this high pressure steam vessel has been replicated by your very own Herr Döktor, a build diary of a sort can be found here.

Mr Mark Dalzell tipped us about one of his latest creations, this wonderful steampunk-styled guitar, built for the 2008 Jersey City Artists Studio Tour.

“Designed using elements of steampunk,” Mr Dalzell says, the contraption “incorporates clockwork gears, hand hammered brass, cloth wire and wood to show an alternate historical glimpse of a 19th century electric guitar.” Quite fascinating! You can see more photographs in this Set.

May we wish you all a Happy New Year, and to celebrate, here’s an image of what Santa’s visit in 2007* looked like one hundred and one years ago:

*Shamelessly borrowed from ‘Girl Genius’

Sadly, the latest blog posts all seem to be about the inner workings of the site.  You may have noticed down time for a day or two — our MySQL server crashed for an unknown reason; I was on holiday and didn’t notice.

My apologies for the inconvenience.  For those who care about such things, the details of what happened will unfold on the forum as I uncover them.

UPDATE: If you’re seeing this, you’re at our new home!  You may notice that your address bar contains ‘74.126.25.104’ instead of ‘brassgoggles.co.uk'; fret not, that should be fixed in a few days (it’s a side effect of moving to the new host).

My apologies for the short notice: we’d intended to manage this a little more slowly, but were caught off guard by a particular requirement of our upgrade process that I hadn’t planned for.

At this time, the comments to the blog are disabled, and the forum has been taken off-line. This is to prevent data loss as we make the move. This is no longer true.  Comment and forum-ify away!

This move should go much more smoothly than the last round, since we’re staying with the same hosting company, and just moving to a bigger server.  Thanks to everyone who has donated so far, you’ve made this move possible for at least the next few months.  Please continue to support our plan to be funded for 5 years by following the Amazon badge found in the Donate area of the right column (waaaay at the bottom).

Soon, soon, Now, we will no longer have our 503 errors that have plauged the forum of late! (fingers firmly crossed).

Clive Batkin is a new (and hopefully upcoming) steampunk artist of whom we proudly display two perfectly stylish creations here.

The first image depicts a steampunk desk lamp called “The Optimus” by Mr Batkin, after the Swedish-made brass stove that forms the base of the lamp. Simple and beautiful, “The Optimus” should perfectly complement any steampunk enthusiast’s desk–and we want one too!

Depicted besides the lamp is a steampunk desk fan created in similar style. Mr Batkin explains that, “construction centered around lots of copper pipe,” with “some of the beautiful newly designed UK one penny coins” used as end caps and decoration, “and lots of random brass/copper bits and pieces here and there.” The result makes for an elegance pure and shining that represents the work of an undeniable new voice in steampunk style.

You might not realize at first quite what this contraption is, but it’s the first full-fledged steampunk cellphone! It has, “no display. No 3G. No data plan. No games. It doesn’t even have a dial pad,” write the people at Unplggd “You make your calls with binary-coded punch cards, steampunk.”

The device was created by a Mr Arthur Schmitt.

A new steampunk blog popped up fairly recently. Steampunk Pics provides the visitor with charming collection of steampunk imagery, always within a certain scope, be it “Steampunk Toys” or “Steampunk Star Wars” or “Zeppelins” or “Clockworks”.

As the author, Mr Tomasz Armatowski puts it: “I’m on a quest, browsing through the Internet in search of pictures.” A quest certainly successful, we dare say, for the blog is regularly updated to provide the steampunk enthusiast with a new selection of wonderful depictions!

Word comes to the Brass Goggles Film Review Dept (via pneumatic chute) of an award winning visual entertainment from Sudden Stop Films…

Professor Dantes and the Severin Conundrum

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clfM3HJujIU[/youtube]

Further information on Sudden Stop Films can be found here:

http://www.myspace.com/sudden_stop_films

O.S.M.

Sillof’s Workshop continues with his on-going Steam Wars project with a set of figures from Return of The Jedi…

Originally an entry in Customcon XXI.   The line continues the idea of blending original Star Wars elements and industrial aesthetics.

Enough talk, go take a look at the site…

Sillof’s Workshop

O.S.M.