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Archive for May, 2009

Laboratory, basics

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

So, in the new house we’ve established there’s a large, concrete floored room with three walls (2 sides brick, one side fibrous cement) and panelled ceiling under the house. What’s the first thing that should be done in such an area?

Fill it with stuff, naturally.

Yes, I started doing the laboratory almost completely backwards, getting very excited and buying lots of steam-punk looking items and furniture. When I brought some friends over they were quite impressed with the space, but then asked what I was going to do about the floor, walls and ceiling. Whoops. Thankfully I wasn’t too ridiculous — time to rethink the plans. Obviously step one had to be tackling the basic structure of the room to make it look more Victorian era. Time to hit the internet and design books.

Resources

Hardware stores (1): Floor. Lots of it, and it was concrete. Enthusiastic I may be, but carpet is expensive and — in an area that was until recently susceptible to flood waters — not practical. Especially for a laboratory look. Timber flooring them is out due to expense. So we went the logical step, seal the concrete to prevent overly dust and leave it like that. Rugs were acquired later to lend a bit of a warmth to the area.
Hardware stores (2): They have the paint, and they have the books. Rummaging through books enough and we found colour swatches specifically targeting the Victorian era. Funnily enough, they mentioned colours that were actually for sale at the shop we were at! How’s that for convenience with a complete lack of ulterior motivation? Three colours were selected, cottage cream, some sort of green, and an indian red.
Hardware stores (3): Given that most of the room was brick, I was looking at a fair amount of trouble turning those into paintable walls. Or so I thought; first experiment – grab some MDF, paint them white, paint them the wall colours and liquid nail them to the brickwork. Surprise surprise, it actually works really well.
The Internet: There was some verification about the colours, but then there was looking into ratios and scientific principles, there needed to be method in my paint. The Indian red was for the ceiling, so I had green and yellow for the walls. The split between the two colours was quickly determined to be the golden ratio. Very science, and very appealing for splitting. Looks good.
Good friends: Dame Virago and Baron Cyrus von Borg (Amy and Scott) were above-and-beyond helpful with painting the MDF, affixing the MDF, sealing the floors, painting the roof. Much gratitude towards them

NOW that the area is completed, we can start looking into the furniture and accoutrements. You will note in the right picture part of the ceiling that’s exposed beams? Yeah, a few months into living in the house that part of the ceiling collapsed. We fixed that up in the emergency pressure stage of building (covered in a later entry).

First coat of red ceiling paint

Second coat on the ceiling, looks a richer red

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Professor von Explaino: Inspiration

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

I’m a child of the late 80′s and early 90′s. Inspirations for the Prof are drawn from the media that was prevalent at the time, yes we had inspiration before the wide-spread installation of cable modems.

Science shows

From the Curiosity show through to “Why is it so?” when an egg gets pulled into a milk bottle (from Cadbury ads rather than the original), I loved watching the science shows growing up. I can still recall snippets of the shows, the presenters and the voices, and the little catch phrases. I don’t know how much of the shows’ messages sunk in versus how much was just watched over in the glory of enjoying science on TV. While they didn’t have the budget of Mythbusters, nor the international penetration, they still shared Science. This also helped my dad find presents for me, solar kits and other hands-on buildy stuff were always good gifts. I kept the solar powered ‘stuff’ kit for ages, and I didn’t even have someone cut the speakers into tiny pieces from making the light-sensitive-noise-squarker too often.

Doctor Emmett Brown, Back to the Future

Yes, I’m one of those kids in high school who mimed looking at a watch and their wrist while saying “Damn, damn!” Even though he had enough money to buy a DeLorean and make a time-machine, he’s definitely SteamPulp over SteamPunk. To break it down:

Hair: Completely manic, white, barely managable.

Outfits: Fashion victim of the worst kind, EXCEPT when he was dressed in wild-west finery. Victorian era… coincidence? I think not.

Science: Flux capacitor. 1.21 Gigawatts. Nuclear powered time machine using plutonium stolen from Libyans. “You disintegrated Einstien!” Plus, look at all the pretties over his SteamTrain Time Machine. Not a rust mark in sight.

Outlook: A generally optimistic viewpoint, a bit of comic releif dusted through everything he did, a fun naivety and he gets the girl in the end.

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Steampulp Laboratory – Beginnings

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

When my wife and I were going house hunting, I had a simple requirement for any house we were looking at. There had to be a room that could be come my ‘laboratory’. Or, rather, the laboratory of Professor von Explaino. We looked at a number of houses that had spare rooms where I could have a combined study/ laboratory but we eventually found one place that was great. It was a raised 1960′s house. Fibro on the top, but bricked in underneath. One side held the garage and laundry, the other had a bathroom but a large, concrete floored area that was below legal height so couldn’t be classified as a room. Brick walls, concrete floor, exposed beam ceiling. Enough room that we could split it between my wife and myself so we both have some areas to indulge our hobbies.

We’ve been in the house just over five years now, and the laboratory has had work performed on it in a very sparodic basis. With the continual help of very close — and similarly mad — friends, it’s getting closer to being a true, fake laboratory. Laboratory-tagged posts in this journal will be looking at the unfortunately very gradual transformation of this area from unused space to the laboratory demanded by Professor von Explaino.