The Lost (not so) Laptop.

    Post count 4

    I think I'm getting the hang of this Blogging stuff.


     Today's blog entry is all about my third build the one I loved the most yet never finished [/sadface].
So after getting more and more into this steampunk thing, I started coming up with ideas. Yes I know again the Laptop is not super original, But I wanted to make one. but I didn't have any unused laptops. Nor did I have any money to buy one that my wife would let me rip apart. So this idea stayed on the back burner for quite some time. Meanwhile I still thought about it, Thinking to myself what would I do had I got the chance to make it. Would I try to make it out of brass? Should I try and make it out of nothing but wood? The ideas kept coming but no progress was made with no laptop to pull apart non of these ideas would come to fruition.

     Then one day it happened the thing I have been waiting for. I was sitting in the living room using my laptop. I get up to use the bathroom and from the living room I hear it. "BOOM"  "What the heck was that?" I ran out of the Bathroom to find my laptop on the floor in two pieces with my cat standing over it with a smug look on her little kitty face. "Well that sucks." I said and then LIGHT BULB! my chance has come to make my ideas finally into a real thing. "YAY!!!"

     

      So the Building Started. First I ripped out all the guts of the laptop. You know it's funny how quick thing can come apart when you are not worried about putting them back together. Luckily for me only the hing that connected the screen to the bass was damaged, Everything else was still intact and in proper working order. After getting everything pulled apart and disassembled it was time to start the build.

        I started by building a base for everything to sit in. I drilled holes where the fans where to let air through, Which oddly enough was sufficient and ultimately lead to the laptop overheating and burning up the hard drive. At least that's what I was told I'm not very good when it comes to computers. I lined up portholes for all the USB slots and the charger and all that good stuff.

         The CD tray was the next hurdle. I wanted it to be very hard to see when closed but work perfectly. this was a challenge that outwitted me. The face of the drawer fit perfect into the slot. However when attached to the drawer itself there was just enough play in the drawer slide that it would get hung up. so I went it and sanded down the imperfections, and tried again. Kept doing that till the slide work perfect, But now it was plain as day the it was two pieces. So I ripped it off and tried again. this drawer slide was pulled apart and redone three times and at the end it was function over form and never got to the point that it looked like one piece of wood.

      Next came the monitor. This was one of the easiest part of the laptop to make. It was got a frame build around screen. The back of the frame would get rabbeted out to accept the screen and hold it in place. Two hinges would let the screen open and shut the same as a normal laptop.



        Then to start adding the Brassy bits. nothing says Steampunk more than brass. I started finding little brass pieces in every hardware store, home depot, and lumber yard I went to. It became a joke at work whenever I would go into the lumber yard or hardware stores the guys would be shocked if I walked out without some sort of brass hardware.


           
     Once you start adding brassy things its Hard to stop. The chains that I put on though were actually needed. Without the chains on the screen there was nothing to stop it from slamming backwards and potentially breaking the screen. So those worked out great.

   


      After that I had to pull it all back apart and Stain it. I used a minwax color named Jacobean. It gave the piece a nice antique look. Also it complemented the brass really well.



         Up next was the key board this was a struggle to say the least. I through around a few Ideas in how to do this. First was these Script font stickers I found. I though about putting them on top of wood and then polying over them. Then I tried Script decals with the same technique, and that didn't work either. Finally I settled on free hand painting. Problem is I'm not a good painter. and the paint I use was some weird brass colored paint that would just peel right of of everything I put it on. so the keyboard had me quite discouraged. and I decided to move on for now and come back to it at a later time. hoping that by then I would have come up for a solution for my lettering problem.

        Then I got a new job and all my side projects went on hold for a bit. When I came back to it I decided to put red velvet wrist rest on. But this also was a day that I did a lot of drinking the beer. If you know what I mean. They didn't come out bad for my level of intoxication, But they could have been much better. I finished them on a different day because you would believe how much one could bleed from a pin prick after being drunk for a few hours.

       THE TOP!
       One of if not my most favorite parts of this hole build. Again went back and forth on a few ideas for the top of this thing. Finally I settled on making it into a round top chest. I figured this would give it more of a Victorian era feel to it. And well looking back on it, It seems a little more pirate-y. But hey pirates are cool. Anywho when I pulled apart the computer I never came up with a good way of changing out the battery so instead of worrying about it  I just Left the batty out of the equation. Which is fine because after this the portability of this particular laptop is less than it once was. You are not going to be sitting in Starbucks writing your new book on this thing. But I plenty of planes on doing just that when I finished it. Minus the book part.


 Leaving the battery out was ok but now you needed to be plugged in at all times to use the laptop. So we now need a place for all these cords that have to stay with said laptop. Another cool part of the round top was that it opened up for storage. Pretty cool right? Again I was lining this part with the same red velvet that was used for the wrist pads. It was coming along great this laptop toke me a few months of work. couple hours here few minutes there but it was finally coming together and looking good.

        Sadly this is where the story of the (Not so) Laptop comes to an end. More of a screeching halt. Remember when I said that I didn't drill enough holes for sufficient air flow? Yeah this is the point where I found that out. So like I said the ports for air flow were not good enough to let in and out the right amount of air. The system overheated and fried the hard drive. So this project was scraped I started it when it was my only computer and I needed a way to put it back together in one piece. By time it died I already bought a new computer and had no need for this one. If I had money to put into it for a new hard drive and all the fun stuff needed to run it I might have finished it but now it sits in the dungeon of my basement till the day I have the time and money ti pull it back out and rehash the hole thing.

      Hope you enjoyed this installment of my Steampunk Journey.
      And thanks for reading.