NESteampunk Anyone?

             #14


          HELLO.... THERE..... INTERWEBS!!!!!

          So it has been a long time since my last post. Over a year! Well to say the least things in the past year have been Very hard for me. Very long story that I'm sure most people will not care about so I'll keep that to a minimum. Long story short I still have yet to find a new place for my workshop and the divorce is still hindering my living situation.

         With that out of the way I stopped at A.C. Moore yesterday and pick up a few things to fool around with some small builds. I found some things to finish my Tea lights from a few posts back, and I started and finish this last build.

       

        So to start off this build I took one of my NES controllers. I purposely chose the one that was slightly discolored because no one likes discolored NES controllers. No one! At any rate, I First tried seeing if I could clean it up because I never tried to make anything with just a faux antique paint job. So I was going to try my hand at it. But cleaning it up didn't work out as planned and I quickly realized My painting skills are not up to par to pull that off.



        I then decided that this will be another wooden build so I ripped the controller apart to see what my plan of action was going to be doing that. Even though I probably should not have expected anything different I was still surprised at how few components in this controller there are. So after ripping it all apart I quickly realized that the way the buttons are held in place would be impossible to recreate out of wood so the only way to do this is just reskin the controller with very thin wood.



I then glued the contact rubbers to the circuit board as if the case was holding them in place. Followed by Gluing the original buttons to the rubber contractors. Then glued some wooden spacers to the buttons knowing I would need them to extend the buttons past the new layer of wood soon to be on top of the controller casing.



        After putting the case back together and building the new wooden exterior case cover if you will. I added some extensions to the select and start buttons. The I said "Ok now I have a wooden NES controller." "How am I going to make this more steampunk?"

Gears!!! so I put two little gears on it one for the start and one for the select button. Then See how I have all these Typewriter key charms I bought from the craft store I thought. Perfect!! the A and B buttons. Then put a nice coat of minwax Jacobean stain on said controller.


         After that I just went crazy with the Brassy bits. I added U,D,L,R typewriter keys for the up, down,left,and right, D-pad. Some sheet copper corner covers I made that are almost impossible to see in the below picture. Four stamped corner plates, A Key hole plate and some copper wire twisted over the cord end and a little on the bottom for a little more metal-ness.

         
              So there it is boys and girls my Steampunk NES controller. It has been over a year since I have built anything and I was really happy to get something new done. Also Like I said earlier in the post I plan on finishing the tea light lanterns soon so stay tuned for that update. thank you for reading and I will also link my youtube video of this build for anyone who wants to check it out.