Telecalculograph

A few years ago, I purchased a bare-bones PC from Ebay. The internals were nice, and the case seemed pretty cool—at first. I quickly to grow tired of it’s cheesy, 1337-wannabe aesthetics; and even more so of my purely-functional mods. I wanted something new, and I wanted it to look old. While appearances were high on my list, I did not want to sacrifice any function to achieve them. This was to be my “daily driver” PC, so anything les than comfortable and easy to use, would get annoying FAST.

I was originally going to do a 1940s, Nazis-combining-science-with-magic, Hellboy-esque “electrical brain” type thing, but decided not to. With the popularity of the Wolfenstein games, this type of thing had already been done several times. Besides, the less Nazi stuff the better, right?

I soon realized that my true passion was not in the ‘40s, or even in the 1900s at all. No, steampunk was the way to go.

Thus was born the Telecalculograph.

Not including the original PC, this project cost about $70 total. It took around two months of spare time, and was done with basic hand tools. The only power tools used were a drill and a Dremel.

Be sure to watch the video of the furnace in action here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPO2JuqAl0M
*Note: The color of the "fire" is a little off in the video, in real life it is a more homogenous orange.

Thanks for looking--enjoy!

33 photos | 54,452 views

items are from between 09 Apr 2006 & 23 Jan 2007.