Pachyderm Update

We last left our feckless hero, the Pachyderm, waiting for a styrofoam head to arrive, in order to correct his Mickey Mouse ears. Not being able to work on the elephantine gas mask, I turned to other pursuits, namely creating my first raygun. I am now pleased to report that the man head has arrived, and much progress has been made on the mask. The ear straps have been completely redesigned so that the ears are not quite so comical.

The acorn nuts holding the bad air transmutators onto the leather mask were a bright brass, and needed to be subdued. By searching online I discovered liver of sulphur, a chemical used to tarnish brass and bronze, and proceeded to purchase a small bottle. The results are lovely! I also fabricated the eyepiece out of acrylic sheet, then molded it in silicone rubber and cast two of them in a faux copper. The results are splendid, with its rivets making it look rather like a porthole from Capt. Nemo's Nautilus.

The only step left is to buy and install some small rivets to hold the trunk in place. I will photograph the mask and post pictures here in a couple of days.

Life's Latest Lesson

Today I learned that if you take an elephant and make his ears round and move them to the top of his head he turns into a large rodent. A cartoon mouse even. Who knew! In the illustration the drawing on the left represents the original pachyderm gas mask concept. The drawing on the right is what the mask currently resembles. Clearly I need a model of a full-sized human head on which to make my patterns. Guessing—the technique I have been using up to this point—doesn't always work. OK, there is any easy enough workaround for this, and that is to take the strap that the ears are attached to and lengthen it so that the ears hang a bit lower. Hopefully, the elephant will then return!

Pachyderm: Making the Eardrums

I blogged about making the copper steampunk gasmask pachyderm ears here http://tombanwell.blogspot.com/2009/01/copper-pachyderm-ears.html , but I’m still missing the center piece which I’ll call the eardrum. I am just about done with them, and here is how I went about doing it.



My first thought was to make a resin piece that would just fit into the opening of the copper ear. My concerns were how to attach the ear and the eardrum to the strap which will fasten to the mask itself with snaps, and how to keep the weight down. A mask of this size can get heavy pretty fast, and be uncomfortable to wear. I was planning on bolting the eardrum through the ear and through the strap, but this presented the problem of hiding the bolt head on the front of the eardrum, and also on the bottom side of the leather strap where it could rub against the wearer’s skin.

After deciding that a resin piece would be too difficult to attach and too heavy, I considered a wire screen or other thin metal dome. Given that I don’t have many metalworking skills, I eventually opted for making the eardrum out of formed leather.

I knew I wanted the eardrum to be domed to give it a little class, so all I needed was a form over which I could shape the vegetable tanned leather. I looked around my shop for a suitable something—I was thinking of a bottle lid—to no avail. I thought perhaps a drawer pull would have the right shape to it if I could find one with the right diameter. Going to my local hardware store I quickly found just the knob I needed. The first picture shows the copper ear, the knob, and a piece of plywood ready for attaching the knob to.

I carefully measured the opening in the copper ear, and cut a hole the same size into a piece of ¼” acrylic plastic. I added a second piece of wood on top of the plywood to reduce the height of the knob, thus completing my forming jig, as shown in the third picture.

I then cut out a circular piece of oversized leather with the ventilation holes already cut, and soaked it in water to make it plastic. I laid the damp leather over the knob, and forced the acrylic piece down over the leather and knob, stretching the leather and conforming it smoothly to the knob. I held the forming jig together with two clamps as shown, and let the leather dry.

The fifth picture shows the before and after of the leather circle. After dying the eardrum black, I inserted it into the copper ear. Now I just have to attach them both to the leather strap.

Copper Pachyderm Ears

I was at the local thrift shop looking for vacuum cleaner hoses to use as the lower trunk when I stumbled across these copper lamp reflectors. Now, I am comfortable working with leather and resin, but I have little experience working with metal. As a utilitarian sound enhancer, metal would probably function better than leather, but I didn’t know a way to form it and have it look good.

So when I saw these reflectors at the thrift shop, and a scratch test revealed them to be copper, I knew that they might serve me very well. As I mulled over how to adapt them to the pachyderm project, I realized that there were five criteria by which to judge them.

1) Would they look historically correct i.e. fit into the 19th century.
2) Would they be believable as a functioning sound amplifier.
3) Would they have an element of fantasy that was steampunk, and not just Victorian.
4) Would they integrate well with the rest of the mask, and
5) Would they in some way resemble elephant ears.

I felt that I could accomplish all of this by just a few steps: Stripping away the brushed antique finish, polish the copper, cover the crimped outer edge with “bomber brown” leather, and antique the whole thing.

All in all I think it works. The leather trim hides the 1960’s looking crimped edge, plus the brown color matches the rest of the mask. I am torn at this point whether to leave the copper polished or to tarnish it with copper sulfate, but I can decide that later, after I see all the parts together.