Borchardts go with Steampunk

[StarOfTheWest]

http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=...XN34h4l5k2TGxc

[Edward Tinker]

Nice antiques and nice guns, overall pretty cool

[Ron Wood]

Watta hoot!!! Love what you have done with the house! Still hope to get there someday.

[Thor]

The title of this post and some of the comments seem "off" to me.

[StarOfTheWest]

Steampunk is a subculture genre that combines a Victorian look with high tech, as if power sources has proceeded along the lines of steam, or perhaps Tesla.
It is imaginative, beautiful and at times very science fiction.
Think H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, or the most recent well publicized ripoff of it, the remake of the move "The Wild Wild West".
Steampunk has been around for years, and has very little to do with punk, and a whole lot to do with steam.
The genre has attracted folks of all ages, even some of us old fogies, (as we can afford the best toys).
Look it up on Wikipedia if you still have no clue what I'm talking about.
http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=...GBrIh4l5k2TGxc

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by StarOfTheWest

Think H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, or the most recent well publicized ripoff of it, the remake of the move "The Wild Wild West".

Or "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"...which was a dud, but has some interesting Steampunk ideas...

Yes, I love that decor also...especially the Doggerman...

[StarOfTheWest]

By gosh, Postino, you get it!!
Thanks to all for the kind comments and even thanks for the befuddled one.
Y'all are great, and I might post more later that show the guns to better advantage.
BTW, the Borchardt and the 02 Carbine were the ones I chose to play with in these shots.
Don't have to shoot em to have some fun with em, guys!!!

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by StarOfTheWest

BTW, the Borchardt and the 02 Carbine were the ones I chose to play with in these shots.
Don't have to shoot em to have some fun with em, guys!!!

Yes! Fondling can be more satisfying than shooting...the heavy weight, the smooth cool steel, the heft in your hand, the satiny functioning as you rack the action, the click/snick as it cycles...

...Did I say that out loud???...

[Mauser720]

Wonderful pictures, Star. Glad to see you still have your Borchardt. (I thought at one time you were going sell it.)

[StarOfTheWest]

I would still consider a good offer on it, but it is happy here, so it has stayed.
Thanks for the kind words on the pics, just ignore the old lady playing dress up, and enjoy the guns and ambiance.
Fritz the Dog sends his greetings as well.

[Mauser720]

A friend of mine who lives in Missouri has a model of a steam powered tractor. Since I thought it was very interesting, I asked her if we could fire it up and see what it would do. She said "Okay"; however she had never personally started the thing up. It used some kind of fuel pellets and I just assumed that we would need quite a few in order to get the steam pressure up to the actual operating level. So I put quite a few of them in the furnace, or whatever that part on a steam engine is called. It sat on her kitchen floor for quite awhile and then gradually started to sputter and hiss. I had the steering wheel set so that it would run in a big circle. And eventually it was running around in this big circle on the floor just fine. But it kept running faster and faster, and she did not know how to turn it off. Eventually we both realized that unless we did something, it was going to fly off and run into a wall or break something. Quick thinking lad that I am, I just assumed I could grab it as it ran by me, and lift it up from the floor, and just let its wheels spin until it ran out of steam. Initially, this did work; however, as it continued to run faster and faster while I was holding it, it blew one end of the boiler off and splattered black soot and crud all over my face. Fortunately I was not hurt, but I looked pretty ridiculous and it was quite a while before we could both stop laughing. I did send her steam engine back to the factory and they did repair the boiler. And I never started that thing up again. That was my first and last experience with steam power. I'm not sure if this qualifies as "steampunk" but I certainly did look like a "steam punk."

[StarOfTheWest]

Wow! What an experience!
Steam power can be quite deadly.

A lot of NYC modern skyscrapers are still heated from a central city steam boiler system that runs at 3200psi, although it gets stepped down in stages before it is used in the buildings.
Every once in a while though, a major full pressure steam line blows out under the streets there, and it is impressively catastrophic.

The old steam locomotives were horribly dangerous as well, due to potential explosions.

Sounds like you had tons of fun, but narrowly escaped some possibly very bad injuries or scalding.

Much like our manned space program, the steam pioneers were very courageous, and risked dreadful deaths to bring progress to humanity.

[Vlim]

One of the steam punks of his generation, an American inventor who had also dabbled with machine guns and who developed some sort of repeating mechanism that also found it's way into a type of pistol some people like, decided to look into the challenge of manned flight and he set out to do the ground work for a heavier than air flying machine, powered by a very efficient and light set of steam engines.

He reached his goal, his flying machine took off, but in a controlled environment powered by those 2 steam engines. All this quite a few years before the Wright brothers came up with their solution.

One of the steam engines survived and is still on display somewhere in the UK. The other steam engine is, well not entirely missing as we know where it was, but out of reach nonetheless. In 1912 it was shipped to the US, in a steam liner called the Titanic.

The inventor was Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim.

[StarOfTheWest]

Thanks Vlim, I had no idea!
Fascinating!

I kept an old framed print of Hiram Maxim on the back parlor wall for years, btw, just so I could tell visitors about the internal toggle action on his guns.

[minigun]

That's cool! I thought there was a different angle to this sort of thing, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Now I know the saying for it too.

Wonder where "steampunk" actually derived from. Nice Luger carbine too!

[StarOfTheWest]

Thanks Minigun, I love that old Carbine.

From what I can gather, the Goth movement got terribly bored with itself and wanted something more technological and interesting to do about 10-15 years ago.
They also attracted a much wider range and more well-read age groups with the changes.

It was suddenly no longer just rebellious kids, but the full age spread of folks wanting personalized expression in a society that had started to become more uniform, faceless and standardized.

The Edwardian/Victorian folks went with Steampunk, and the more modern, (1920s-1950s) group went Dieselpunk.

There is very little "punk" in either group, except for some exotic birdlike hairstyles amongst the West Coast musicians.
And that is all I could find out about the term.

But Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had been writing about this genre over a century ago, so there has always been a certain interest generated by the ideas.

Judging by the Youtube hits, (lots and lots), this is also a subculture happening in Europe and Russia, so it seems to appeal to a rather diverse group of very imaginative and creative intellectual rebels.

It is what YOU want to make of it, no particular defined rules or costuming fads, just lots of different approaches to alternative could-have-beens of science, music, costuming and art.

Almost all of it is hand and homemade, luckily it hasn't appeared in retail outlets yet, *giggle*.
The Real Thing will still show as drastically different though, even if it does start being commercialized.
Mass production can never duplicate unique personalized expression.

Here are some wonderful lyrics that kind of sum it up:

Throw Them Overboard by Abney Park

If you map out my psychology
It will look like archaeology
I've got no love for this society
I prefer total free autonomy!

Take your newfangled this and your newfangled that
And you can line them up and throw them overboard!
Your newfangled this and your newfangled that
And you can line them up and throw them overboard!

We've made an art of this horology
To the point of a new theology
I say to hell with modern technology
And we embrace analog mythology!

Take your newfangled this and your newfangled that
And you can line them up and throw them overboard!
Your newfangled this and your newfangled that
And you can line them up and throw them overboard!

This society's technology
Is an aesthetic anthropophagy
To survive this cultural urology
You have to study alcohology

Or take your newfangled this and your newfangled that
And you can line them up and throw them overboard!
Your newfangled this and your newfangled that
And you can line them up and throw them overboard!

[hardinge]

I keep looking for the absinthe fountain in those first pics.
Lovely sense of style.

[StarOfTheWest]

I don't think we can have "real" absinthe, containing artemesia, here in the States, but I heard it can be had in Eastern Europe somewhere.
Wouldn't that be fun?
Yes, I agree, the Green Goddess sure would fit right in.
Or was that the Green Fairy? I forget.

[A.Mifsin]

Thank you StarOfTheWest, We hope that some day, when you get better we will have the privelage to see the rest.
Alf.

[A.Mifsin]

"Yes, I agree, the Green Goddess sure would fit right in.
Or was that the Green Fairy? I forget."

Green Fairy.
Alf.