William Henry Steampunk Viperfish – Side B, Part 1

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Well, I’m baaaack! With the unmasking of Side B of the Steampunk Viperfish. At the top is THE PLAN, the center has the design transferred to the steel knife scale, and the bottom has had all of the major lines engraved. Tomorrow, I’ll start the copper and 24 karat gold inlays. See you then!

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Here’s the anatomy of a large copper inlay. 1st image: three copper wires “tacked” into place. You can see tiny “hooks” engraved into the bottom of the inlay pocket. 2nd image: all wires tacked onto place. 3rd image: copper wires have been punched into the hooks in the pocket bottom, and flowed into the undercut edges. 4th image: the copper has been stoned flat, and tiny lines engraved around the steel edges.

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Almost all of the copper inlays in place. Next, the gold inlays…

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I got some of the gold inlaid today before I burned out…

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Finished the gold on the steampunk anglerfish. Bear with me a little longer, just a couple more inlays on the squid-thing and then fun stuff will begin happening…

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Inlaying gold wire into a complex gear. I add in short gold wire segments, which will become a solid mass when hammered into place.

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The same gear hammered and stoned smooth and flat.

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All of the squid-thing inlays are finished. Next I’ll begin excavating the background and sculpting the elements.

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Background removal around the anglerfish. Still need to stipple the background…long way to go yet…

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A big push today towards background removal – sorry there’s not more to see.

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Yippee – almost all of the background removal is finally done. Next is background stippling to increase the contrast, then on to the fun part, sculpting!

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Spent most of the day making small circle punches to make the pins in the squid-thing’s bicycle chain tentacles. Here I’m turning a taper on the business end of one of the punches on a tiny Sherline lathe.

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You can see the four different sized punches I made in the center of the image

, and the test marks at the blue arrow. I also placed all of the circular pivot pin marks on the bicycle chain tentacles.

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I spent today sculpting the tentacle attachments to the squid-thing. These were way more complex to sculpt than I had anticipated…

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A lot done today on the tentacles. The half on the right are finished, punch work left to do on the left…

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The bad tempered anglerfish is fully sculpted, and except for rivets and a few panels, is finished

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