Bring It On, Fleamarket!

A Steampunk engineer needs some tools in his or her belt. Alas most of my tools look too modern. But trust the local fleamarket to provide a nice assortment of rusty scrap metal and steampunkish bulbs.

I wonder who else buys rusty tools, and what for? Do people maybe sacrifice unwanted tools as anode in electrolysis to remove rust from more valuable other tools? A man next to me even bought a wonky hammer for 50 cents, and he didn’t look like he was making a steampunk costume. *shrug*

I was also looking for a glass tube or test tube as an ingredient for a Tesla gun. Then I saw these light bulbs and fuses… and a light bulb appeared over my head: Soon, there will be nothing for sale but energy-saving halogen lights; lightbulbs will go the way of the dodo and the phone booth… Which makes them totally retro, and therefor Steampunk… right?

One of these bulbs even has the brandname Tesla on it! :-) My Tesla-gun plan is a bit on the back-burner, though, since the next Maker Faire I want to attend requires a plane trip, and airlines don’t allow toy guns (which is a pity, but understandable).

The tube with the whitish liquid is glow-in-the-dark paint from a crafts store. Can’t have non-glowing lightbulbs in the Tesla gun, can we? :-)

Today’s last Steampunk item was not from the fleamarket, but from a stationary store: An architect’s or cartographer’s drawing compass. The plan is to display it together with a dip pen and the wrenches/spanners in my engineer’s tool belt.

Heyyy compass, U sexay! ;-)