Alethiometer from Philip Pullman's books

[juno88]

I really loved Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. While pitched as juvenile literature, it is strongly written and a much more textured read than the (yep, I'm going to say it) Harry Potter books. The two series really have nothing to do with each other other than both series have found an audience with adults and youth.

Anyway . . . in the book there is a device called an alethiometer. I've seen a few artist interpretations of it, and my favorite has always been one a Random House illustrator came up with:



I wanted to post this project after it was done, as a show-off thread of sorts, but lately I've been unmotivated to do much work on it (until tonight). Initially I used some scavenged clock parts and worked on the paper side of it as that is my strongest skill (creating a faux ivory dial). The inner design is acid-etched magnesium that just happened to photograph gold in this shot:



Here's a close-up of the ivory symbol wheel:


I took many breaks. And when my young niece and nephew came over I cobbled together a mini version out of an Altoids tin:



But finally, tonight, now that I've had the 3-axis mill for months and have yet to pop out anything other than a McGonagall brooch and a mini-Firefly, I decided to start the CADD drawings for the body. I did a lot of CADD work in high school and college, but I've really gotten away from it.

Here's my progress:



Note that it is not anywhere near complete -- my cross section is in progress, so I didn't include it. The watch screws are a purchased item and are only in the drawing for sizing purposes.

I intend on using watch glass (it's a laboratory glass that is domed) as the glass cover. The rest will be machined out of wax and then cast in resin and then perhaps cast in bronze at my local university's foundry.

Thanks for looking. Yes, I'm double posting this here and on the RPF . . . I'm just hoping that posting this will give me the kick-in-the-pants to finish the project.

[amish]

That is fantasitc! Though I am not familiar with the works, the piece is quite nice!

I would also love to see your mini-firefly

[juno88]

Jeez

[amish]

Oh my!! I am definetly impressed.....

How long did that take to do?

It kind of reminds me of a game piece the more I look at it....

Great, great work!

[juno88]

Most of the time was machine-time. The ship itself was made by exporting a freely-available Lightwave model of the Serenity into a format readable by my MDX-15. Scale it down and "print."

In order to do it right, I should have added sprues and milled both sides, but I was really just doing it to see if it COULD be done, and how good it would look.