Orrery For Me!

Side note: I have since decided to junk this particular piece and start over.

I just finished building my first Orrery. There is no rhyme or reason to it. I figure that wherever Steampunk man is going to live it's a different time and maybe even in an alternate universe, so I can make the planets go around in square orbits if I want to do so.

I started with good old MSN "Images". I love that particular search engine because all of the images come up on the same page and you don't have to keep turning the page, so to speak.

Did I mention that last evening I sorted some of my findings into a Plano plastic box? It is so nice to see where half are my findings are. The other half still need to be sorted. We aren't going to talk about that part. I am going to try to do that this afternoon.

Anyway, I thought you would like to see what I have done so far on the first Orrery. I messed around with a number of different spindles for the center column. I kept breaking them. I finally decided upon this one. I think it was an old bedpost or something of the sort.

For the base I used one of the thicker watch cog wheels. On top of that I used one of the teak wood beads. Next part of a watch body was glued on. I let those dry.

Then I started building the column. I stained the post. I took antique brass head pins and eye pins and wrapped them around the post at several different sections. This was the hardest part. I wanted the arms to stick out fairly horizontal. After bending them around, I turned up the ends and bent back the eyes of the pins to hold the planets.

I glued various cog wheels and other parts to the base and decided that there should be a vertical pin from the lower wheel to the upper one. After I got all of the parts together and was satisfied with the way that it looked, I glued beads from an old earring on the ends of all of the arms.

After I sat back and looked at it for a few minutes, I felt like there was something wrong. I went back and looked at the photos. It dawned on me that the ones on the net all revolved around a central planet or sun. My brain function is not what it should be today.

I think you can put whatever heavenly object you want at the center of your own universe. I noticed that some of the ones that I was looking at had the earth as the centerpiece. Others had a sun. Still others had unidentifiable globes. I opted for unidentifiable. Mine is an old round earring that is coated on the inside of the glass with what looks like the old fashioned mercury glass....I am not opening it to find out.

I still need to do a bit of tweaking here and there, but for all intents and purposes it is finished. I may try a second one to try to make it better.

Please excuse me now whilst I go tweak.

See you tomorrow.