Raygun Build

Part I

Scrap Punk: I make personal disasters.

The Ridiculous Diversion part of Wargaming involves the influence of other people on me. Victorian Sci-Fi and Steampunk are both truly outside my orbit. That is until something comes along that piques my interest. I have a certain magnetic attraction and wonder at the reuse of parts from one thing to make another thing, a transformation of sorts, as in reuse from refuse.

      “What can it become?” is my favorite question.

Moding or modifying is another term that I use interchangeably with scratch building or kit bashing both older phrases.  The fourth term in constant use with DiY’ers is altered as in ‘altered books’, ‘altered boxes’, and ‘altered toys’. Altering, bashing, scratch building, homebrew, moding and punking (even pimping) convey the idea of making something from various left-over bits and parts. It is not called kit-bashing for nothing, hence, the need to keep a lot of parts on hand.

There is a sculptural aspect to making decisive additions to the template material (as in the picture above) and putting the pieces together in 3-D. It is a collage of bits in the round.

A few of my associates needed a new term for making things from scrap and so I invented Spiking. Graphic artists to artful MiG and TiG welders took the term and ran with it. My phrase for this upcoming challenge shall be:  Scrap Punk.

All the world’s a dust bin,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their bits and their parts,
And one man in his time plays with many toys. . .

My next in-between projects diversion will be a Victorian Sci-Fi / Steampunk Raygun Construction Challenge. I have just the place to begin, in my toy shop where I deconstruct to re-construct, all very post-modernist (Po-Mo). I began bashing kits before Po-Mo was cult.

I say, the games afoot…

I make custom disasters.

Scrap Punk is my own term, and a Steampunk Raygun is closer to reality. Please accept the oxymoron.