Funny how people think that, but it’s probably quite the opposite in most cases.

I had the great fortune to work in a machine shop with one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met, Steve Grimes, before he passed away. His company, SK Grimes, is still in business modifying large format cameras.

Steve was really into cool mechanical design, and repaired camera shutters as well, not very different from mechanical clocks. He was also a collector of clocks with interesting workings and is often the case, you had to repair the clock yourself if you wanted to see it work. That stuff is just not that easy to figure out and must be much harder to design from scratch. I’ve designed circuit boards, to me they were easy in comparison, very two dimensional.

I’m hoping that steampunk, once it’s abandoned by the pseudo-hipsters who jump on any new trend, ingrains itself into the underlying current of design. Steve taught me a lot about what was actually cool in mechanical design, the cleverness that’s found in old hand crafted pieces…he taught me to see the elegance in the simplictiy. We would be walking through a swap meet and he would pick up something and say, “look at how they made this latch”. The guys who wrap their TV’s in burlap just don’t get it (really, how lame is that?).

Thank you for the kind words. I just checked out your website, and your steampunk lantern is fantastic, as well as the rest of your work. It’s great to see the ways steampunk is influencing different areas of art!

You asked if Steampunk has peaked. I agree with you that the true Steampunk genre, because of it’s historic basis, has not. It is a bona design movement and will be adopted and altered- as all great artistic genres are. Thank you so much for the post.