One of my ongoing goals is to emphasize reuse in solarpunk media – both through my own projects and whenever I get the chance while helping others through suggestions or editing.

There’s a wealth of stuff all around us which could be repurposed in creative ways, and solarpunk art and fiction has a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that ingenuity and thrift.

A lot of that stuff is in cars. So here’s some notes I’ve pulled together from various online discussions and from many people’s recommendations in solarpunk spaces. It’s not exhaustive, its probably not all good advice, but it should be good enough for a writer to casually drop into a description of a room or workshop, or for an artist to include in the background of a scene. Something that shows that this isn’t a scratch-built future, that they’re repurposing existing stuff wherever they can.

Think of all the weird ways postapoclyptic movies dress the sets with misused items from the present – here’s a somewhat practical guide to solarpunk set dressing with the guts of cars:

The big stuff:

• Depending on the vehicle, its frame (if it has one), axles, and wheels can be used to make a trailer, cart, or similar. (I’ve definitely seen trailers that were just the back half of a pickup truck with a tongue and hitch welded on.) Bonus: the bearings in car wheels tend to be better than those used in regular trailers.
• The transmission from a vehicle could be rigged up to a wind/water mill to adjust rotational velocity of a sawmill or other industrial application. Some power tools, like lathes, use vehicle transmissions: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/truck-transmission-for-lathe.240574/
• Steel leaf springs can be removed from their bundles (they’re long, flat pieces of steel stacked and bound together with strips of steel) and are favorites of blacksmiths for making swords and knives because of the type of steel used.
• Earthships can be made with stacked tires packed with rammed earth: https://earthship.com/systems/garbage-management/

The Electronics:

• Alternators can be used to generate a wide range of amperage and voltage, suitable for different needs, including (in a few specific cases) welding: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/diy-low-cost-generator-from-vehicle-alternator-alternating-generator.1843/
  • The terminology here is a little confusing – early cars had DC generators (sometimes called dynamos), then they switched to AC alternators. But modern ’emergency generators’ still use alternators hooked up to an engine. So if you’re looking for something to convert motion to electricity, perhaps to attach to a water wheel, a vehicle alternator (and some belts to adjust the speeds) could do the job.
  • Some caveats: suitable vehicle generators and motors will likely work better, and to get an alternator to work you may need to either include a power source of 12v to excite the alternator, or to to replace certain internals to include permanent magnets. You'll need to mess with the gear/pulley ratio to get the right (high) speed too.
• The electronics in most cars are usually all designed to run off 12 volts, which can be very convenient for a household with solar panels depending on their setup. If a household has a low-voltage DC battery bank (some do, some don’t) then dropping the battery voltage a few times to power car parts comes with a smaller efficiency loss.
• These 12 volt electronics include things like the cab lights, headlights, radio/entertainment system, backup/surround cameras (perhaps for a security system?), all of which could be placed in a home on a circuit providing the same power they’d get in a car.
• LED headlights make for decent grow lights. Different models hit different parts of the spectrum, but generally they’re sturdy, run cool, and don’t take much power. They might not be as fine-tuned for plants as a dedicated product but they’re common and probably not being used for much in a solarpunk society.
  • Alternative use: outdoor lights, indoor spotlights, light on a wagon, rickshaw etc.
• A car air conditioner could cool some small storage room decently. With big living rooms, it would have difficulty https://permies.com/t/177638/Convert-car-air-conditioner-home
• Cars have lots of small electric motors with various advantages and disadvantages: you can pull motors from the blower, power windows, and windshield wiper motors have a fair bit of torque and can be decent actuators for some projects (I’ve seen them included in robotics projects).
  • The blower and motor could be used for ventilation elsewhere.
• Starter motors are tricky – they’re designed to provide a lot of sudden torque to briefly turn the engine, and not to run for a long time. So they don’t fit a lot of our usual use-cases for electric motors. I’ve seen forum posts that describe using them for hoists (like to lift heavy things) but that’s about it so far.
• There’s plenty of wiring in a car which can all be reused as long as the gauge is correct for the new use.
• Automotive Relays are used to enable a low amperage circuit to switch a higher amperage circuit on or off, making the control systems safer. One example given was switching on heaters in a thermal storage water tank. There’s a fair number of forum threads where people link arduinos to automotive relays to control things the arduino couldn’t handle on its own.
• Car batteries have long seen alternative uses – they might be the one car part used most outside of cars. As vehicles go hybrid and electric, their bigger, more powerful batteries become more common. Even when they weaken overtime, the lower power density doesn’t matter much for fixed installations where weight isn’t a factor, so old electric car batteries show up in homes and local grid storage systems: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/11/old-ev-batteries-solar-power-grid-backup-b2u/

Moving fluids:

• Various pumps and tubing can be used for moving fluids (though the original purpose/contents will restrict what you can use them for).
• The tubing, tanks, pumps, and other parts used for windshield washer fluid are probably the safest car-fluid-handling components to reuse for non-car things (with a lot of rinsing and cleaning): https://www.mountainbuzz.com/threads/reusing-wiper-fluid-jugs-for-drinking-water.97053/
  • Possible uses could include aquariums and hydroponic setups (This may stand out to fish keepers though, who are very cautious around how they handle the water for their aquatic friends and who would be leery of traces of methyl alcohol wiper fluid contaminating it. https://www.nano-reef.com/forums/topic/376583-windshield-wiper-water-pump-as-ato-pump/)
• Car radiators work well for heat exchange, their intended purpose whether they’re in a car or not. This can be part of systems for heating or cooling.
• Copper brake line can also be used in heat exchanges.
• Fuel and brake lines should definitely not be used for things like potable water. But you wouldn’t be using potable water for heat exchange anyways, so contamination from the radiators, tubing, or brake line won’t make much difference there.

Odds and Ends:

• Inside the rubber squeegee part of windshield wipers is a long thin strip of good quality spring steel. Lockpicking folks like it for making tools.
• Catalytic converters might be useful for other kinds of filtering? Maybe not in wood stoves though: https://permies.com/t/96864/Misusing-car-parts-cleaner-cooking
• Certain vehicle exhaust parts can be used to make rocket stoves: https://permies.com/t/15611/Auto-exhaust-muffler-pipe-parts
  • https://permies.com/t/129517/Homemade-Wood-Stove-Propane-Tank

Cosmetic stuff:

• Seats: couches, chairs, porch swing, etc, fabric, foam stuffing for stuffed animals.
• Windows are tricky because the shapes are weird, which can make framing them difficult, but they could be set into clay or concrete or similar building materials.
• Hoods, roofs, and body panels offer some large sheets of metal which could be used for sheds.

Last but not least, there’s always conversion to run on woodgas (something I’ve depicted in a photobash) for some limited uses, or conversion to electric. And if all else fails, you can always melt them down for your society’s steel manufacturing needs – electric arc furnace smelters running off a green grid, recycling, are about as close to zero emission steel as you’re likely to get, and the metal is already refined so I think you could get pretty tight control over the quality on the output.

But I hope you’ll consider some of the above possibilities too. The parts are out there, we might as well use them.

Thanks for reading! Like I said, this is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you know of something I’ve missed, or see something I got wrong, I’m happy to edit it!

Also available here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/using-every-part-of-the-car-a-resource-for-solarpunk-writers-and-artists/

Hi, I've had some good discussions here in the past, so I thought I'd reach out with an idea for a resource I'd like to try to put together for solarpunk writers and artists.

I was talking with A.E. Marling about a story he's working on, and one of the things he was looking for was uses for old cars.

I think the obvious answer you'll get from solarpunks (aside for limited use where it makes sense) is to melt them down for your society's steel manufacturing needs - electric arc furnace smelters running off a green grid, recycling, are about as close to zero emission steel as you're likely to get, and the metal is already refined so I think you could get pretty tight control over the quality on the output.

But I think reuse offers some much more interesting opportunities. I'm only just starting to learn about fixing cars, but I've already been struck by the fact that at least some parts in cars can go into other things. For example, it looks like certain old alternators can be used to generate a wide range of amperage and voltage, suitable for different needs, including welding: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/diy-low-cost-generator-from-vehicle-alternator-alternating-generator.1843/ so perhaps one could be hooked by belts (adjusting speed) to a waterwheel or something?

I feel like a solarpunk society with a really strong library economy might start cataloguing parts of more complicated machines (even salvaged from machines like cars).

And looking for parts commonalities and alternative uses strikes me as a really cool step towards building an open-source manufacturing sphere. Perhaps starting with a database of hardware/parts so they could be identified and repurposed, and alternatives identified.

So the actual proposal:

I'd like to try and put together a list of common car parts which can be reasonably used in other (more solarpunk) contexts. This doesn't have to be specific down to the model number or include a how-to guide, (though I recognize that some reuses might only be possible with a specific model) just something solarpunk writers could casually drop into a description of a room or workshop, or an artist could put in the background of a scene. Something that shows that this isn't a scratch-built future, but that they're repurposing stuff where they can. Think of all the weird ways postapoclyptic movies dress the sets with misused items from the present - we could offer something like that to solarpunk, but grounded in at least some practicality. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!

edit: I've built out a list and it's located over here: https://slrpnk.net/post/13032570

I've been thinking about trying to depict some of the ideas from this conversation: https://slrpnk.net/post/12735795, using a sort of flat, diagram-like style similar to this old photobash:

Though a bit more complex. The obvious answer is 'don't build cities in swamps' but we already have a bunch of them, and though I don't live there I recognize that they have a lot of unique cultural and historical value and are peoples' homes, so I'm interested in what a solarpunk-adapted version of these would look like.

At the same time, I know basically nothing about New Orleans or similar areas, have no background in civil engineering, and no qualifications to make this except for the capability to do so using an old version of GIMP. So I'd absolutely love to identify issues, places to make improvements, and things that are missing now rather than once I've spent days chopping up images and finessing them into something coherent.

So what'd I get wrong? What's unworkable, out of scale, or dangerous? What style of buildings or cultural touchstones would you like to see? What kind of plants are missing?

I recently started making solarpunk postcards again, and I had a lot of fun with a quick scene of a solarpunk cargo ship (a steel-hulled, four-masted barque) in a storm. I'd like to do more but don't yet have any strong points to make or designs I'm excited to feature.

So what would you like to see? What scene is missing from solarpunk art of humans interacting with oceans, rivers, lakes, canals? What weird idea, or old, practical design should make a comeback?

I can't promise that I'll make everything but I really do try to include as many suggestions as possible.

So far suggestions from reddit and discord have included:

• Showing more of the mooring ropes and foundations festooned with underwater life (perhaps in another storm or low tide?)
• Boats or ships with soft wing sails which are apparently good (in theory) when it comes to performance as they maintain their shape regardless of wind conditions.
• edit to add: a clipper ship

I'll state up front that I'm not a nautical kinda guy. I like to pick up terminology and learn but I've never sailed anything larger than a sunfish and I see the ocean maybe once every five years. So feel free to spell out practical considerations and realism stuff because I probably won't think of it.

And thanks!

I’ve been wanting to do scenes of solarpunk ships and shipping for awhile now. I love reexamining old technologies and seeing if they could work again, mixed with modern advancements, especially in a society with different values, or one that uses more metrics than just money to make their decisions.

I’ve read about the various attempts to make container ships more green with massive sails and kites and alternative fuels, but I never really loved any of them enough to make art of them. At best, they seemed to promise that they might use somewhat less fuel in the future, but they seem committed to the basic container ship format because its so efficient (in cost) and because everything is optimized around it.

I was talking with some of the folks from Fully Automated! about future weather changes, megastorms and tsunamis (and the potential for tsunamis to set off undersea avalanches that cause more tsunamis) and the damage those could all do to ports. How all that carefully-optimized equipment, even the depth of the ports themselves, could be damaged suddenly.

I started to think about solarpunk ocean scenes again, and about smaller vessels (which could perhaps use the shallower ports) could operate largely by wind, more or less traditionally.

Can the concept of container ships fit solarpunk? I genuinely like the optimization and logistical advantage of using standardized, stackable shipping containers which fit on ships, trucks, and trains without the need to load and unload the cargoes by hand at each transition in their journey. That’s great stuff, no complaints. What I wonder about is if that cost efficiency has caused other problems. We ship cargo all over the world but much of the time, we do it because it’s so cheap to do so. We ship raw material from one continent to process it on another, we ship that material again so we can shape it into parts, which are shipped back to the second continent for partial assembly, and then for final assembly on a fourth. Is that efficient? It’s cost efficient. But we burn terrible amounts of fuel each time we do it, and we do it for so many things.

So I’m skeptical.

Alright, my complaints out of the way, what’s actually in this scene? We’ve got an offshore windmill and a steel-hulled, four-masted barque with what’s hopefully an open-source variant of DynaRig sails.

So what does that mean? I’m very much not nautical – as with most of my postcards I’m doing my best to combine a bunch of concepts I’m only newly familiar with, so I’ve tried to make sure they’re at least based on reasonable starting points:

Cromlyngames in the FA! team mentioned DynaRig sails, these kind of funny-looking sails that taper towards the base, with thick masts and curved yards. They’ve seen some limited use on expensive yachts, there’s some proposals/plans to use them on container ships, and do seem to work well from what I’ve read. Their main advantage is in labor-savings and safety – the sails apparently slide out from inside the masts following tracks in the yards, so nobody has to climb the rigging to raise or lower them. And the entire mast rotates to best catch the wind. This allows for a smaller crew, and less of the traditional risks.

Crom suggested that they could work with any square-rigged ship, and a quick perusal of some nautical and sailing forums agreed with that (and taught me what those were). I started reading about traditional maritime shipping, and eventually found a forum discussion about the potential return of sail to modern day shipping. A poster on there mentioned the Passat, a German Flying P-Liner, and I was delighted to learn that a whole set of steel-hulled sail ships were hauling cargo well into the 1950s. Heck, one of them was captured by New Zealand during WW2 and put right into service hauling construction supplies.

So I borrowed the hull. IRL, I’m sure there’s a ton of quality-of-life improvements ship designers and sailors could suggest for a modern barque, and I’m sure I’ve included some stuff that doesn’t belong, but I’m just happy to have found a sail ship that was still effective in fairly modern days. In fact, it looks like staffing (both the difficulty finding qualified crew, and changing laws requiring more crew than traditional) was a big factor in the end of their service, and that’s something I suspect the modernized sails could help with.

I’d like to do more nautical scenes, so if you have improvements or alternative designs, let me know! I think I might do one with an offshore windmill substation, a clipper ship, or anything else you think would be worth showing. I know there’s been a ton of tech and safety features invented and added to ships since the P-Liners were modernized, and I think those things could help shorten their journeys and improve their safety at sea.

Art stuff: usually, unless I already have a strong plan for the visuals, part of my research is looking up various real life postcards and other art of similar content for inspiration. People have made postcards of almost everything.

There’s no shortage of paintings of ships at sea – I started this as a peaceful, sunny scene, but eventually gave in and went for a dramatic storm instead. Maybe showing the ship in a storm weakens the point a little, but ships run into bad storms even now, with all our modern day early warning systems – you can see plenty of videos online of even massive container ships losing cargo from being heaved around by the weather.

And one of my goals is to show weather, seasons, and locations that Solarpunk art doesn’t often feature. Bad weather is a fact of life, and it’s likely to get even more wild as our climate changes. I’ve done a couple scenes of blizzards, but none of terrible rains yet.

Given the premise that this is a postcard from a solarpunk future, it might be a historical scene of a famous ship that survived a hurricane, perhaps in the moments when the storm blew it dangerously close to an offshore wind farm.

This image (and all the other Postcards from a Solarpunk Future) is CC-BY, use it how you like.

This was another of those still images, where I wanted to capture a specific kind of place, the old farmhouses you find all throughout my hometowns, and a specific time of day in November when the sun has set and everything is this almost monochrome purple but the grass and crops look almost tan. In a few months, on cold grey days like this, when there’s a layer of snow on the ground, it almost mirrors the sky with just dark trees between them. But for now it’s this very specific color.

I used to go for walks or snowshoe trips most afternoons, and would often find myself hurrying to get back as night settled in. On those early evenings, I loved the yellow lights in the distance, the warmth and human routine they contained.

I wanted the farm in the comic to be a little more active than some of the ones back home. I did a fair bit of reading about agriculture UAVs and autonomous tractors, and I very much liked the used-future feel of the brand new stuff from those articles being kind of old and hacked-together at this point. Something these folks bought second- or third-hand, probably after it was already hacked by a previous owner to remove the manufacturer’s ability to remotely disable it. I like the idea that they have a sort of workshop/hangar for launching drones and inspecting their crops set up in the loft of the barn.

The standing figure is based a bit on my grandfather.

If want to read the rest of this silly rural cyberpunk webcomic about a stolen secret service prototype and the endangered deer it thinks is the president, you can find it here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/president-deer-adventures/

If you’d like to read the related-but-mutually-non-canonical short story version, you can find it here: https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/harbour it’s in the first edition, on page 3!

It’s been a little while since I posted one of these. I’ve been working on writing a campaign(?) adventure module(?) For the solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated (which I’m hoping to release libre and gratis through their channels in a few months) and that’s taken up a lot of my creative time lately. It’s the first piece of solarpunk fiction I’ve written, and it includes almost every setting concept I’ve been playing with in the postcards.

(In case you’re wondering, it’s a sort of treasure hunting adventure, where the players are on a quest to find several tons of illegally-dumped industrial waste, which is useful in the production of geopolymers. Through their investigation they’ll explore a mostly-abandoned town which is in the process of being deconstructed and rewilded, talk to locals and work crews, and hopefully unravel a cold-case murder mystery lost to the region’s chaotic past during the setting’s Global Climate War 60 years before.)

Either way, I’ve gotten far enough along that I think I can start photobashing together some art for some of the locations the players might decide to visit (starting with this bike kitchen in the village where the game begins).

In my postcard about deconstructing McMansions to reclaim the building materials and rewild the land, a few people brought up simply repurposing the buildings. I’d been batting around the concept in my head for awhile before then, but had struggled to figure out how to render a scene that showed everything I wanted it to.

I ended up using pretty much every idea I had for those scenes in the campaign’s starting village (a planned community which has repurposed an abandoned wealth enclave and its golf course as communal housing, workshops, and a food forest. That means I can put together photobashes of specific spots within that village, which I think is more achievable.

So here’s the first of the set. It shows a little bit of a repurposed discount mansion, but focuses mostly on the old back yard. The concrete patio has been removed, the large lawns and nearby golf course have grown into proper forests, and public paths have been brought right up to the house. The pool house has been turned into a bike co-op, and the swimming pool has been converted into a sunken greenhouse or Walipini.

Generally when you end up with an old swimming pool you don’t want, your options are to tear it out and fill in the hole, just fill in the pool, convert it into a natural pond, or (perhaps the least common answer) build one of these. Which one you pick will likely depend on your goals, the quality of the structure, and how far down your water table is. If it’s too high, it can lift an empty pool like a concrete boat, or cause other structural damage. But if circumstances are right, and the pool is intact after being abandoned and empty for a good many years already, it might be worth repurposing.

There are some beautiful and solarpunk photos online of real life versions of these, which have a far grander scale than what I’ve depicted here. This is more like the old pineapple pits, or a fancy version of the citrus trenches. Who knows, maybe they even cut away part of the floor so they could plant into the ground below.

The above-ground portion of the greenhouse is backed with an earthen berm/raised bed meant to help it maintain a consistent temperature. The retaining walls of the tiered bed are made from repruposed, broken-up concrete (sometimes called urbanite), likely sourced from the concert patio which was replaced with wood chips for better water permeability. Some full-shade plants like rhubarb and mint have been planted on the back slope, and a grape arbor has been built over it. Sweet peas are growing along the side where there’s more light. Raspberries and wildflowers grow around the rest of the smaller yard space.

In the background of the scene, an old pool house has been converted into a bike kitchen, one locations where the players will be able to obtain transportation.

A network of paths have been built all throughout the village, the food forest, and the region beyond. Even the town the players will explore is riddled with small trails and paths which the locals have built in lieu of trying to maintain a full network of paved roads. This was inspired by my hometowns' network of backwoods trails, and the downsizing to achieve a maintainable transportation network described in this article. Some roads obviously still exist because they're useful, but others have been washed out and never repaired because none of the current residents need them for anything, while new trails cut straight through properties nobody has lived in for decades.

The buildings are painted with colorful murals. This is always a challenge for me in these photobashes. I love the idea of a society that makes art everywhere for its own sake and I'd hope a solarpunk society would abandon some of the obsession with property values and would decorate everything from buildings to machines, in all kinds of styles. That might mean folk art with historical roots, like the zapista murals, it might mean carved panels on cabinets, or etchings on tools, metal sculpture, or who knows what. Embellishment not for commercial value but as self expression and messaging. So the topics and content would vary a lot.

I think there's a bit of punk in that, in refusing to paint or decorate with an eye on the resale value, like your house is a product for others rather than your own home.

So I try to include murals, carvings, and other decorations in my solarpunk art. Unfortunately I've also found that in my postcards, where the buildings are usually part of a cluttered background, murals can kind of act like dazzle camouflage, making it hard to tell what exactly is happening. So I'm still figuring out what works and what doesn't. (Ideally, I want the contents of the mural to be clear while also allowing for the building and the assorted stuff attached to it (plants, solar panels, other tech) to be easily recognized and understood. It's challenging and something I might revisit someday. I did try a version where the bike kitchen's mural was made out of silhouetted bike parts, but it looked less obviously like a paint job on a building, so I went with the mandala for clarity for now.

Edit to add: this photobash (and all the Postcards from a Solarpunk Future) is CC-BY, use it how you like.

I really enjoy the arcade blogger for the arcade cabinet raid writeups he does, and his step-by-step repair posts. The history aspect is neat too.

This is a repair post with a bit of history.

Decades ago, to combat ROM-cloning piracy, Capcom started adding a chip to their PCBs that stored encryption keys in memory backed up by an onboard battery. You may see the problem here - batteries are not meant to last forever, and if the chip lost power AT ANY TIME the keys were lost and the game was unplayable.

This feels like yet another example of the total disregard corporations hold for the media they own the rights to, in favor of short term profits. We've seen before that many works produced by entire teams would have been lost if not for the efforts of pirates and amateur archivists.

To quote the blog:

Its hard to say if Capcom knew this would happen, but then again, the shelf life of most arcade games was months, or at most a couple of years – I guess it wasn’t something they planned for.

Fortunately, this is a well established problem with a motivated, technically-minded community looking for a solution, so this early DRM has already been circumvented. The article doesn't go into detail on how they researched and reverse engineered this sabotage, but I might do a little reading and edit the post if I find anything cool.

Edit: this seems to have more details and is an interesting read so far: https://arcadehacker.blogspot.com/2014/11/capcom-kabuki-cpu-intro.html?m=1

The gist is that the problem is well solved at this point and there's a small industry of aftermarket components out there that are nearly plug and play. The version the author went with works like this:

You desolder the dead battery and replace it. Then desolder the blank sabotage chip. You swap in the aftermarket one and configure it (by using tiny switches) to inject the correct set of encryption keys. Then you slot the blank sabotage chip into the aftermarket one.

When the game is powered up, the aftermarket chip restores the encryption keys, the PCB looks for the keys, then successfully used them to run the game files.

The cool thing is that the sabotage chip is now functional again on its own.

The author spent some time restoring the board to stock, by keeping the sabotage chip powered with another battery while removing the aftermarket chip so it could be used elsewhere. I should appreciate the effort at not wasting any resources but I think it makes sense to keep the de-sabotauge chip as a permanent addition, as it automatically prevents the kind of data loss the company intended.

Either way, it's a neat article and I'd recommended reading it. He does a lot of arcade cabinet restorations, but generally sends the electronics away for repair, so this was a neat one.

I know tech has come a long way since these were made but there's something to be said for these big, chunky, through-soldered components and the well-documented wiring instructions that often came with them.

I stumbled onto this article while working on a photobash of a solarpunk scene. I think it does a good job of explaining the concept but there seems to be something wrong with its certificates, which might throw an error in your web browser. https://nwedible.com/urbanite-broken-concrete-retaining-wall-as-a-garden-feature/

Just in case you don't want to check the link I'm also going to plagiarize a few quotes and images from the article:

"The marketing term for “old chunks of broken up concrete” is urbanite. Urbanite has a lot going for it: it’s durable and heavy like natural stone, reusing this product in garden and landscape design takes it out of the waste stream, it’s often a uniform thickness which makes it easy to stack or lay as a permeable patio surface, it’s often available in most urban locations, and it’s frequently free for the hauling. Free is good.

Drawbacks to urbanite can include potential contamination – this is more of an concern if your urbanite comes from a torn out commercial parking lot where all manner of auto fluids may have seeped into it than from the neighbor’s pool deck tear-out. Concrete itself can contain additives that might pose a health or contamination risk, although my feeling is that old, weathered concrete has probably already leached the worst of itself out somewhere else.

I probably wouldn’t use urbanite to build edible garden beds, but I can see great potential for turning this waste product in retaining walls, steps, and patio areas."

And a few examples of recycled concrete patios:

This last one came from https://www.terranovalandscaping.com/90/, which has a few other examples, including raised beds, so perhaps they knew their source of concrete was clean, or weren't worried about the potential for contanimation?

I've actually done a couple posts about softcover books on my movim blog, this one and one previous one. The Fully Automated softcovers are a little fancier, but this one I think is a good example of the benefits of being able to just make a book when you want a physical copy.

I have a few advantages in this project: my SO had already bought a bookbinding kit and book which I was able to use, and I have access to a free color printer, and, through my local makerspace, a plotter printer which can print on canvas. Everything else, the graphic design, the interposing, etc, was done using free tools like GIMP, an online pdf cropping website, and https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/.

It looks like one of the advantages of this hobby is suddenly being able to get physical copies of books that aren't available as anything other than PDF ebooks. I've got a handfull of favorite books from various authors which were extremely self-published, sometimes as serial fiction later edited into a PDF. One or two eventually got a limited print run, or the author made it available on a Print-On-Demand site, but at this point, I think I've found and bought all of those. That leaves a few that I'm very happy to finally be able to hold in my hands while I read them.

Vatsy and Bruno was one of those. Written in 2010 by Adam "Rutskarn" DeCamp, and published on the old version of https://www.chocolatehammer.org/ , Vatsy and Bruno is a high-strung, noire, dark-comedy-adventure story set in a radio-era city under the thumb of vague oppression. It's a fun story, and one that feels like it should be typewritten on paper (preferably cheap, grubby, fish-stained paper with some suspiciously blood-like smears).

Making this one actually took a bit more prep work on the files.

I started with the PDF DeCamp released on his website over a decade ago. This, unfortunately, wasn't really sized or laid out for bookbinding (re. the wide margins, the page size, and all the page numbers being on the right side of the page). I could get really fancy with editing this, but it's just for me, so "good enough done quick" was the order of the day.

I wanted to print this with no extra trimming, so I planned to use 8.5x11 paper folded in half. Unfortunately, the PDF was, itself, scaled for 8.5x11" paper, and when you fold that in half, the aspect ratio changes. So when I fed the PDF into (the tool I use for interposing the pages](https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js) it stretched it vertically quite a bit. It was also showing some fairly large margins, which was unfortunate as those came from the original file. So keeping things "good enough" I threw it into an online PDF cropping tool, cropped it closer to what I'd need, and let it stretch the file a little.

I spent a good bit more time on the cover.

The original covers were also the wrong aspect ratio, but they had almost everything I needed.

I used them and a cover from one of the three sections the story was originally released in, to bash this together:

The cover, spine, text, and back cover were all made from DeCamp's own art, just re-arranged to fit this aspect ratio. From there, I followed the same process as before, but with much faster prints (no giant backgrounds) and no trimming the pages (no giant backgrounds) so that part was easy.

Fold, punch, sew, glue:

I took each signature (stack of four pages meant to fold together) and folded each page in half with the bone folder, being careful to make sure I knew which side was 'in'. Then I nested them together.

I made a guide to lay out the six holes in each signature, and used it to punch holes through the fold with the awl. Then I sewed them together following the Penrose Press Pretty Perfect Paperback Guide:

Once the book block was all tied together nice and neat, I clamped it and glued it with three coats of acid-free PVA glue.

My book clamping station certainly looks ragged enough to do the title characters proud.

While it was drying, I swung by the makerspace and printed the cover. I need to remember to oversize these by a few millimeters, because the first one is always a little small. Ah well, maybe I'll find someone with a bookbinder's guillotine someday.

I folded the cover and glued in the book block just like with the previous project.

I find it easiest to attach the cover in three steps, back, spine, front, but I'm sure real bookbinders have better systems. I start with a flat smear of glue down the inside of the back cover, right beside the bound edge and to set the book block down on it. Then I glue the spine with the book upright (this time I tried on top of the bone folder, which has a similar shape). Then I glue the front cover. I squirted some acid-free fabric glue down the spine and used a paperclip to work it further down, to where it hadn't stuck, and then held it in place by hand for a bit to get a closer fit. I like this stuff, it bonds well and it seems to set much faster than the PVA. This time I also used it to glue the bound edge of the front of the book block to the inside of the cover too, so we'll see how that works out.

The results:

Cover size aside, I'm pretty pleased with it. If ever there was a book to glue into its cover the wrong way around, this would be it, but I got that right this time. I'm glad to be able to read it properly, and to finally be able to put it on my shelf.

#DIY #bookbinding

The image shows a capped pipe with some assorted valves sticking out over water. Someone has drawn a >:3 face onto a small round part sticking up from the top.

Awhile back I posted that one of my cyberpunk short stories got picked up by an anarchist fiction zine. I was excited because I had this related-but-sort-of-mutually-non-canonical photobash comic ready to go, about a stolen secret service protoptype and the endangered deer it thinks is the president. I don’t want to spam this community with my weekly updates, so I figured I’d just share the still panels, spaced out whenever I get to them in the posting schedule. They’re just quiet bits of art between the jokes.

There are a bunch of spots like this around my home towns. Not necessarily a business, not a house, just some kind of sandpit with an old workshop or metal building and some old vehicles in it. Probably if I really dug in to county records I’d find a registered business, likely defunct, in a local family name. Perhaps several. But usually they’re pretty quiet spots, at least until someone new buys them. I’d wanted to do the cyberpunk version of one of those.

(I’d like to extend a huge thanks to the ham radio community over on reddit, who were great sports about looking over an early draft of the building and the antennas, and who helped me with scale and even which antennas to include. The only one that came up as a possible issue was the discone on the back, and there was some debate on whether to scale it down to make it more ‘as expected’ or to leave it as an unusually large one, until someone settled it by mentioning that their mentor had had one about this size, which came from the Swedish military. I’m making a rural cyberpunk webcomic, so I will 100% include European military surplus equipment in the backgrounds if I get that opportunity.)