How-to...make steampunk engines with legs.

This is a quick ‘How-to…’ to go with my Engine designs.

I have always had an interest in Steam Engines. A lot of my childhood was spent visiting steam railways around the country and my father has spent most of his life building engines. When I was growing up in a village in Leicestershire we had a 7 ¼ gauge railway going around the garden and ‘Tinkerbell’ (named after our dog, not the fairy) was often pulling wagons backwards and forwards during the summer months.

 

Tinkerbell now resides at the Moors Valley Railway in Dorset.

http://www.moorsvalleyrailway.co.uk/locopage/4tinkerbell.html

If you take this background and my love of Sci-fi it is not surprising that I design things like this.

 

So how do I go about it? First I needed lots of reference. 

Two very handy books came from my Dad.

These are packed with detailed diagrams and plans.

I took the engines profiles in Bolton’s Siding’ and made them into silhouettes. These acted as the initial base for the designs, cut and manipulated on Photoshop. 

 

The legs segments were drawn with ink on paper, scanned and filled in black.

 

The Victorian gears I made on Photoshop.

Each Engine starts as a tiny thumb nail sketch. Then it is just a matter of putting the bits together in Photoshop.