The design, etching and manufacturing of Steampunk Family’s Victorian style decoder disk PART 1

Or Steampunk Etching design using Photoshop using layers . . . . . There has been much interest in the Steampunk Family’s decoder disk. Like most of the costume items I make, I aim for function and the use of Victorian feeling materials when possible. However, the process was about as modern as a home shop tinker can manage and while it was an involved process, the skill level needed is not high. Really just a steady hand mixed with patience is fifty percent of the battle for the more skilled bits. I originally drew out the idea in sketch book, where I did the math for how many places for alphabet characters, numbers and symbols I would need. It was quickly apparent that 27 or 28 for the alphabet places on the out ring was too many for easy of construction and use, so some vowels were moved into the inner ring. I came around to a multi-layer inner ring design concept with a wire ring space and a hollow back. In the construction phase I simplified it, but more on that later. I used basic math and map symbols to fill the blank spaces.