Of course I also crafted some presents for last years christmas (2008) to give them to close relatives. The picture in the picture to the left is a kind of portrait. But I did not have to make a single brush stroke for it - at least none with color. I created this artwork twice. One of both exemplares went to the mum of my mum, the other one to the parents of my father.

I built the frame using wood, but compared to a common picture frame the border is rather deep than broad. The planks of the border are rather oriented from the background away to the front and not in a way it would result in a broad border. I mounted a real grapevine into the frame. I got the grapevine from a winegrower in Mödling named "Pferschy Seper" and would like to say thanks at this place. They allowed me to get a few of those grapevines for my artwork which were originally dedicated to get fired for heating. From those few grapevines I got I selected two to be mounted into the frame. I cut them so they matched the height of the frame and fixed them using screws. I would have prefered grapvines still having some vines sprouting out but I coludn't find such exemplars there So I had to be fine with the main trunk.

Instead of a vine I mounted some copper wires twirled to form a kind of artificial vine which should resemble the original one. The next step was to mount some leaves to the artificial vine. The leaves are copper sheets which I cut to look like a vine leaf. I couldn't get real vine leaves to be used as template for the copper leaves so I had to use a drawing from wikipedia instead. At the time I was building the artwork the grapevines didn't carry nice leaves any more. So I cut the leaf according to the template and used a chisel to create the pattern of the leaf: A stem in the middle of the leaf reaching till the top of the leaf and side branches to the left and the right to stabilize the leaf.

One of the last parts of the picture was to mount grapes. Two of them. Those grapes were built up from single welded common steal screw nuts. The size of the nuts was M4, M5, M6 and M8. To get the screw nuts to form a grape I had to build templates which made this possible. So I used a quite gooey plaster to form a grape template looking like a grape being cut in the half. When the plaster was dried I post processed the grape template a little bit to look better. Then I put the plaster template into a box and put a plastic foil from common plastic bag over it. Again I poured plaster over the template in the box to get a negative of the primary template.

When the poured plaster dried I removed the primary template, which was quite easy because of the plastic foil in between. So the negatives were a block of plaster having a trough in the middle. I put the screw nuts into this through and tried to resemble the look of a real grape. At the top of the grape whre the stem goes to the vine I put rather large nuts (M6, M8) and at the border of the grape and at the tip rather small (M4, M5) ones.

Then I welded those grapes from the inner side (the top of the through) using my gas-shield welding machin. One of the most problematic actions of this part of the artwork was to make a contact between the nuts and the cathode of the welding machine. For gas shielded welding one pole has to get mounted on the item being welded and the other electrode pole is made up of the welding wire being pushed out of the welding machine handle. After some of the screw nuts have been welded they could act as electrode for the other nuts so the whole thing got easier the more nuts were welded.

As almost last step I used wood stain to darken the light wood of the frame to look more like the grapevine. Finally I mounted those "steel grapes" on the artificial vine and the copper leaves next to the grapes. A little gimmick of the whole artwork is the background. The background is a common simple picture frame like it can be bought in almost every bookshop. I put some large sized pictures of my hometown Rust into the picture frame. The frame could get inserted into the handicraft as background and also removed again. So the whole thing is more or less "themeable" and can get styled to match the current season for example.

Additionally there is a kind of "long term feature": As the leaves are made of copper they surely will get a coating of verdigris after some years and so will change its color from copper brownish to a greenish similar to copper roofs on old houses, churches or monuments. The screw nuts of the grapes are made of steel and look silverly. During a few years they will start to rust and change their color to brownish/red. So the whole grapevine will mature during the years and get red grapes and green leaves. The fact that the leaves go the other direction - from an autumn brown to a summer green probably can't get explained. But it would be quite complicated to create copper leaves which grow and not only change their color.

During my schooltime in the technical school (HTL) we were teached how to etch copper for creating printed circuit boards. Altough we just learned how to etch circuit boards, and how to transfer the layout from a computer to the board using optical methods (UV light), I adopted this method to etch copper and brass tin plates.

On printed circuit boards the copper film is just 35 or 70 µm (Micrometers, 1/1000 of a millimeter) - but it just took longer to etch the 0.3mm thick copper and brass plates.

As christmas present for 2007 I etched such a "star picture" out of copper and brass tin plates. The picture itself was created by a software program i wrote in PHP, similar to a fractal generating program. The template was then printed on a laser-printer in black and white and then transfered to the tin plates using a photos resistive resin and ultra violett light. The plates were then etched using Iron-III-chloride (FeCl3) and Sodiumpersulfate (Na2(SO4)2).

The finished tin-stars were then mounted between two glass plates (15 by 15cm) and fixed on the top and bottom using aluminium and brass bars (U-Profile). On one of those profiles (the upper one) a steel chain was inserted in a way which made it possible to mount the star pictures/motives on a wall.

The profiles are drilled on the top and on the bottom. By this it is possible to unmount the chain, turn over the picture and mount them reversed. Each of the stars is not put into the complete center of the picture but rather shifted a little bit to the left or right and a little bit to the top. By turning around the picture around you change this and the star is below the center and on the opposite side.

As usual with handcrafted stuff this is a "limited" edition. There are a total of 9 of those stars. One of them is not etched at the current time. Two of them have not been mounted in frames, and all of the remaining 6 exemplars except one have a signation at the bottom profile bar ("kraftb.at 2007").

One of those stars got a special attention. It was galvanised (electro plated) with nickel. All other stars are made of copper (so the color is brown, red) or brass (golden, yellow) - but this one is silver - as it is electro plated with nickel and this metal shines silver. The frame of this one is made of brass to give contrast to the star which is already silver. This special version was a christmas present 2007 for my grandma!

I do not really know how I got this idea. But also for christmas 2007 I made two lanterns in "Tiffany style". One also has use as a fragrance candle - the top, made of copper, is dished to the bottom and can get filled with water and a fragrance oil. This variant was round and christmas present for the parents of my father. The second lamp was box shaped and is also a present.

This technique is not like the one used at castles or church windows. There each glass piece is hold together by lead. But the method I used is based on bordering each glass piece with a copper band which is sticky on one side. Those copper enbordered glass pieces can then get put together and soldered by usual electronic solder.

Normally when you create tiffany handcrafted objects it is the aim to create some picture and the glass pieces get cut into their correct shape. But in this case I just destroyed colored glass plates and put them together like a puzzle to form an uninterrupted area.

If you like to buy such colored glas plates or the required accesories in Vienna you can get them at "Farbglas - Margit Dvorak". I have to recommend this shop!

This audio amplifier is nothing developed by myself but was created by an hungarian (as far as I know). The schematics and layouts were put under some public license by him for use in non-commercial applications. The name of the amplifier is "Quad 405" and a lot of pictures and information about it can be found on the web. I put this piece together in 2004 but didn't have the time or requirement to take it into action since then. Most probably because I didn't find the time and bought a commercial amplifier in the meantime :(

As I create electronic applications quite often and capacitors and coils are parts which get used often I built this measure instrument. Next to resistors, capacitors and coils are some very common passive electronic components.

Mostly any good Mulitmeter you can buy at an electronics store allows you to measure capacitance. But tools for measuring the inductance of a coil are very special devices and you have to pay between 400 and 1000 Euro for such instruments. So they are relatively expensive for home usage.

There is a cheap alternative which can be found on the web. On the website "sprut.de" there are schematics, PCB layouts and microcontroller software for a capacitance measure instrument for which you require parts which cost about 30 Euro.

Those photos show the device with opened case (you can see the circuit board) and a view from the front while in operation.