—submitted by lennonfantasy
—submitted by dedicatedfollowerofrock
Check out more photos from photographer, Jesse Frohman’s 1993 shoot with #KurtCobain on RollingStone.com. Jesse caught up with #RollingStone to chat about his day long shoot with Kurt in NYC. #RSRandoms (Taken with instagram)
So, if any of you didn’t know, here’s some tattoo history. Standard coil tattoo machines are essentially electromagents; two copper wire wound cores create the electromagnet when voltage is sent through. This came from old electric doorbells, which use the same exact specs. I collect old doorbells, because I feel that they’re a very important part of tattoo history.
I came across these antique doorbuzzers. Instead of the armature bar being connected to a long rod that rings a bell, (like many old doorbells) the brass piece between the coils rings the bell, as the whole buzzer itself was placed inside a bell. When the brass piece moved up and down, it rang.
Since tattoo machines are essentially doorbells with a tube vise and a nipple bar, I decided to do just that to one of these buzzers (left), and it’s now a functional tattoo machine. My favorite part is that there’s no capacitor, so it’s loud as all hell and sparks a ton. It just overall sounds terrifying, but it’s awesome. I wish I knew exactly how old the buzzers are.
Sorry to bore you with that history lesson. You can go back to your Tumblr feed of weird sex pictures and animated gifs of stuff now.
thanks - Mike Adams.
(via theboldwillhold)
