Black Oxide, Giant Spikes

Hello From G.P.S.Hardware,

    Its been an exciting past 10 days or so here in the Gothic Punk  Specialty hardware workshop.

first of all, we finally did our first photo shoot with a real photographer and models -  The pictures are still being edited, but the shoot went really well, and the photos look good - so we're excited to get those up on the website and stuff.

Next, we got our Black Oxide chemicals, which allow us to put a black oxide finish on our aluminum parts here in the shop. Im really happy with how thats working out so far - its great to be able to make  a new product and quickly and easily give it a black finish here in the shop.   We do powder coating on our stainless steel hardware, and thats a great finish, but you cant really use it on things like the metal bracelets that have hinges, because it will clog up the hinges.  We have done some black anodizing on our aluminum parts, and that is a magnificent finish for aluminum - you get deep rich colors, and it gives a hard shell to the surface which makes it scratch resistant, but, its pretty expensive to do.  You really have to be making large volumes of product to do a lot of that without it really driving the cost of the items up.
         So, Black oxide is a great alternative - it gives a nice black finish to aluminum parts, and its relatively inexpensive to do.   Here are a couple pictures of  how it looks:

Those are the 1.25" black metal cuff, the 2.5" black metal cuff, the 5" black cone spike and the 8" black tree spike.Check those all out at the website.
 There are also some cool rub-off effects you can get by buffing the black finish partly off to expose the aluminum underneath. the 1.25" black metal cuff is available with that tarnished looking finish.

The last bit of excitement we've had going on  has been two separate customer requests for large spikes. We have had 3" tall spikes available for several months now on the website, and they have been pretty popular, and we hadnt really thought of making larger ones any time soon, until a lady called from L.A. wanting to know if we could make 5" Cone spikes, so we whipped up a batch, and they look great. They are 3/4" wide by 5" tall. They are cut from solid aluminum and come in raw silver color and with the black oxide finish. Here are some pictures of those:

A few days later, a man called wanting to know if we could make a spike 9" long and 3" around!  We could, sure, why not- but that thing would probably weigh 3 pounds and wouldnt really suit his purpose of making the worlds biggest dog collar.  We slimmed the dimensions down a little bit, and came up with the monster 8" long by 1.25" in diameter tree spike. Here are some pictures of that:

And here is a picture of the 3", the 5" and the 8" spikes, with the black oxide finish standing side by side: I guess this picture captures the new developments here at the G.P.S.Hardware studio over the past 10 days.

You can see more of those spikes on the Giant Spikes Page of the website.

Thats it for this post -
         Thanks a lot for your interest in Gothic Punk Specialty Hardware - Ben C - Owner/Designer