'Don't bother with the buzzer," says Kaden Harris to those visiting his East Vancouver apartment. "I won't hear it over all the noise."
Indeed, the noise drones from Mr. Harris's place at all hours of the day: saws whining, routers grinding, hammers thumping. One look inside his kitchen reveals why. Tucked across from the stove is an 80-square-foot workbench that holds all the tools of a wood and metal workshop 10 times the size.
"We're literally eating sawdust some days," says his ever-supportive wife, Kaia Howe.
It's here, right next to the refrigerator, that Mr. Harris fabricates what he calls "antiques from a parallel universe" - wood and metal objects that draw on equal parts Jules Verne, Leonardo da Vinci and Salvador Dali, in a style called "steampunk." They take on many forms, from torsion-powered crossbows called ballistas to high-powered catapults called trebuchets and mangonels. He's built a bong from a glass lamp globe and scrapyard brass that looks as if it could've been stolen from Dr. Jekyll's laboratory. ("I have turned down ridiculous amounts of money for this," he notes.)
Now, Mr. Harris is bringing his gifts for producing offbeat but functional works of art to the office worker. With the recent release of his do-it-yourself book Eccentric Cubicle: Products and Ideas to Enhance Your Cubicle World, the average office drone can learn to build a desktop guillotine, a USB bubble machine or even a lucid-dreaming induction device.
"It's supposed to inspire them," says Mr. Harris, an energetic 50-year-old who looks like a well-groomed pirate: two golden earrings in each ear, jet black goatee, hefty biceps protruding from a black vest worn against the skin. "There's joy in a simple mechanism doing a really unexpected thing."
It helps to have a few high-school shop credits under your belt before attempting Eccentric Cubicle projects. To build an iBlow USB bubble blower, for instance, one must lathe a tiny acrylic pulley, drill several holes and hook up a simple wiring harness. But Mr. Harris coaches you through every step, and the finished product - which incorporates a computer fan, a drinking straw, several rubber bands and a ballpoint pen - would bring tears of joy to MacGyver's eyes.
Mr. Harris has had a predilection for constructing odd things since the age of 10, when he and his brother ripped the guts out of an answering machine and created a 60-foot tape loop whose capstans were screwed into the hardwood floor of the family home. "Man, Mom hit the freaking roof," he recalls. "My butt still hurts."
But he didn't start treating his mechanical mind as a potential source of income until five years ago. He noticed gavels selling for a few hundred dollars as executive gifts and wondered, "If these guys will pay $410 for that, what would they pay for a really nice museum-quality miniature catapult that will launch a chunk of cheese across the boardroom?"
So began EccentricGenius.ca, the site where Mr. Harris offers miscellaneous ramblings and creations to the world. He quickly became "the world's foremost manufacturer of high-performance desktop guillotines." Featured on the site now is the Nessiteramplifier, a fifties-era microscope image projector converted into a guitar amplifier.
Mr. Harris soon found kindred minds among the maker movement, a motley band of devoted DIYers who build functional objects from scratch. Makers will devote their lives to building everything from jet packs and Lego trains to electric basses that use motorcycle gas tanks for resonators.
In 2005, Make magazine, the print soul of the movement, asked Mr. Harris to write a guidebook to some cubicle-appropriate projects.The secret to fabricating something that will blow officemates' minds is sound "scrapyard archeology," he writes. That is, one's will to find odd objects in scrapyards.
Mr. Harris's living room is evidence of his own formidable scrounging talents. He points to an elegant assemblage of tins, tubes and hoses that he calls the Haze-o-Matic. It's a fog machine that Mr. Harris built with $20 worth of scraps from a dollar store.
"It makes me laugh every time I run it," he says.
When asked to name his most treasured scrapyard score, his eyes grow wide.
"Oh yeah, dude, this is the most deadly thing you've ever seen in your life," he says, hauling a white metal box from the clutter. "A 1956 Bircher Electrosurgical Unit." He looks up maniacally at his wife. "Want to grab a hot dog?" he asks, before plugging the box into a socket, setting a dial on the box to "cutting and coagulation" and grabbing a narrow wire running from the box.
Within minutes he's slicing into a hot dog with the electric scalpel. The smell of burning hair fills the apartment. He holds up a thin slice of wiener. "Is that or is that not the coolest thing?" he asks.
"You wouldn't believe some of the stuff you come across in scrapyards. There's a certain Zen about them."
