This was the second issue in 2002, but there were nine months between issue two and this issue. We were still hoping to get the magazine out twice a year but it was taking longer than six months to do each issue.

If you want to talk about a fantastic cover, issue three is the one. Cake decorating has it’s own weird, codified aesthetic. Some might think it’s a corny craft, but some think that about tattooing. The machine on the cake was made of marzipan. Stuart Archibald’s dad did the cake decorating for us. You can’t tell from the magazine, but the cake was really big. We were eating cake for days.

In issue three we tried to get a lot of information into print without making any more people angry at us. There was a pretty good and certainly sincere editorial in issue three. Frame styles and variables were identified, further expanding the idea of common terminology.

The Green Monster project machine hit 300 Hz. But it was a mess, running rough with no capacitor. It was actually more difficult to get the machine running that fast than we thought it would be. It was only possible by using some frame geometry tricks that are all explained in issue three.

There were more Readers’ Machines than ever. There was an amazing full-page ad for the Q-T tattoo machine, and the first appearance of the Machinegun Magazine “set of three” t-shirts: Tattooing for Jesus, Tattooing for Satan, Machinegun Magazine. So complete as a set they can’t be split up – wear all three at once.

Best Line in Issue 3

Bill Baker presents a theory of why some customers believed they could become tattoo artists (Editorial, p.7).

“Customers who should have been presented with the image of a hard-working professional in a position of great responsibility instead saw an irresponsible nincompoop who was making a lot of money without exerting much effort.”