Making moonshine has gone from a backwoods black art to a high-end hobby practiced by "whiskey geeks" with a taste for top-shelf hooch.

Unlike their bootlegging predecessors, who cooked up big batches of white lightning and distributed the illegal booze out of the backs of cars, today's moonshiners focus on quality rather than quantity.

"It took me years, but with practice and dedication you can make any spirit every bit as good as a commercial distiller," says Dave Robison, 42, owner of Pioneer Spirits, a single-batch distillery in Chico, California. "You might not be able to reproduce it exactly, but it will be as good as anything you can buy on the top shelf."

Home distillation of liquor used to be the province of backwoods bootleggers. Up until 1974, when the world price of sugar skyrocketed, commercial moonshiners throughout the Southeastern United States made enough money making hooch that it was worth the risk of getting caught by federal revenuers.

Today, making your own liquor is as illegal as ever, and a lot less lucrative. In fact, it's considerably cheaper to buy it off the shelf.

As a result, today's home distillers are quintessential do-it-yourselfers. Many are engineers and techies, much like the liquor connoisseurs who attend the Whiskies of the World Expo each year in San Francisco. "We have a whole audience that we refer to as the whiskey geek," event founder and organizer Riannon Walsh says. "I think 90 percent of them are techies."

John Spidell misses the moonshine tradition. A former federal revenuer, the 65-year-old spent the first half of the '70s "busting up" illegal stills in North Carolina. His job sometimes required living in a sleeping bag under a piece of canvas for weeks at a time, watching a big still, waiting for the owner to appear. Smaller stills got less attention.

"A five- or six-hundred-gallon outfit wasn't worth wasting time on," he says. "I'd go back to my vehicle, get the C4 explosives and blasting caps, and I'd blow it up. There were only so many of us, and only so much time."

Spidell was blowing up simple pot stills, which were used to distill mash made from sugar, water, yeast and hog "shorts" (corn feed for hogs). After it was fermented, the mash would go into the boiler, where it was heated.

Because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, the vapors that rose from the mash contained more alcohol than the mash itself. Those rising vapors traveled through an angled lyne arm to a condenser, traditionally made of copper coil. The condensed spirits were collected and redistilled until they reached a sufficient proof, then bottled in quart-size mason jars or gallon-size plastic milk jugs.

Bootleggers delivered the illicit liquor to "shot houses" in the cities on Wednesdays and Thursdays, ensuring they were stocked for the weekend.

Today's home distillers are more likely to build a small reflux still and hide it in the garage. Unlike a pot still, the vapors rise through a column packed with copper wool or another high-surface-area material before being directed into the condenser. A beer keg makes a good boiler, and a homemade column and condenser are within the reach of anyone with basic welding and soldering skills and access to copper pipe.

The packed column makes the reflux still more efficient than a pot still, so it produces a higher-proof spirit on the first distillation. Still, the average home distiller isn't making any money on the endeavor.

"People are trying to keep a tradition alive," Robison says. "They're not selling it. That's looked down on in the home distilling crowd. Most people I know aren't making more than a gallon at a time. Some people on the forum come from the moonshiner tradition, and we've learned a lot from them. But I've never met anyone who makes it for money."

Robison runs the popular Home Distiller forum with more than 2,000 registered users and 50,000 unique visitors per month. Other online home distilling resources include Smiley's Home Distilling and American Distiller.

Depending on the efficiency of the still, home-distilled alcohol can vary from 120 to 192 proof, or 60 percent to 96 percent pure alcohol.

The concept may be simple, but high-quality home-distilling isn't exactly easy. The moonshine tradition spawned a lot of misinformation, which Robison tries to rectify on the forum. First and foremost, he makes it clear that home distillation of liquor is illegal in all 50 states and just about every country, save New Zealand.

Besides being illicit, white lightning has earned a reputation for blinding and killing people who drink it. Many sources attribute these effects to methanol ("the heads"), which boils off naturally during an early stage of the distillation process.

"The heads will make you blind if you drink it, but I defy you to try to drink it," says microdistiller Michael Heavener, co-owner of Highball Distillery in Portland, Oregon. "If it doesn’t make you wince when you smell it, it's probably not going to make you go blind."

The real culprit in poison moonshine was usually radiators, according to Spidell. "Copper coils are not the most efficient condenser. If you're making 10,000 to 25,000 gallons at a time, you might immerse a truck radiator in the water. Chemicals in the moonshine leach out lead salts from the soldering. As a result of that, here comes the lead poisoning."

Made properly, home-distilled spirits are as safe to drink as any commercial liquor. Still, Heavener warns, "I'd be more concerned with the danger of explosions."

Most stills are heated with propane burners. Purified ethanol is highly flammable, and its clear blue flame can be difficult to see under certain conditions. Open flame plus high-proof alcohol equals one potentially explosive combination.

Even innocent mistakes -- such as using lead soldering or plastic parts in the still - can lead to serious consequences. So Robison encourages would-be home-distillers to do their homework first and make liquor later.

After all, he says, "This ain't stamp collecting."

Though made for children, Japanese toy robots can catch the eye of even the most discriminating adults.

Iconic graphic designer Tom Geismar, whose firm Chermayeff & Geismar has created memorable logos for Mobil, PBS and other U.S. institutions, has been collecting the shiny bots for decades.

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle will exhibit toys from Geismar's collection in Robots: A Designer's Collection of Miniature Mechanical Marvels through Oct. 26. The vintage robots on display reflect Geismar's trained eye. "I've really restricted myself to ones that appealed to me as interesting, imaginative designs," he says.

Left:

"I continue to find the straightforward and somewhat naïve appearance of the early toys to be most appealing," Geismar says of this vaguely Victorian robot.

Photo: Richard Nichol

Geismar's fascination with robots began in 1970 while he was working on the U.S. pavilion for the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. In local stores, he came across zinc die-cast figures like manufacturer Popy's Chogokin King Joe, based on a villain from the Ultra Seven show in the Ultraman series that aired in the late 1960s. "They were all made of metal and painted terrifically. And they were very imaginative," Geismar says. In those days, boxes often featured the names and pictures of the toys' designers. "Obviously they put a lot of effort and care into making these intricate things," he says, "but they were just in stores for kids to play with." The holes in each arm fire black, three-fingered claws and yellow missiles.

Photo: Richard Nichol

This DX Tetsujin 28, literally Iron Man No. 28 in English, was based on the 1963 Japanese anime of the same name. Some of the episodes aired in the United States the next year, under the title Gigantor.

"This handsome form is one of my favorites," Geismar says. "As a designer, I tend to like things that are reasonably simple and clear, straightforward." Like many robots, it comes with a small model human, in this case the boy who controls the flying man by remote control in the cartoon.

Photo: Richard Nichol

The Takara company's highly articulated Abitate T-10B, also called Blockhead, is a die-cast mecha based on a character from the 1981 Japanese series Fang of the Sun Dougram that never aired in the States. The models did reach U.S. shelves, however, and a smaller-scale version of this body armor, the T-10A, came in a box featuring the intriguing slogan, "We never approve your independence from our federation."

For Geismar, the most captivating thing about the models is the details, like Blockhead's menacing red hands. "When you go to a very different culture where you can't even read any of the signs, you see things in a very different way," he says. "You see it for what it looks like. Only later did I learn that most of the toys were representations of characters in popular Japanese films and television shows."

Find great scans of box art for the Sun Dougram series (and many others) at Alen Yen's ToyboxDX.

Photo: Richard Nichol

Robot toys hit a peak of mainstream popularity when Hasbro introduced the Transformers, but the roots of those bots lie in designs like Popy's Chogokin DX Sun Vulcan Solar Combination from 1981. The transforming robot turns into the triangular Cosmo Vulcan jet and the stocky Bull Vulcan tank. In its humanoid form, the mecha carried a huge sword and shield, and tied into the TV show Solar Squadron Sun Vulcan.

Photo: Richard Nichol

Another transformer, Popy's Chogokin Goggle V GB-76, turns into a yellow truck and was later reissued in the Etarnal [sic] Heroes Series. This bot's tie-in live-action show was part of the great three-decade lineage of Super Sentai TV series. Check out the Goggle V opening credits and learn from whence the Power Rangers came.

A collector of naïve figures from around the world before he came across robots, Geismar compares models like this to folk art. "In the World's Fair pavilion in Japan, there was a major exhibit of Native American masks, many from the Pacific Northwest. When we went to install them, the workers already knew them and they really related to them. They are very similar to a number of Japanese cultures' masks. I think, in a sense, there are masks involved with these robots. The mask behind a mask, or face within a face."

Photo: Richard Nichol

Although they usually take a humanlike form, the Japanese robots can take any shape. Take, for instance, this Outer Space Spider. "Whether they were men or bugs or flying saucers or whatever they are," Geismar says, "there seemed to be very few creative barriers to the designers doing them."

Photo: Richard Nichol

First starring in Forbidden Planet, Robby the Robot went on to appear in everything from a Columbo episode to Earth Girls Are Easy, becoming a popular and endlessly reproduced emblem of robotkind. Once wound up, this Action Planet Robot version of Robby takes clumsy steps and shoots sparks under the red mouth shield below its head grill.

Before the zinc mecha craze began in the 1970s and '80s, Japanese toy robots were simpler. Made of tin or plastic during the country's post-World War II industrialization, they were also more fragile.

Photo: Richard Nichol

Some Japanese toy robots, like this one, remain anonymous.

"I would find robots like this in souvenir shops in Times Square," Geismar says. "Very simple windup or battery-operated mechanical men. They weren't based on stories and didn't have names. I always liked their sculptural quality."

Photo courtesy Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

The designs of early bots from the 1950s and '60s have been reinterpreted over the years with more sophisticated finishes. When switched on, this Horikawa Silver Astronaut, probably from the 1980s, walks forward, pausing every few steps to spin its torso with its green canons leveled at all attackers.

Photo: Richard Nichol

It wouldn't be a robot collection without Mechagodzilla, the kaiju monster that aliens built to do battle with the real Godzilla in 1974. Released in 2003, this model comes loaded with features like pop-off knee missiles and an opening mouth and chest hatch.

Photo: Richard Nichol

To wring as much profit as possible from their molds, model companies cast the same robots multiple times. Sometimes, as in the case of this Cosmobot, the molds would change hands and models would come out under other brands with only new names or slight differences of detail to distinguish them.

"They'd change the feet or change the color," Geismar says, "or just do anything to say it was a new one. You clearly recognize over many years the same molds with only slight variations." Thanks to a tread on his back, Cosmobot changes into a tank.

Photo: Richard Nichol

The Golden Warrior Gold Lightan makes an unusual transformation: From the form of a classic robot warrior, it folds into a small cigarette lighter. Released in 1981 (when else?), it naturally had its own anime series.

"The funny thing about all these images," Geismar says, "is that when they're photographed like this you have no sense of the scale. That lighter is not more than 2-and-a-half inches high." In an effort to replicate the larger-than-life roles these toys have played in children's (and adults') minds over the years, the Science Fiction Museum will include giant enlargements as part of the exhibition.

Geismar approves. "They are scaleless in a sense," he says. "You want to make them human-size."

Photo courtesy Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame