Locked and loaded

Passed another major milestone tonight.

We are now – but for a wee bit of bungie-ing – ready for the long trek to Maker Faire.

I spent much of the evening getting Keyboards 2 and 3 (right) properly aligned against the side of the van.


I had to measure and cut support stanchions from 2-inch recycled aluminum tubing (thanks again, side effects IMS), troche and then mount bottom brackets onto the van. This involves drilling holes in the body and attaching the SpeedRail support brackets to it with an ungodly number of pan washers and other hardware so they won’t tear through the metal with all the weight and stress …
I also had to solve a nasty engineering problem. The left-hand support bracket on Keyboard 2 gets in the way when I flip the keyboard up for travel/

so I had to grind off about 15% of the bracket hinge so that the A# key j-u-u-u-s-s-t clears it:

I also worked out a brace-and-strap system for Keyboards 1 and 2: When flipped up, treatment their support braces flip over and rest on the roof rack, where I attach them with cargo straps in a way that stands the fragile keys away from the roof rack’s mounting brackets – and that keeps the keys from hitting the van’s windows:

Here she is, ready to go. Tomorrow night – whatever icing I can put on the cake before Maker Faire – like gongs and/or wheel paint …

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