Year: 2010

We need MORE POWER – wiring XyloVan’s auxiliary battery

After weeks (okay, months) of building instruments, doing bodywork, making mallets and generally getting XyloVan into shape, it’s finally time to give it a pulse. How? Auxiliary big-ass battery.

The battery’s going to have to power the amplification system and the lights while we’re out roving the playa – or more importantly while we’re parked and people are playing for hours on end.

First thing you need is a really, really, really long battery cable. There’s no room for this huge deep-cycle marine battery in the engine compartment or anywhere near it.

The longest battery jumper cables made are only 20 feet, so I have to splice a couple of them together and somehow route them from the main battery in the engine bay, down beneath the truck, around the engine mount and driveshaft and exhaust pipes – and rearward to a place somewhere under the second row of bench seats because that’s where the auxiliary battery will be. And that means weather- and abrasion-proofing the cables – and that means cutting up some old inner tubes to serve as conduit and insulation …

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Keyboard 4 installed – Now a total of 83 keys!

Hit a big milestone the week before last, sales but I’ve been too busy until now to blog about it.

I installed Keyboard 4 on the van’s hood – no small task, since the thing has to bolt onto a pretty thin sandwich of steel without puncturing anything – plus the f%#&er weighs a good 70 pounds.

Here I’ve already marked and drilled holes for the left-hand half of the keyboard, and I’m attaching it with 3/8″ coarse-thread tap bolts …

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Rinse, repeat – building Keyboard 4

What do you call a 1985 Ford Van with three xylophone keyboards and some gongs bolted to it?

Not enough xylophones.

I wanted to give the van more presence, approved more weight visually (and, coincidentally enough, literally). So I’m building Keyboard 4 from the same raw aluminum (3-inch by half-inch 6106 T6 aluminum – at right) and monkeyed-together hardware contained in Keyboards 1, 2 and 3 …

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The loudest piece of metal on the van

(video lost when we quit Facebook)
I love this thing.

It’s a piece of scrap – a 3/4-inch-thick slug of aluminum sliced off the end of a 13-inch-diameter aluminum cylinder.

Whack it, and it rings for more than a minute, with an intense, Döpplering tone.

I’m going to mount it on the front, and maybe I can hook it up to a simple solenoid so it can be rung from the driver’s seat.

Keyboard 4 roughed out, with a screw-up

Ladies and gentlemen – because I don’t have a “xylophone problem, ” and I can really stop any time I want – I’m building a little whole-note, bi-directional keyboard in C for the hood of the van.

The lowest key will actually stick out near-vertically from the hood, decease with two identical keyboards of 9 notes each spreading away on either side of it. Mounting it’s going to be … fun.

Meanwhile, I got a little overzealous while tuning one of the F keys tonight. I was deepening gouges in the bottom that I had made earlier with the cutting blade mounted on the circular saw, and dug right through …

… to the other side.

Because I am powerful simian. With opposable thumbs. And power tools.

Grunt. Snort.

Backsides & elbows

Back from Maker Faire, and there are a million little things to do for our next gig.

We’re going to roll in the Topanga Days Parade on Memorial Day.

Topanga Canyon is a blend of old-school hippie culture and celebrity ranches with long driveways, a beautiful curving road up from the ocean to the San Fernando Valley. Every year, there’s a music festival (this year it’s been headlined by Ziggy Marley, Maria McKee and Canned Heat, which should give you some idea).

Anyway, we applied and were accepted as one of the 50 vehicles in the parade (largely old fire engines and hot rods, so I’m told, but there should be a few floats too)

We’re driving in what’s traditionally the Santa Claus spot in the lineup – the very last.

Between now and then, we’re making mallets to replace the dozens of splintered casualties left by the pummeling of hundreds of kids and aggressive adults at Maker Faire.

I ordered four dozen 3/8ths-inch fiberglass dowels to serve as new sticks (at right). Only one problem: They’re so rigid, heavy and dense that they actually deaden the sound when playing. Instead of a nice “PLONNNNGGGGGG” you get a leaden “THUNGK.”

Fifty bucks down the drain, and now we have to repair the sticks we have left, and battle-harden them …

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Noisy work

(video lost when we quit Facebook)
I cut a lot of metal. I’m still cutting. It sounds like this. It’s a little loud but the earplugs and dual-can respirator mask keep it from killing me.

When I’m done, the floor looks like this:

Maker Faire Day 2 – How to play XyloVan & who made it

(videos of this lost when we quit Facebook)
You all showed us how to play today.

You toddled up and whacked away with sticks, silly grins on your 2-year-old faces. You strode up as if approaching the concert vibraphone you played in band, delicately picking out notes to tunes you haven’t played in 20 years. You hammered and drummed, pulling rhythmic tribal fugues out of the raw metal. You wheeled your disabled son up to Keyboard 1, watched his face light up, helped him hold a mallet and tap out a tune.

You played, in every sense of the word.

Thanks so much to all the folks at Maker Faire who enjoyed the van. You really touched us and showed us more joy than you can imagine.





We wanted to give a huge shout-out here to all the good people who helped us bring this project together:

  • To Dave for the junkyard crawls, the invaluable hoisting and finagling and sandblasting and painting of the enormous honkin’ rack, and the endless bonhomie.
  • To Robbie for wrenching and sweating par excellence to restore the damaged door, and for all the cheerful banter on the rainiest, slimiest junkyard crawl ever.
  • To Brian for acoustic advice, hardware assistance and spiritual support in the “man, that’s a wacky idea, but it should be cool when it’s done” vein.
  • To Steve and Beth for helping us mount the xylophones (man, was that just last week?)
  • To my excellent son and daughter for helping with makin’ mallets, changing valve-cover gaskets, cutting keys, mounting disc gongs, doing body work and probably helping us violate various child labor laws (although safety gear was worn at all times!)
  • To Rogan for engineering advice on mounting the keyboards, and to him, his lovely wife Susan and son, Asa for crewing our Maker Faire demo. We had an awesome weekend with you, and thanks to you freeing us up to see the other great creations there.
  • And finally, to my ever-patient, enthusiastic and non-stop gung-ho wife, Kristina, for helping to make all of this happen. Can’t wait to travel to Topanga Days Parade, Burning Man and all places in between where people love making sound.

If you enjoyed the van, drop a comment below – if you have photos or more/better video, add some links!


Here are some more videos and photos from Sunday:






Day 1 of Maker Faire – hundreds of hammering hands!

(videos here were lost when we quit Facebook – photos below!) Hey!
The Maker Faire crowd gave the van a good wringing (ringing?) out all day long,and the gear all held up (mostly) great.

Welcome to all the Maker Faire folks who came by and banged on the van today. What a fabulous noise you all made!

Waves of people washed up against the side of the van all day long – it was so great seeing the variety of ways people interacted with the van …

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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, IMS), 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 …

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Xylophones, meet Van!

After nearly three months of cutting and grinding, fiddling and drilling, cursing and screwing and painting, the magic moment is here.

Time to mount the xylophones on the van.

Here’s video (videos lost when we quit Facebook) of @alienrobot and me mounting Keyboard 2 which is the lower-octave and rear-most of the two keyboards I built for the passenger side of the van:

And here’s what Keyboard 1 looked like as friend Steve Finkel and I mounted it on the driver’s side …

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It *is* easy being green

We had all sorts of crazy notions for decorating the van.

As vibrant as its post-70s-paint job and sober-living-facility-logo’d style were, we wanted to transform it – to give it a new visual life to match its new incarnation as a rolling instrument.

We thought about going hotrod-lowrider with a lime-green metalflake triple-clearcoat paint job and lots of chrome. But that seemed too garish and expensive. One local shop was asking $800 to $1,000 just for straight paint even if we did all the bodywork …

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