Go team!
We got a lot done today on prepping the van – gutting the interior so we can overhaul the carpet, seats and headliner (and see how to mount the xylophones) and scrubbing off the rest of the mid-80s tequila-sunset striping.
@alienrobot finished stripping off all that stuck-on trim with a razor blade.
Now that the keys are all cut, price we have to lay out the frame.
As I said, I don’t have strict engineering plans for this thing, I’m going by the seat of my pants. But I know what the materials will be, so I’ve laid out the frame – it’s 1-1/2-inch aluminum scaffold tubing, held together with Hollaender Speed Rail and then the keys ride on custom-fabricated 1/2 x 1-1/2-inch aluminum stringers … More
By now you’ve probably gathered I’m not an engineer. None of the XyloVan team is, really.
As a result, this build blog is more a chaotic pile of raw coverage than a fetishistically neat, step-by-step how-to.
This rolling concert instrument (I do dream of a fleet of instrumental art cars – DrumVan, or PianoBoat, anyone?) is taking shape in a raw, organic form in our minds .
I’m not computing engineering challenges ahead of time. I’m figgerin’ ’em out as soon as I get my hands on the materials.
This means I use sketches as a sort of problem-solving tool rather than a full-on architectural spec.
So this one (above) is one of the earliest, showing a three-quarter view and all the gross components we’re planning to build and attach – xylophones, gongs, lights, sun-shelters, speakers, etc.
I’m posting these largely because tonight’s the deadline for Maker Faire entries and we’re hoping to have the van in some kind of playable shape by then.
So on the one hand, you have crudely-detailed sketches like these:
And on the other hand …
(video lost when we quit Facebook)
Once the keys are cut and rough-tuned, they must be mounted.
Step one is finding the “nodes,” or the dead spots at either end of the key where the metal doesn’t vibrate. This is where I’ll drill holes for mounting.
To do this, you park the key atop two pairs of balled-up socks so it vibrates when struck. Then sprinkle a little salt near either end of the key and whack it repeatedly. The resonating metal bounces the salt away from the most-vibrating part into the nodes, the deadest spot in each key …
I mark each key, then put it on the drillpress and drill a 3/8-inch-diameter hole through each key’s nodes.
Drilling one of the two keyboards (about 30 keys) took the better part of an hour and resulted in several pounds of this fantastic aluminum chaff.
Wonder what I should do with it all …
One of the drawbacks with the door from the junkyard is that it had a two-paned window instead of the nice big panoramic single light the original door came with.
Really fussy-looking. Kills the lines of the van (such as they are). And easily remedied.
First, remove the windows and the weatherstripping. Like this:
It’s often noisy and dusty when I’m cutting, so full respirator/goggles/earplugs are called for.
I’m not the neatest craftsman in the world, and I have a lot going on at any one time.
Here’s a view of the entire workspace.
Here’s the first set of tubular bells, untuned. Tuning them is a pain in the ass: Unlike the keys, these cannot be made flatter by hollowing out the middle, between the nodes.
Instead, you can only sharp them by carving slices off the ends. Luckily, I wound up creating a sort of Middle-Eastern koto-sounding thang, that kind of works. I hope these don’t dull down too much when I mount them.
Miking and amplifying will be a challenge – I’ll need to figure out a resonator or some sort of sound funnel feeding a mike at one end of the tubes. But they resonate deeply, and they’ll look pretty wikkid bolted to the side of the van.
Enjoy the sustain.
It’s promisingly non-rainy gray when we set out. The minute we arrive at the junkyard, the sky tears. A good, heavy rain soaks us and everything around us, but it’s a good day to be slogging around with wrenches in our fists and a plan.
This is the day to replace the door I smashed.
We wander around the van section of PickYourPart looking for XyloVan’s ghost twin. Identical paint job, identical van, it would have been a perfect match.
But it is gone. I guess the yard declared it well and truly stripped and sent it off to the crusher. In its place are a few more options, but it takes a good 45 minutes sloshing around through oilslicked pondlets 30 feet across to canvass the whole inventory of mid-80s Ford vans.
I took a little time tonight to lay out a near-full keyboard on some telephone wire just to see how the 2-½-octave range sounded:
(video lost when we quit Facebook)
The keys don’t ring yet because there are no insulators under them, no holes drilled, no resonators to catch the sound yet, and it still needs a final tuning. But everything sounds solid so far.
Looks like I need to finish it up with a D at the high end. I’ll probably cut some more for the low end just because they sound so rich and I think I can keep going down before the metal’s native harmonics overwhelm each key’s primary tone.
Pride goeth before the fall, they say.
For a while there, I was having a proud day.
I had a DMV appointment at 10:40. By the time I waded through two jammed parking lots and landed out on Glenoaks, it was 10:52. But no problem, I sailed right through check-in, waited 10 minutes and was called to the window.
Bada-boom, bada-bing, I was out of there in 10 minutes with my license task done, the van registered – and instructions to get it smogged before I could get the full reg paperwork.
Straight to the smog shop near my house. The taciturn, ruddy smog-shopkeeper plugged the van into his gizmos, ran it through the paces and – bazoop – shot my PASS readings straight to Sacramento by wire. Happy day.
I jumped in. I had to wait a couple of minutes for the guy who had parked his truck abreast my tail to back out, but when he did, I managed to back out safely without nailing the gas pumps.
Quick head check, no traffic. I eased forward to the right around the island into a THOROUGHLY HORRENDOUS CRUNCHING NOISE and hit the brakes.
Yep. Peached it. Boy, I wish I had a recording of that sound.
I sideswiped a bollard at the end of the pump island. Hadn’t seen it below the level of this monster’s windows, and before I knew what I had done, it was too damn late.
The door still works properly but, well, I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend:
Pulling more stuff off of Xylovan’s dead twin at the junkyard. That’s what.
This weekend’s work has been mostly about sound (with a little van tinkering here and there).
How do we amplify two full keyboards of two and a half octaves of keys each, order plus numerous gongs and chimes?
Full-court press – set up a testing environment, bring in some mikes and amps, and sort it out, right?
We picked up a little mixing board at Guitar Center on Saturday night and spent some time bullshitting with the staff about microphones.
The challenge of the project is getting a full, clean mix out of the instrument in the face of these facts:
I got into a real rhythm last night and blew through a good 27 linear feet of aluminum bar stock, cutting keys for the xylophones.
To the right here is what my shop floor looks like – thick with aluminum dust. I must have swept up 5 pounds of the stuff. (The logo on the floor reminds me not to crack my head on the face-height 6×10″ beam hovering just 5 feet off the floor – I’m always standing up under it suddenly. Not for nothing is the beam called The Widowmaker.) …
MoreWe’ve knocked out two octaves worth of keys so far, only a sample of which will fit on the bench for a demo. Obviously they’ll sound much fuller after we figure out how to set up resonators and amplification, but at least they’re correctly tuned.
(videos lost when we quit facebook, but read on)
As for finish, the first three are polished, the rest are still raw, and none have been drilled yet for mounting)
I picked up a new, slimmer metal-cutting disc for the circular saw the other day, and cutting is dramatically easier than it was. Now it takes barely four minutes to slice through the half-inch by 3-inch aluminum bar stock we’re using for keys.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been tinkering with disk gongs – I want people to have a broad array of stuff to bang on beyond the tuned keyboards on either side of the van. Otherwise, they may take to hammering on the mirrors or the coachwork.
These quarter-inch-thick steel disks have a tinny, bell-like quality …
To paraphrase Ratty (or was it Mole?) there is nothing half so fine as an afternoon spent messing about in junkyards.
Rob was kind enough to join me in a trip to PickYourPart in Sun Valley, where the gutted wrecks hunker beneath the sun in neat rows. Parts lie in exploded clouds around them, and you can find pretty much anything you want.
We went looking for a Ford van – mid-80s – and stumbled almost immediately upon the carcass of XyloVan’s dead twin …
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XyloVan needs new seats.
Lord, how we need new seats.
Legions of nameless alcoholics, slouching through this former taxi-bus’ years of service for a sober-living facility, site have shredded the fabric.
Looks like someone force-fed meth to a sackful of starving cats, gave it a good shake, slung it inside and slammed the door in 100-degree heat. The ensuing tooth-and-nail brawl for survival left a fine webwork of tattered polyester (and a few questionable stains) draped over age-browned fabric, itself shot through with rusty springs.
It’s bad.
So off we go (after an already-exhausting morning sledding at Mt. Pinos to the junkyard. I had called around, and the one place that told me they had seats that should fit (everything from ’78 to ’92 in Ford/GM interiors is interchangeable, apparently) that has an ’86 Ford van is down in Carson …
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This is a hardy old bucket. The motor’s in good shape (76, this 000 local miles), the transmission whines and leaks but still has plenty of life in it. It has new brakes and tires, and feels rock-solid.
But the motor leaks like a sieve, so I thought I would tackle the only leak-plugging task I’m capable of without an engine hoist and a ton of spare time – replacing the leaky valve cover gaskets.
I learned how to do this on an old four-banger Volvo B-18 engine 25 years ago, from a mechanic who had trained with shade-tree tough-guys in South Africa.
Here’s how it goes:
MoreOkay. Long story short, I spent half of the day Saturday(2/6/10)working on a single key with the bench grinder buffer until @factoid finally realized that I had been using the wrong buffing compound. It was a laugh for him, but it only made me mad. so we walked down to Baller Hardware and got another type of compound(this one was brown), and it worked a little better, but it was messy, and soon we had brown splatters all over one of the walls. I spent the rest of my day working with this. At the end of the day, I was still working on the same piece when @factoid came over and said that it wasn’t the compound, it was the machine I was using. Another laugh for him. So Sunday(2/7/10)I started using another tool that maybe is not as easy as the bench grinder, but definetely faster. Here are a few pictures of me using it.
picture #1-This is a picture of me using the new tool.
picture #2This is a good shot of the tool itself. As you may have noticed, we have built our own custom jig to hold the metal piece in place.
picture #3-This is a picture of a half-finished key.
We cut more keys this weekend. We’re up to F#. Almost one out of the four planned octaves of keys is cut (but only half of the keys are tuned so far.
Since the metal heats up during cutting, and heated keys resonate a good half-tone lower than room-temperature keys, you’re forced to put them aside until they cool down before trying to tune them. It’s time-consuming work – each key can take up to an hour to cut and tune properly.
We also spent a lot of time figuring out the polishing/buffing routine and tools, but I’ll let @alienrobot tell you about that.
It’s a big, old van and it needs new seats. Or at least new upholstery.
Spent a good hour calling around to junk yards yesterday, including TruckWrecking.com and had no luck digging up a set of seats for a 1985 Ford Club Wagon XLT. The seats any Ford van built in the surrounding 10 years would probably do it, but no one seemed of a mind to help. I have a couple more numbers to call in the morning.
