XyloVan

Hit a big milestone the week before last, 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 … Continue reading

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, 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 … Continue reading

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, 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.

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 … Continue reading

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 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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Like a drunk tiptoeing into his AA meeting with actual quitting on his mind, I’m finally ready to quit breaking taps – and pay attention to all the solid advice I’ve been getting along the way.

Tonight, I took it all in hand and put it to work on my one surviving 6mm tapping tool – and the dozen-plus very serious holes I had left to tap:

• The machinist recommended I countersink the holes and use cutting fluid … But I had a long way to go – the last 8 holes in the stringers for Keyboard 3, plus the remaining three very deep holes in Keyboard 1′s crosspiece – each of them through a thick, 3-layer sandwich of aluminum.

  

  I started with the drill … Continue reading

Keyboard 1 is more than 7 and 2 1/2 octaves long – running from A to high D#.

All that metal is pretty heavy, and the weight actually bows the stringers that carry the keys across it, so I’m building in a crosspiece for support. It will run vertically between the top rail and bottom rail, and all four stringers will screw down to it for support.

I lay out the keys then I tighten the frame at the corners along the bottom …
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All the geek opinion and doomsaying in the world can’t beat a crusty old Chicano machinist in a crusty old machine shop.

After Googling and dialing all over Hollywood, Los Feliz and Glendale in search of an EDM-equipped shop, I phoned a local machine shop and described my two mistakes.


“Ehhh, bring it in, we’ll see what we can do,” says the crusty old voice at S&K Precision Engineering Co.

So I bring it in. Within an hour and a half, I get a call saying “It’s all set.” They drilled in with a carbide bit (probably a better one than I used, and used an extractor on one broken tap, and a punch on the other – and now the holes are cleared.

The guy even took pity on me and told me the secret: countersink the holes from now on before tapping them – and use some cutting oil.

Done. I’ll be attacking that just as soon as the best little hardware store in Silver Lake restocks their 6mm Irwin thread taps. The ones that I seem to keep steadily depleting.

My plans for a productive evening of xylophone-building thus foiled, I turned to slapping together the rest of the frame-mounting hardware.

Unfortunately, the Hollaender company turned out a couple of SpeedRail parts with nasty burrs inside that kept them from sliding onto the 2-inch aluminum tubing that we’re using for xylophone frames.

I tried grinding out the lip on both sides of the mount …

But no luck. The collar still wouldn’t slide on over the tubing … Continue reading