I’m not much of a player, but here’s a demo of a drum in C-minor – This is the seventh drum I’ve made out of a 20-pound propane tank.
The discarded tank came into the shop in a thrashed, rusted-out pale blue, which looked amazing.
So I kept much of the original paint, cleaning off only a ring of the steel at the tips of the tongues. I then added a pinstripe ring around the hexagonal key (low-C) in the center, painted on a stylized “7”, which I limned in Sharpie – and sprayed 3 or 4 coats of clear enamel over the whole thing.
I made two major design improvements for sound – I cut out a resonator hole in the tank’s bottom (around the valve, just inside the handle).
And I’m experimenting with a new deadening material – recycled bicycle tubes wrapped around all the way around the tank to keep the body from ringing and drowning out the keys.
Here’s a quick demo of Fireball XL-5, which I made on commission for Burns. I’m not much of a musician and iPhone isn’t much of a sound-capture device, so the clip doesn’t quite do justice to how resonant it sounds in person. It’s glorious.
If you would like me to make a drum for you on commission, the price is $300 – $250 if you bring your own empty propane tank. Contact me for details.
I made Fireball XL-5 for Mykal Burns, a video producer, roller derby enforcer and erstwhile percussionist. The build went something like this:
I safely emptied the propane (see the build log for Green Destiny on how to do that), rinsed and dried the tank, and then prepared the surface. This means scraping off all the paint with an angle-grinder and then in this case, sanding the hell out of the metal with 80-grit on an orbital sander.
Ooo. Satiny-smooth.
The workspace – Plastic sheeting contains the mess of metal filings, ground-off paint chip and Krylon overspray that fly around during fabrication, to keep it from polluting the area reserved for sewing, beading and, well, breathing.
I built a stand out of a 3/4-inch flange and 5-inch nipple, which screws neatly into the tank socket where the valve fitting was removed.
Once on the stand, I can spin the tank to any angle for drawing, cutting, painting, etc.
Using Green Destiny, I traced and cut a template in thick sheet plastic.
This is what happens when you put a flat template on a domed surface. You spend some time fudging and finagling to get it aligned with the center of the tank, then tweak some more to …
… trace the individual key shapes.
Use a center punch to mark all the corners – this will make drilling easier.
Drill holes through all the corner points – this makes it easier (and hella less finicky) to connect the linear cuts.
And … start cutting, with reiforced cutting wheels.
Cutting takes 4-5 hours – the Dremel gets pretty hot from being overworked. I might just upgrade to a beefier model.
Now for tuning. You tap the key and check the tone on a guitar-tuning app. This one came out G#, supposed to be G natural.
Cut the key a tad longer with a hacksaw blade …
Sweet. Tuning all the keys takes another couple of hours.
Burns wanted the note markings left on the drum, so before clearcoating the keys, I engraved them into the steel.
After spraying three coats of clear enamel onto the whole drumhead, I masked off the keys from the paint.
Two coats of red later, it looks a little like this.
Now for the sunburst.
First peek!
Peeling is appealing …
Burns requested this paint scheme – it came out pretty sweet.
Now I apply material to damp the ringing of the drum body – The sound tends to overwhelm the sound of the keys if you don’t deaden it. I used the same type of self-adhesive rubber step-tread strips here that I applied to Green Destiny. Unfortunately, the Chinese manufacturer used shitty adhesive and they immediately started peeling off.
First I tried riveting the corners – but the riveting crushed and distorted the edges and looked awful. So I removed the rivets, and re-applied them with industrial-strength rubber cement – the solvent in which had the immediate effect of … blistering the paint. Ain’t chemistry a hoot. But precisely applied, the strips covered their own adhesion problems – and stuck fast.
Here’s the finished product – Paint scheme picked out by Mykal Burns, other aesthetic and functional nonsense was mine.
I can’t wait to make the next one. And yes, I am taking more commissions like this one. If you want me to create a drum for you, hit me up. If you want to know about the experience, ask Burns.
Man spotted with bizarre handmade musical instrument. Enjoy, Mykal!
If you would like me to make a drum for you on commission, the price is $300 – $250 if you bring your own empty propane tank. Contact me for details.
Perfect for Burning Man, lazy Sunday afternoons or hand-to-hand combat.
I then ratchet-strapped it to a post and put a bar on the wrench to get the needed leverage. It takes a *lot* of leverage to break the seal.
Once you’ve unscrewed the valve, take the tank – which still contains propane and methyl mercaptan residue – immediately out back and fill it with water and dish soap. Leave it overnight, then dump it and rinse and drain it dry.
I’ve written about this before, but do *not* attempt to build one of these unless you know how to safely empty a propane tank and get the valve off ot it. Just don’t. Anyway, beginning with an empty, de-valved tank, you start by using ViseGrips to break the welds holding the base in place. You have to wrench pretty hard back and forth to weaken the welds till they snap, but there are only 3 or 4 of them.
I then used an angle grinder to strip off all the paint and grind off the welds from the bottom of the tank.
This leaves a nice, textured finish.
Laying out the pattern with a compass and Sharpie. The concept of building tank drums from propane tanks should be credited to Dennis Havlena, a Michigan instrument-hacker who made his first in 2008 – (plans are here) A lot of people took up Havlena’s open-source idea – some even took off into manufacturing them.
I found a video at one maker’s site that had a tuning I liked, and hand-sketched a 10-key drum based on that design.
Here’s the pattern sketched in with Sharpie.
. Now drill holes at the corners of all the key edges. This lets you bring two cuts together cleanly without making an X if you cut a little too hard.
Then you get to making the rough cuts with a Dremel, top speed, with thin-grade reinforced cutting discs. I go through 8-10 discs during the whole process.
You cut each key a little short of what the template suggests, tape off all but the key you’re tuning, and then use a smartphone tuning app to find what the pitch is on each one.
You can find a few good tuning apps on the App Store – I’m using insTuner.
If a key is sharp – say, an E is ringing at D#, you cut it longer. If the key is flat, you have to carve off the end of the key to shorten it and raise the pitch.
After a lot of tuning (cutting takes a couple hours, and tuning properly can take three or four more) it’s mask and paint time. I’ve already sprayed clearcoat all over the keys, since I liked the way my sketched-in keys looked and wanted to preserve the design process. I then masked it off and sprayed a thick coat of yellow. I purposefully laid on a bit too much so the paint would drip and run a bit.
I sprayed the middle of the drum with this wild green mealflake model enamel I’ve had sitting around forever, and then sprayed the handle in black.
I wanted to add a little accent color, so I masked off triangles at the base of each key and used red Testor’s model paint.
Then – I don’t know what the f$@k came over me – I proceeded to over-pimp the triangles with Sharpie and metallic markers, and the whole thing wound up looking absolutely garishly awful. So …
I masked off everything but the level containing the ugly, and put three thick coats of yellow over it so it would blend with the rest of the top- laid on stripes of masking tape at regular diagonal intervals, sprayed the exposed stuff with black …
… et voila. No less garish, but at least it doesn’t look like a hippie barfed all over it. I even managed to keep a little bit of the detail that I did like.
I epoxied a chunk of slit garden hose to the handle to act as floor protection for the base …
I also found a terrific substitute for the damping material. To help the keys ring well, you have to nullify the entire body of the drum from ringing and overpowering them when you play. On “Little Boy,” my previous 8-key A-minor drum, I used a chunk of garden hose wrapped 7 times around the center, anchoring the ends with metal screws. On this one, I found that self-adhesive rubber strips used as non-skid-plates for stairs worked perfectly – and fit in beautifully with the aesthetic.
If you would like me to make a drum for you on commission, the price is $300 – $250 if you bring your own empty propane tank. Contact me for details.
If you’ve ever dreamed of owning a handmade full-octave xylophone like this one – or an ornate custom-engraved ceremonial gong for announcing dinnertime, kickass achievements or the arrival of Friday, now’s your chance.
We need to have it repaired (it’s a big, costly 1985 Ford truck transmission!), smogged and re-registered so that our one unhappy neighbor (among hundreds more who love playing it every day when they walk past) won’t have call the Parking Authority to get it ticketed and towed.
That’s where you come in. We’re reviving the full perks package from last year’s successful Indiegogo campaign, and offering them to you.
Please donate towards the XyloVan repair fund via the Paypal button below, and we will hand-build some instruments (and deliver some other very cool schwag) just for you:
$5 gets you: a XyloVan sticker. $10: A XyloVan crew patch (plus sticker!) $35: A hand-machined aluminum slice amulet (plus patch and sticker!) $85: A hand-machined aluminum block amulet and dowel chime (plus slice amulet, patch and sticker!) $150: A hand-machined, disc gong (seen here in the video), custom-engraved with your choice of slogan, quote or mighty call to arms! (plus dowel chime, block amulet, slice amulet, patch and sticker!)
$300: A hand-engraved, mounted XyloVan xylophone key (plus disc gong, dowel chime, block amulet, slice amulet, patch and sticker) $750: A hand-built, 5-key xylophone and personal 4-hour appearance by XyloVan anywhere within 40 miles of Los Angeles (plus engraved disc gong, dowel chime, block amulet, slice amulet, patch and sticker) $1,700: This is pretty damn awesome, so we’ll let our Indiegogo description say it:
You are THE ULTIMATE XYLOVAN PATRON – you’re pushing us a long way towards our goal, and we’re massively grateful and fortunate to have you support us. So we’re building you a FLOOR-STANDING, FULL-OCTAVE 13-KEY CHROMATIC XYLOPHONE. Each key is hand-cut, carefully tuned to A-440 (Western) scale and mounted in a handsomely-finished, laminated-wood sound-box / case with handles for carrying. The instrument is set atop detachable hairpin-steel legs, which make it elegant for a spot in your music room or parlor, yet completely portable for special events, trips abroad or visits to the home of your exotically musical friends and collaborators. The instrument is fitted with a pressure-zone microphone, allowing it to be plugged in and AMPLIFIED, which will surely lead to all sorts of amazing adventures in music.
Excellent Patron Bonus: A 1-DAY XYLOVAN COMMAND APPEARANCE Because you believe in us, we’ll bring XyloVan to you – anywhere within 150 miles of Los Angeles. We’ll set up the instruments, sound and lights for a morning, an afternoon or an evening, and you and your guest/students/family/co-conspirators can make any kind of music storm you like. You’ll also have full access to our mixing panel, in case you want to bring other instruments into the mix, or pipe XyloVan’s four channels out to your own mixer for recording purposes.
Make it $2,000 and we’ll give you our Beloved Patron Bonus: A 2-DAY XYLOVAN COMMAND APPEARANCE – Because you’ve given so much, we want to give back to you. We will drive XyloVan to you – anywhere within 400 miles of Los Angeles – for a two-day gig. Do with us what you will. We’re there for you, body, soul and amplified, illuminated, motorized instruments.
That’s it!
Donate what you can here – include your mailing address – and we’ll start building your instruments right away:
In line for inspection at the Department of Mutant VehiclesI’ve often said, because I believe it to be true: A mutant vehicle is a hole in the playa into which you pour money, blood and tears. But it’s still a goddamn mutant vehicle.
There’s nothing so thrilling and rewarding as crawling through the inspection line at the Department of Mutant Vehicles at Burning Man, and realizing you’re surrounded by hundreds of other deluded crackpot engineers hard-working creative mutant-vehicle builders who are also transitioning from the hardest part of the journey to the most wonderful reward: Driving an art car on open playa, bringing your madness into the world.
Inspection went swiftly and painlessly – and sent us off into the wild night with full permission to drive no faster than 5mph completely sober with lasers, high-watt floodlights, strobes and propane bombs flashing in ones eyes – while simultaneously avoiding running down all the drunks, darkwads and overly-enthusiastic hippies who seem to delight in suddenly flinging themselves in front of our four-ton vehicle.
Whee! DMV hottie attaches the coveted and hard-to-earn night-driving permit next to the daytime permit we earned in an earlier inspection.
The Light Fandango parked at Swing CityThe trick with a mutant vehicle like XyloVan is that you have to disassemble everything you spent many weeks building, and then rebuild it on-playa in Nevada’s unforgiving Black Rock Desert in a reasonable amount of time.
Last time (when we built Janus) the build crew was, um, me. I had a few hours help on setup, but I worked mostly solo for 2-1/2 18-hour days and by the end I was exhausted, cooked, a mess.
This time around, I had an excellent build crew – Thanks to Sam Hiatt, Julie Demsey, Lindsay VanVoorhis, Anna Metcalf and Jeremiah Peisert, as well as my kids, Biomass and Hitgirl – and the mutation from XyloVan to The Light Fandango took just 10-1/2 hours.
We bolted the pre-cut 1-inch EMT tubing frame together atop the already-assembled passenger cage with U-clamps. Then we installed the front wheel covers.
We sleeved the theatrical lighting-scrim panels onto the three sections of pre-bent conduit (thanks for the bend-expertise, Bender!), and used long poles with plywood hooks at the end to hoist the sections into the air and bolt them to the ends of the 14 struts sticking out from the framework.
At this point, a massive storm system came in – shutting down the playa to traffic, and shutting down our work party for a good 18 hours. We left the sleeved halo in place, but kept the fabric all furled up, which was a good move because the 50-60-mph winds would have thrashed it to pieces.
Once the storm passed and things dried out a bit, we unfurled and draped the fabric, installed the 10 carefully-tailored shrouds to hide the Ford ClubWagon XLT’s gorgeously brutish 1985 bodywork, and tied everything down with a Frankensteinian mess of cord and used Rob DeHart’s genius-magic trick of bunching the fabric around tennis balls tied to the frame.
We plugged in the 14 chandeliers and hung them from the strut tips with carabiners (thanks to Kristina, Christo and Lee for their tireless assembly work a few weeks earlier!)
And then we plugged in the LED strips – which promptly showed some kind of electrical fault by glowing all red, and only red. Our genius Arduino expert Spencer Hochberg quickly isolated the fault, we rerouted some power, and gorgeousness ensued. (thanks, Spencer!)
And we had fun and managed to avoid heatstroke while doing it. The miracle of playa teamwork and good friends.
Framework built atop the passenger cage, Halo sleeved and hung
Sam bolting down the halo
Sam tapes on drunk-cushions to soften the hard-edged passenger cage
Sam handles the body drapery
Lindsay and Anna wielding the lifting-poles we used to hoist the canopy into place
Lindsay and Anna goosing Sam
Anna holds the drapery in place
Lindsay, the desert flower
Lindsay zip-tying LED strips to the inside of the wheel covers
Lindsay gathers the draped fabric
Anna assists with the drapery
Anna hiding and/or working
Sam the indomitable
Sam the enthused
Sleeving the halo
Sam and Anna sleeving fabric onto the halo segments
