Month: April 2010

Hey there. Nice RACK.

Yes! We have discovered the perfect rack for XyloVan – an architectural salvage expert up in Santa Barbara was liquidating his business, and had this parked atop a storage unit. This is a burly, 10-foot-long tube-steel rack, floored with heavy duty wire mesh it’ll be the second floor of the van, the observation deck, the framework for all the lighting and shade structures, and lord knows what other trouble we’ll get into.

Dave was kind enough to cruise up there with me, and help me wrestle it onto the van …

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Machinist’s woe: How the hell do I fix THIS?

So I was tapping a stringer on Keyboard 1 and the tap snapped off in the hole.

Below the surface. That’s hardened steel. Drilling it out so I could use a reverse-extractor was fruitless: I blunted, and finally snapped a cobalt bit, which the hardware store said was the hardest thing they sell.

Now WTF do I do? Anyone have any brilliant solutions? Please forward this to all the metalworkers you know.

Machining the superstructure for Keyboard 2

I’d like to think we’ve known how to build XyloVan from day one, but the truth is – we’re dumb. We’re like sack-of-hammers, short-bus, don’t-get-the-knock-knock-jokes dumb.

We’re like chimps who have seen television, digging around in the back of the live set with screwdrivers. We make dumb mistakes, do dumb things, suffer from dumb ideas. And along the way, stuff gets built.

So this 3-foot-long chunk of 1.5-inch by .5-inch aluminum is one of the four stringers for Keyboard 2. These serve as the airframe for the instrument …

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First blood, first panel surgery

Kind of amazing that I haven’t already done something like this – sliced it open on the inside of the body structure while trying to thread a coarse nut onto a fine-threaded tap bolt. Duh.

Today we began sorting out the foundational hardware – the junk that holds the xylophones to the van. They’re going to be big, heavy, and somewhat springy, and we don’t want them flexing loose or tearing the metal.

Rogan helped me hem and haw my way through the engineering challenge – how can we make the keyboards ride high enough when stowed that they won’t scrape the ground – but still be easy to deploy and play? …

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Keyboard 2 of 3 laid out (well, okay, it’s half a full keyboard, but …)

By now, it should be plain that there’s absolutely no linear flow to the XyloVan construction plan.

With Maker Faire bearing down on us in 7 weeks, we’re tackling tasks willy-nilly, like a crew of chimps with A.D.D. and a pound of meth – frenziedly, for long stretches, whether in teams or alone, whenever we’re able.

Tonight, I was alone, so I spent it cutting aluminum stringers to fit the frames and laying out Keyboard 2, which with Keyboard 3 will cover the passenger side of the van.

The full keyboard (about 2.5 octaves) would be seven or eight feet long, but we have to somehow accommodate the van’s sliding door …

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Makeover, step 1

So I spent Saturday morning in the junkyard with Dave (thanks, Dave!), who helped me pull a rear door, a ladder and an extra panel of headliner.

Then I picked up a chunk of carpet remnant (right) which should mesh nicely with the body color and look pretty clean once I get it glued and screw all the floor moldings down again.

I spent a couple of hours cutting it to the shape of the vomitrocious (as my wife says) poo-brown carpet that had served as the van floor for a sober living facility taxi-bus and and for numerous band tours including one (or so John told me whilst selling it to me) involving the Germs.

I then promptly forgot to take a photo of the new interior until all the furniture was back in the van, none of it bolted down.

On Sunday, we yanked off the trim all the way around …

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There, I fixed it – Part 1

So here’s the solution to the problem I discovered yesterday.

The problem was that the xylophone – if bolted to the van with the upper hinge of the frame just below the windows – would have scraped the ground.

Solution: Get a few more Speed-Rail parts and create a sort of offset cantilever hinge. Built right, it should pivot out and away from the van to playing position (about a 20-degree angle from the ground) when deployed, then fold up flat against the van when stowed for travel.

First, I have to modify one of the parts, a sort of T-joint that is too wide to fit between the anchors for the key stringers.

A little circular saw abuse – followed by much cursing and futzing and hollowing out the apparently mis-forged piece so that it actually *fits* over 1.5-inch pipe – and the piece now fits snugly between the stringer ends …

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Stripdown

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.

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Roughing out the frame for keyboard 1

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