To carry two sets of speakers (one port and the other starboard), I’m installing pipes of 3/4-inch galvanized steel conduit onto the roof rack, by means of these custom-built brackets …
Standard conduit clamps grip the brackets to the big honkin’ roof rack and the pipes slip through these to be screwed down …
I’ve been wanting to do this to Keyboard 4 for a while now: A customized logo.
In keeping with the rest of the van’s aesthetic – and my utter lack of refined metalworking skills – it’s going to be extremely rough, applied with near-blunt force directly to the metal on the center key. This is an F that lines up with the hood’s centerline and – appropriately modified – should lend a sort of Peterbilt-like elegance to XyloVan’s prow.
I start by doing a plain-stencil nameplate similar to the quarter-panel nameplate that I Dremeled up a few weeks back …
There are two reasons for building a moveable command panel for the sound and light controls:
A) I’d like to be able to control the sound and lights from outside the van (so I can tell whether my knob-twiddling is having any effect. and B) I want to make the whole thing removable so that I can lock the van and take the junkie-bait with me whenever I park for a while.
An old Makita power-drill box is the perfect candidate for this. It’s made of blow-moulded plastic, so it’s designed to take a beating. And with a little modification, it will accommodate the mixer, all the patch cords that come in and out, and even a little switch-panel for various light circuits.
I Dremel out some of the box’s lining, which was form-fitting for a Makita power drill but would otherwise clamp down on the mixer’s knobs and jacks …
If the xylophones are XyloVan’s skeleton and soul, then the sound system is its gonads.
To add some mystique to the aluminum’s natural resonance, we’re hooking up a cheap Pep Boys amplifier to the auxiliary power system, flying a quartet of cheap bookshelf speakers on outrigger booms (about which more later) and feeding them mike signals via a Behringer Xenyx digital-delay mixer. We haven’t quite figured out the microphones yet (well – more about that later).
But we have to install the components somewhere slightly out of the way yet still accessible so I can futz and troubleshoot from one location if anything goes south with the sound or lighting …
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