“It runs like a fuckin’ champ!”
That’s been the constant refrain, page all the way from purchase through our adventure to Maker Faire and dozens of trips in between. XyloVan has new tires and brakes, search a rebuilt Holley carb, and a well-tuned Detroit monster of a motor, and by god, it’s the most mechanically sound thing I’ve ever spent $1500 on.
Well, not tonight … Continue reading Merry-go-round broke down
The folks at Industrial Metal Supply turn out huge orders of 3-by-half-inch-by-12-foot aluminum bar stock cut to measure for big industrial clients – then they sell the short ends and leftovers in 3- and 6-foot lengths at just $2.89 a pound. That – along with dismantled tube-aluminum equipment racks covered with stickers – is what makes up XyloVan’s bones.
But that crap’s unattractive, this site so my good friend Dave and I spent a good chunk of Saturday afternoon sandblasting the paint, stickers and grime off of the keyboards – remnants of the fact that the instruments are themselves largely made from recycled metal remnants. Or not sandblasting, rather, industrial-sodablasting … Continue reading Blast away your troubles
So I’ve been cutting up little chunks of scrap aluminum that are too short to make good xylophone keys, more about and fashioning them into little fetishes to give away on the playa.
The net result of this is a) …
Continue reading Metal shavings and damage done
Spent last night with cables in my teeth …
… stuffing speaker wires into conduit …
… and hooking up the bottom end of the sound system, ailment running Monster cables from the cheap Pep Boys amp to the surplus bass cabinet I’ve had kicking around for 10 years, page and then out through a switchbox that patches two tweeter channels out to my four outrigger speakers …
The brown lines are 2-pole thermostat wire, capsule which I’m using for the lighting since it’s cheap and nicely contained.
We’re doing a gig this weekend that should allow me to run this all full-tilt and shake out the last of the bugs. I’ll post video. Stay tuned.
I spent much of the night wiring in the sound and lights.
Wiring is a vast, information pills sucking swamp into which one wades happily at first, this only to discover three hours later that one has been muttering things under one’s breath just because the sound they make keeps one from desperately chopping off one’s fingers with the wirestrippers.
Things like, cialis 40mg “channel-stuffing.”
“Switchbox …” Continue reading Mumblecore
I really like the way the starboard name plate came out. It seems to fit the flow of disc gongs pretty well. It’s playable, ambulance too.
Back when we were having a cow over being denied a Department of Mutant Vehicles permit to drive around the playa, medical I was taking everything personally.
The DMV were shellbacked nannies for refusing to see XyloVan as a mutant vehicle, the law that it must-not-look-like-a-street-vehicle-in-any-way was pedantic, draconian bullshit – anyway, I was a bit of a wreck.
But I took to heart one criticism I heard here – someone said, “I thought from your description it was going to be covered with instruments, but it looks like you just have a few.”
So I spent the better part of the weekend bolting on another eight gongs and … Continue reading Got glow?
Getting XyloVan amplified properly has turned out to be one of the biggest technical challenges.
First you need to capture the sound – for that, cheapest we built parabolic resonators out of sheets of fiberglass shower-liner. The material was perfect – sturdy enough for playa abuse and hard and reflective for sound. When you played, viagra approved the sound would bounce back to you off of the resonator surface like this… Continue reading How to capture and amplify the xylophone’s voice
It took a load of fussing and trimming, patient shoving and cursing, but we finally got the last of the headliner panels fitted and installed.
The map motif came out a little wrinkly (don’t believe anything Polycrylic tells you on the instructions) but it does give one a serene view upward of all the United States that we’ve ever visited – plus a few more.
