Category: lights & sound

Bits and bobs – 3 days till liftoff

Because an art car is never finished.

I disassembled all the light arrays from XyloVan 1.0, and I’m reassembling them onto the light bars I made for JANUS. This involves testing all of them, including the flasher circuits …

… and then screwing them down. I’ll wire everything up later today. (It’s stupid-o’clock in the morning right now).

I also cut a stencil so that I can spraypaint warnings (PLEASE DON’T CLIMB HERE!) that discourage people from trying to scramble up onto JANUS’ “shoulders,” which are built to withstand the playa winds and sun, but not a 238-pound Java developer full of Fuzzy Navels and good cheer – let alone a 5-year-old child in a Wolverine costume.

I then cut a frame for the stencil out of an old TV carton and put the whole thing together with Gorilla Tape (accept no substitutes!)

I’ve also been drilling out a few discarded xylophone keys that I plan to mount with the drums that will be installed on the Cloud Deck so that people riding on top will have more instruments to play.

Chugchugchug.

Repair time in Kidsville

Quick – run out and publish this bumper sticker: “AN ART CAR IS A HOLE IN THE DESERT INTO WHICH YOU POUR MONEY”

I moved the van into Kidsville Thursday morning to repair a melted circuit. A staple had cut through a lead, shorting out the entire port strobe circuit – and basically melting the wires together. Check it out …
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Bits and bobs – knocking down the punchlist

Last night was all about hitting XyloVan’s extensive punchlist of Little Things that Need Doing.

I spent the better part of a flaming Technicolor tequila dusk on the roof beneath the gently fluttering canopy, side effects paranoid that we’ll crash or break down en route to the playa, cialis 40mg and debugging shorts in the strobe/flood bars. Then I set about hammering out all the other little things I’ve been meaning to do as this insane 6-month project comes to fruition.

Things like … More

Sound check – Clean!

Clean enough, discount anyway.

That wicked line buzz is gone. It turns out I needed to ground the mixer to the chassis, link which involved tearing apart and then sewing up the 20-foot umbilical. That took a little while.

Pay no attention to my banging. I’m just banging. But it’s sounding pretty lush. And I”m excited to show it off. Thanks to everyone who pulled up and talked to us this afternoon. It’s all good.

Just a little more wiring to go.

Light bars

The lighting plan is coming together slowly, rx but surely. I installed lights behind the disc gongs, buy ordered some green EL wire and am eagerly awaiting delivery of the Incredibly Stupid Number of Chinese Strobe Lights, view which may or may not be used in an attempt to dazzle the DMV into giving us a nighttime driving permit.

But until then, I got to work building these light bars – scavenged from BM projects past and hand-built over the past week or so. They will hang over the keyboards, giving light to play by … More

Neatening the mass of spaghetti


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.

Mumblecore

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 …” More

Got glow?

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 … More

How to capture and amplify the xylophone’s voice

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… More

Wiring port – get the juice out

I started out thinking, buy information pills “Oh, I’ll just run wires for all the external light and sound equipment in through one of the windows whenever we set up.”

Then I got a load of the number of wires and connectors this would entail – 16 two-pole wires just from the four speaker booms and the lights mounted there, alone – and came up with a better idea … More

Backsides and elbows

Looking back on it, page the past couple weeks have been an utter blur.

After all this, viagra order and seeing all the tasks remaining (wiring, view lights, instruments, sunshades, roof deck) between now and Burning Man, I have to admit that having our DMV application denied was the very best thing that could have happened to us.

So much to do, so little time, as Dean Motter’s Mister X was wont to say.

So here’s all the crazy work we’ve been up to, compressed into one massively overdue blog post:

We started in on replacing the headliner … More

Fabricating the control pod

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 …

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Huevos sonicos

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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We need MORE POWER – wiring XyloVan’s auxiliary battery

After weeks (okay, months) of building instruments, doing bodywork, making mallets and generally getting XyloVan into shape, it’s finally time to give it a pulse. How? Auxiliary big-ass battery.

The battery’s going to have to power the amplification system and the lights while we’re out roving the playa – or more importantly while we’re parked and people are playing for hours on end.

First thing you need is a really, really, really long battery cable. There’s no room for this huge deep-cycle marine battery in the engine compartment or anywhere near it.

The longest battery jumper cables made are only 20 feet, so I have to splice a couple of them together and somehow route them from the main battery in the engine bay, down beneath the truck, around the engine mount and driveshaft and exhaust pipes – and rearward to a place somewhere under the second row of bench seats because that’s where the auxiliary battery will be. And that means weather- and abrasion-proofing the cables – and that means cutting up some old inner tubes to serve as conduit and insulation …

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