Category: Vehicle modifications

Mad dash to the finish

We have a deadline.

I have to finish this by 7/30, since other obligations will prevent me from working on it much more until the week before Burning Man.

So I’ve spent the past week solid (nearly) chopping through task after task. At right are the steel-conduit outriggers I installed at the top of the framework – this will give me something to hang light-bars and speakers from.

Here are the lightbars, cut from 1x4s and painted with a dull-silver hammertone paint.

David (our architect) spent much of last night using a cutting wheel (courtesy of the Disco Kremlin crew – thanks!) to cut out cloud shapes from the sheets of perforated steel that is usually used in plastering walls.

These will be screwed to the crown rail around the top of the pianos once we get to the playa.

Here’s another shot of the work, with the camera flash turned off. Much better.

Earlier, my son had silver-painted all the 1×2 pine furring strips we had, which I tacked up as proof-of-concept for a design layer on the pianos’ top edge. We’ll be getting more of these and painting them the week before the burn so that we can batten down the top and bottom edges of JANUS’ skin.

We then gave JANUS a healthy bath of Flame-X – a fire retardant chemical to protect the otherwise pretty-flammable cotton from following the path of combustion.

Then David and I stood back for a minute to admire our handiwork …

… and started the teardown. We basically un-built JANUS – stripping off the canvas skins, unscrewing all the framing, unbolting the foundational lumber, and then removing the hinge-pinned profiles. It took about two hours.

David peeled off for bed at around 1 a.m. this morning, and I finished up, stacking everything as neatly as I could on top of the van. I got done around 4 a.m., came home to catch a few hours sleep, and returned with a new set of come-along straps from Pep Boys to secure the load.

Ready to roll!

There’s still much to do, but we’ll attend to that the week before the burn – and on the playa:

– Wiring the light-bars
– Re-wiring XyloVan’s roof to fit JANUS’ light- and speaker-positions
– Sewing pipe sleeves into the rear fabric panels
– Acquiring 170 linear feet of furring strips for battens – and painting them silver

But for now, JANUS is complete.

I just want to give thanks here to some good friends, old and new, without whom this would never have happened – or would have ended badly:

– Dave LaFontaine, John Amussen and Alan Hagman for excellent company and assistance
– The crew next door building the Disco Kremlin bus – Mac, Bernie and Tina, for being endlessly helpful, friendly and generous. Thanks for the use of all the tools and materials that helped us solve more than a couple show-stoppers
– David Hoffman, who took my half-assed architectural ideas, and made my mutant vehicle design concept into a portable, reusable, customizable and easily-assembled reality.
– My kids, Biomass and Hitgirl, for lending a hand when it was needed most, and finally my long-suffering wife, Kristina, whose encouragement, support and patronage made it happen.

We built an art car in 30 days or less. Now all we have to do is get it to the playa.

Skinning JANUS

After sewing JANUS’ skin out of cotton dropcloths and then dyeing said dropcloths blue, I discovered the fabric had shrunk.

Yyyeah. All that fabric that I had meticulously fitted to the frame, and then sewn tightly together, was now smaller.

I remedied this by slipping the covers onto JANUS’ piano-keyboard “shoulders,” (which still – miraculously – fit), wetting down the fabric, and then stretching it, foot by foot.

In the end, it roughed out pretty nicely. We’ll be stapling all the top and bottom edges of the fabric to 1×2 pine furring strips (painted silver) on the playa, then screwing them to the crown rail at the top and the bottoms of the profiles a few inches off the ground.

Assembling the cloud deck

The security bars that I acquired turned out to be nearly the perfect size to fit XyloVan’s monster roof rack when turned on their sides – one pane wide and two panes long.

Alan and I spent most of Sunday measuring the bars and then drilling holes through them for 3/8-inch bolts.

We created a top-rail by drilling through 1.25-inch steel conduit and bolting it to the tops of the four side panes.


Then we cut an access hatch in one half of the rear pane, and cut notches in the bottom rail of the rear and front panes so that they could fit over the rack’s existing side rails. (the panes were 5’4″, order while the rack is only 5′ wide). Passengers will mount the deck by climbing XyloVan’s rear ladder and then ducking under the railing.

Huge thanks here to Alan for helping build – and to Bernie from the endlessly generous crew next door building the Disco Kremlin bus, for doing a little tack-welding to reattach a couple bars that came loose during cutting.

The long panes take two men to lift only because they’re bulky – they’re actually fairly light.

Once we loose-bolted it together on the roof rack, we realized that the security grates’ original mounting tabs stuck out and got in the way of things, wo we cut ’em off – then everything fit neatly.

Here’s Alan with our handiwork. I may paint it a pale blue so that it blends into the background better when we reach the playa.

The whole thing folds down to a stack only four inches thick, yet should be stout enough to keep even the burliest drunks from plunging off the van. Knock wood.

Color

I chose blue to counterpoint XyloVan’s shiny aluminum keyboards – I had in mind a Moroccan blue – sort of ashy, like it had been fading for a while …

so it’s four boxes of Royal Blue to one box of Denim, and then it’s a matter of shoving all that fabric into that one tiny tub.

Once saturated, it fit in just fine.

Here’s the left-front panel. Why do I fear that – when I get the lace up over the vehicle’s “eyes” – I will have become some sort of van seamstress, forever building art cars and my latest model will be a laughingstock because it resembles a massive burkha. (shudder)

I laid out the panels on the lawn to dry – then when they were partway there, I pulled them up to the deck railing.

Here’s what that looked like just beforehand.

And here’s what you get when you dye without gloves on.

Observation deck, ho!

I’ve been running around like a madman the past week. I looked at my first post on this project – it was less than three weeks ago. I’m going to have completed an entire vehicle mutation within a single month. It’s a blur of hardware store runs, power tools and raw material.

Fencing worried me the worst. If there’s to be a cloud deck, I need something to keep the happy people from plunging off of it.

A contractor promised to drop off some recycled fence railing, gratis – and then he welched.

Fresh metal was going to cost at least $300 (yes, as a matter of fact, we are on a budget.) so that wouldn’t work.

So I dropped an ad into FreeCycle:

need about 35 linear feet of scrapped metal railings, the sort you see
on balconies, etc.

It can be rusted, bent or painted funky, but it must be at least 36″
high, with a top rail of at least 1″ thickness (round or square).

I will happily pick it up, and even help you clean up around it if it’s
buried among your construction debris.

Don’t own it, but know where I can get it? Let me know! I need this for
an art car I”m building – need to secure this in next 2 weeks! Thanks!

And lo and behold I got a call the next day. From a Burner.

Having just given birth a few months ago, she was resigned to skipping the Burn this year. But she had a whole slew of steel security bars that she just had taken off a building she’s renovating – and offered them up for free.

I cajoled the kids into helping scrub the crapola off of them

Next I’ll be bolting them together. They’ll be perfect. You’ll see …

Connecting the dots

Once I re-hung all the profiles, I realized (yet again) that I am a complete idiot.

The saying goes “measure twice, cut once” but it does NOT say “measure three times, taking into account three-dimensional design, the fact that you’re not on level ground and that you’re a complete numbskull, cut once.”

I had failed to take into consideration the … aw, hell, I won’t bore you with the details. Anyway, the top-line `1x4s were misaligned by a good 4.5 inches.

Suffice to say, I trimmed the tops of the front profiles on both sides to bring them into line with the rear profiles, then kludged together the 1x4s – the whole line will be hidden somewhat by the cloud shapes that we’re attaching later to the top of the piano lid, so all’s well … More

Building JANUS – roughing out the profile

David Hoffman’s architecture for JANUS is based on my design and his experience as a Hollywood scenic designer.

I originally planned to monkey together some kind of framework from metal tubing – I had a couple of old Ikea deck-rocking-chair frames out of swoopy-looking 5/8-inch steel and had planned to (somehow) hang them from tubing bolted to the roof rack. But David came up with something far better – a lightweight, somewhat rigid framework of 2x4s, 1x6es and 4×8-foot sheets of half-inch plywood.

The first order of business after bolting the major framing to XyloVan’s burly roof rack was to cut the plywood’s edges to fit the contours of a 1985 Ford ClubWagon XLT.

We set the sheets up on blocks beside the van, leveled them, then drew the van profile with a stick – one end of which traced the shape of the sheet metal, the other end of which held a Sharpie that drew the shape onto the wood.

Then David and John installed loose-pin hinges, which we’re using so the plywood profiles can be mounted and unmounted easily.

This involved quite a bit of finagling with the jigsaw, as we shifted the panels up/down/left/right to bring them into line with the vehicle and the ground.

This is the right-rear corner, where we’ve cut and installed two plywood sheets. They’re on hinges so, they swing a bit, but we’ll get that sorted out.

The mounting point for Right 2 gave David and me pause ,,,

We had to mount it to the doorjamb – which is about 1.5 inches wide – so that both the passenger front door and the big sliding door (with xylophone keyboard #3 mounted on it – open and shut smoothly. Once we cut down the hinges a bit, removed one of the circular door gongs and trimmed the profile about six times, that panel fits perfectly, and both doors operate smoothly.

Here’s the finished product.

Next – cutting out the profiles’ outer shapes.

Building JANUS – roughing out the frame

We started today with the framing for what will eventually look something like this.

Dave and Alan generously toiled in the sun with me at Big Art Labs, and we began roughing out the side rails that will be bolted to the roof rack.

David Hoffman’s design called for 2x4s, but after finding the 8-footers that I bought to be too short for the job, we tried 1x6es. These proved to be too flimsy for the job but they were good enough to stand in until I can get back to Home Depot for the right size lumber.

Then we marked sheets of 1/2-inch plywood against the profile of the van’s body, taking into account little oddities like marker lights, xylophone mounts and the right rear crushed bumper.

Here, Dave shows off the fine 4×8 sheet of 1/2-inch ply he caught from the stern of the van, using light tackle and bloodworms for bait.

A skillsaw made short work of the wavy lines.

We installed a couple of the plywood profiles using loose-pin hinges.

And hey, presto – they fit! It only took six hours to get all this figured out. My deepest heartfelt thanks to both Alan and Dave for helping get this solved.

Next – we’ll replace the frame rails with 2×4 versions, and cut out the other profiles.

JANUS frame design – Building an art car around an art car

The Department of Mutant Vehicles is very particular about this: In order to receive a new mutant vehicle permit (of which only a limited few hundred will be issued to 50, 000+ Burners), your vehicle must no longer resemble a street vehicle in any way.

We toyed with a bunch of designs before settling on JANUS, the Celestial Player Piano. And now we have to figure out how to conceal XyloVan, covering a perfectly good art car with another perfectly good art car that allows people to still play the instruments and climb up to the roof.

I was going to build a framework out of steel conduit lashed to the rooftop railing (which will itself be bolted to the cargo rack) but my good friend David Hoffman, a playa veteran (and a scenic designer by trade) worked up a much more economical design.

Click at right to see the full array of sketches.

We’ll cut eight profile shapes out of plywood, attach them to two long 2x4s attached to the cargo rack, and then box them out and stiffen them with 1x3s and plywood. (Note – this isn’t the final shape, it might be a bit more Seussian – or baroque.) The whole array will also be fixed to XyloVan’s body panels with loose-pin hinges, to allow for swift setup and teardown.

With any luck, We’ll have our mitts on some recycled porch railing by Friday so we can build the rooftop cloud deck. (See full concept drawing. )

Construction starts Saturday!

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

Gussets – a little slab of playa engineering

What holds this crazy rig together? Why, abortion gussets, of course.

Fold a nine-inch wide strip of fabric (at 60″) into a strip four layers thick, seam its long edges, and then cut it into strips about six inches long.

Then seam the cut edges and voila – a little stack of stout reinforcements …

… to be sewn into place to keep the fabric all in one piece while still letting the air flow through.

Roof shade – the sewing begins in earnest

Step one, ailment attempt to throw together an enormous framework of PVC pipe to arc over the van like some demented logo for caffeinated high-fructose corn syrup ‘n’ gutbombs.

Valiantly attempt to model it.

Then, when that fails, toss the PVC aside and acquire some 1″ steel conduit and connectors for a new frame, which you injure yourself building.

Then start sewing. (more photos after the jump. 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

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