Category: Vehicle modifications

XyloVan will be stationary in BRC – and that’s okay

So: We could have pulled together a mad/brilliant mutation in time to qualify for a driving license at Burning Man.

But we would have died trying.

It’s hot. We’re exhausted. There’s a lot of wiring left to do. And we seem to remember enjoying spending time with the kids, generic and hope we can get some of that in before heading out to the playa.

Plus, we figure that with good siting, plenty of people will find it, and maybe recommend it to their friends, and come back to play it repeatedly if they like it. Our vision still stands – we want people to find it, interact with it, bring their own instruments and talents and sick noise-making inspiration, and play the van. That’ll work whether we’re moving around or not. And maybe even better … not.

At right is a crudely photoshopped image of how the sun-shades should look once we get ’em installed.

And here’s what I just wrote to the DMV: More

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??? XyloVan DENIED a Burning Man Mutant Vehicle invitation (updates)

I’m so flabbergasted I can’t even see straight. This just appeared in my inbox.

Below it is my response to the Black Rock CityDepartment of Mutant Vehicles. Stay hopeful, XyloVan friends – I don’t hear a fat lady doing “La Traviata” just yet. Updates to the correspondence below that.

Dear Mack,

The DMV has carefully reviewed your application for your mutant vehicle “Xylovan” (registration number # 1258) and we’re very sorry to inform you that we can not currently send you an invitation to bring your vehicle to the playa for On-Playa Inspection.
Due to the high number of applications and limited number of vehicles we can invite, we simply can not invite all applicants, even when they meet the minimum requirements. We don’t want anyone to have the sad experience of bringing a vehicle out to the playa and having it denied a license after all that work! We do our best to give invitations to those most likely to get approved on playa.

The review team felt that:
* The vehicle as shown in your application does not meet the current criteria for a Mutant Vehicle (see below)
* The base vehicle (Van) is unmodified/mutated
* This would be a fine in-camp (stationary) piece …

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Hood ornament

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 …

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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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Nameplate

I Dremeled this up the other night. Waiting until the last minute to install it in place of the Ford Club Wagon XLT plate. Doing so prematurely would be courting calamity.

Makes a pretty sweet “B” when you hit it.

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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Keyboard 4 installed – Now a total of 83 keys!

Hit a big milestone the week before last, sales but I’ve been too busy until now to blog about it.

I installed Keyboard 4 on the van’s hood – no small task, since the thing has to bolt onto a pretty thin sandwich of steel without puncturing anything – plus the f%#&er weighs a good 70 pounds.

Here I’ve already marked and drilled holes for the left-hand half of the keyboard, and I’m attaching it with 3/8″ coarse-thread tap bolts …

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Locked and loaded

Passed another major milestone tonight.

We are now – but for a wee bit of bungie-ing – ready for the long trek to Maker Faire.

I spent much of the evening getting Keyboards 2 and 3 (right) properly aligned against the side of the van.

I had to measure and cut support stanchions from 2-inch recycled aluminum tubing (thanks again, IMS), and then mount bottom brackets onto the van. This involves drilling holes in the body and attaching the SpeedRail support brackets to it with an ungodly number of pan washers and other hardware so they won’t tear through the metal with all the weight and stress …

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Xylophones, meet Van!

After nearly three months of cutting and grinding, fiddling and drilling, cursing and screwing and painting, the magic moment is here.

Time to mount the xylophones on the van.

Here’s video (videos lost when we quit Facebook) of @alienrobot and me mounting Keyboard 2 which is the lower-octave and rear-most of the two keyboards I built for the passenger side of the van:

And here’s what Keyboard 1 looked like as friend Steve Finkel and I mounted it on the driver’s side …

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Sandblasting the enormous honkin’ rack

Today saw me sandblasting metal shoulder-to-shoulder in the midday sun with Dave, as we stripped the roof rack we picked up last week and primered it and the van’s roof in prep for painting.

The prop shop next door to Dave in (undisclosed location) has a compressor the size of a Volkswagen, which powered Dave’s sandblaster through 100 pounds of #30-grit sand.

It’s tedious, filthy work …

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Interior design, bolts, sleeper-rod pretensions & random brain-damaging activities

Random, random, random!

We flit from project to project, looking like hummingbirds on crack (one day it’s instrument construction, the next day body work), but we’re still on a headlong parallel-tracked trajectory to getting the beast ready for Maker Faire.

FORWARD! IN ALL DIRECTIONS!

We did a lot of unfinished business today, (not all of it documented here).

I cut and drilled the stringers for Keyboard 3.

@alienrobot and I bolted down the main mounting clamps for Keyboard 1. We bought a double fistful of bolts, nuts and washers for attachment of the mounting hardware for Keyboards 2 and 3.

And then we got busy installing the rug and putting the seats and doorsills back in …

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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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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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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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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