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 …
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 …
The quality goes in …
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.
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 …
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, …
Headlined!
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 …
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 …
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 …
Hot junkyard crawl
Spent an unreasonable hot day in the junkyard, drug crawling around inside vans and harvesting body-trim clips. They’re these cheap, utterly unique little white nylon thingies. You can’t buy them from Ford, aftermarket sellers don’t sell them, you literally have to crawl through several Ford vans, popping out the headliner ribs and slipping clips out. …
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 …
Second thoughts on how XyloVan can interact with Burning Man (updated)
Had a long talk with my infinitely wise wife and co-creator last night and maybe … just maybe … having XyloVan sited permanently somewhere on the playa would actually be better in some ways than getting a driving license. More thoughts on this as they develop in my addled brain. But for now, here’s my …
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 …
XyloVan clears its throat – Hello, World!
(video lost – damn Facebook anyway)I finally figured this out: A pressure-zone microphone turns out to be the best solution for miking the keyboards on XyloVan.
Installing the outriggers
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Registration application for the Playa
We just filed this with Black Rock City Department of Mutant Vehicles, dosage in time for the June 30 registration deadline:
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.
Handmade Music LA at Crashspace
So, we probably fit in with the circuit-bending loop/fizzbit laptop-jazz at Crash Space about as well as well as rubber boots at a tap-dance show, but hey, that was huge fun. Thanks to everyone who (like these two) found their own sound tonight with fiberglass sticks and aluminum bar stock, somewhere between themselves and the …