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 …
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 …
Arrival of the next post
Why so quiet? We’ve been … busy. We’ll get back with you shortly, with plenty of information on our progress. Thanks for staying tuned.
Rinse, repeat – building Keyboard 4
What do you call a 1985 Ford Van with three xylophone keyboards and some gongs bolted to it? Not enough xylophones. I wanted to give the van more presence, approved more weight visually (and, coincidentally enough, literally). So I’m building Keyboard 4 from the same raw aluminum (3-inch by half-inch 6106 T6 aluminum – at …
The loudest piece of metal on the van
(video lost when we quit Facebook) I love this thing. It’s a piece of scrap – a 3/4-inch-thick slug of aluminum sliced off the end of a 13-inch-diameter aluminum cylinder. Whack it, and it rings for more than a minute, with an intense, Döpplering tone. I’m going to mount it on the front, and maybe …
Keyboard 4 roughed out, with a screw-up
Ladies and gentlemen – because I don’t have a “xylophone problem, ” and I can really stop any time I want – I’m building a little whole-note, bi-directional keyboard in C for the hood of the van. The lowest key will actually stick out near-vertically from the hood, decease with two identical keyboards of 9 …
Topanga Days Memorial Day Parade
Ah, the Topanga Days parade. It runs the gamut, from the sublime (the Topanga Earth Mothers group, right) to the hippy-dippy, yin-yang-diculous. We were to take off last in the parade, and pulled in and set up next to this Lamborghini with the disco-cold-sweat paint job …
Branding
So once we decided on the quasi-military paint job. we needed to finish it off with something. I designed this stylized X that might or might not be ripped off from the universal symbol for radiation. The first one came out pretty well, but will need some touchup. Just don’t look too closely …
Backsides & elbows
Back from Maker Faire, and there are a million little things to do for our next gig. We’re going to roll in the Topanga Days Parade on Memorial Day. Topanga Canyon is a blend of old-school hippie culture and celebrity ranches with long driveways, a beautiful curving road up from the ocean to the San …
Noisy work
(video lost when we quit Facebook)I cut a lot of metal. I’m still cutting. It sounds like this. It’s a little loud but the earplugs and dual-can respirator mask keep it from killing me. When I’m done, the floor looks like this:
Portrait, Taco Bell parking lot, the Grapevine
Shot last night, in transit home from Maker Faire to Silver Lake, at sunset, somewhere near Buttonwillow. That’s my wife, partner and co-creator mugging from the navigator’s seat.
Maker Faire Day 2 – How to play XyloVan & who made it
(videos of this lost when we quit Facebook)You all showed us how to play today. You toddled up and whacked away with sticks, silly grins on your 2-year-old faces. You strode up as if approaching the concert vibraphone you played in band, delicately picking out notes to tunes you haven’t played in 20 years. You …
Day 1 of Maker Faire – hundreds of hammering hands!
(videos here were lost when we quit Facebook – photos below!) Hey! The Maker Faire crowd gave the van a good wringing (ringing?) out all day long,and the gear all held up (mostly) great. Welcome to all the Maker Faire folks who came by and banged on the van today. What a fabulous noise you …
All systems go for Maker Faire
Well, not quite all systems. There’s still the auxiliary battery, the amplifier, the mixer, the speaker system, two resonators, the interior headliner needs replacing, the sun canopies haven’t been sewn, and the whole thing has to be wired and lit for the playa. But when you bang on the thing it rings.And that’s what we …
Mounting the disc gongs
I fell in love with these things while scrounging through the scrap bins at Industrial Metal Supply. They’re the sawn-off leavings of enormous logs of aluminum, some of which had been many feet long and up to 12 inches thick. They sound fantastic. And they look pretty graphic against the green of the van, in …
Casualties hereof
No Band-Aids? No problem!
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 …
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 …
It *is* easy being green
We had all sorts of crazy notions for decorating the van. As vibrant as its post-70s-paint job and sober-living-facility-logo’d style were, we wanted to transform it – to give it a new visual life to match its new incarnation as a rolling instrument. We thought about going hotrod-lowrider with a lime-green metalflake triple-clearcoat paint job …
Makin’ mallets
Cut sticks. Bevel sticks …