There’s no trick to mounting a 400-pound-plus tube-steel roof rack atop a Ford Club Wagon XLT. All it involves is a burly buddy, two day-laborers picked up from Home Depot, and a whole lot of swearing, shouting and straining. Really, it’s as easy as …
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 …
Keyboards 1, 2 and 3 – NOW COMPLETE
Sweet.
Bender ender – how to listen up and quit breaking sh#t
Like a drunk tiptoeing into his AA meeting with actual quitting on his mind, I’m finally ready to quit breaking taps – and pay attention to all the solid advice I’ve been getting along the way. Tonight, I took it all in hand and put it to work on my one surviving 6mm tapping tool …
Go back, Jack. Do it again.
Keyboard 1 is more than 7 and 2 1/2 octaves long – running from A to high D#. All that metal is pretty heavy, pharmacy and the weight actually bows the stringers that carry the keys across it, so I’m building in a crosspiece for support. It will run vertically between the top rail and …
Wherein we get a little professional help, and joy is restored
All the geek opinion and doomsaying in the world can’t beat a crusty old Chicano machinist in a crusty old machine shop. After Googling and dialing all over Hollywood, Los Feliz and Glendale in search of an EDM-equipped shop, I phoned a local machine shop and described my two mistakes. “Ehhh, bring it in, we’ll …
Low-rent metal-work in three easy steps
My plans for a productive evening of xylophone-building thus foiled, I turned to slapping together the rest of the frame-mounting hardware. Unfortunately, the Hollaender company turned out a couple of SpeedRail parts with nasty burrs inside that kept them from sliding onto the 2-inch aluminum tubing that we’re using for xylophone frames. I tried grinding …
Damn it. Again.
In machining – as in lovemaking and war – if it hurts, you’re not doing it right. I seem to keep making the same damn mistake. alienrobot did a great job of tapping most of the mounting holes in Keyboard 1 using just the little 4-inch tap handle that came with the set. Then I …
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 …
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 …
How to build a xylophone
For those who haven’t been following along, here’s how it’s done, roughly in order: First, you read Jim Doble‘s brief but precise instructions for making xylophones. Read ’em again – they’re clearly written, with a basic illustration and links to photos and sound clips, and then find some wood or metal that you can work …
Machinist’s woe: How the hell do I fix THIS?
So I was tapping a stringer on Keyboard 1 and the tap snapped off in the hole. Below the surface. That’s hardened steel. Drilling it out so I could use a reverse-extractor was fruitless: I blunted, and finally snapped a cobalt bit, which the hardware store said was the hardest thing they sell. Now WTF …
Fruits of the past two nights’ labors
It’s coming together – more than 15 linear feet of fully chromatic xylophones. Keyboard 1 and Keyboard 2 are built – (they’ll need to be disassembled for final polishing) and Keyboard 3 (at right) is ready to have its stringers machined. More on how all this was made tomorrow night. Facedown time.
Machining the superstructure for Keyboard 2
I’d like to think we’ve known how to build XyloVan from day one, but the truth is – we’re dumb. We’re like sack-of-hammers, short-bus, don’t-get-the-knock-knock-jokes dumb. We’re like chimps who have seen television, digging around in the back of the live set with screwdrivers. We make dumb mistakes, do dumb things, suffer from dumb ideas. …
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 …
Deflowering the sheet metal
First mounting hole. (Rogan‘s photo)
Keyboard 2 of 3 laid out (well, okay, it’s half a full keyboard, but …)
By now, it should be plain that there’s absolutely no linear flow to the XyloVan construction plan. With Maker Faire bearing down on us in 7 weeks, we’re tackling tasks willy-nilly, like a crew of chimps with A.D.D. and a pound of meth – frenziedly, for long stretches, whether in teams or alone, whenever we’re …
Makeover, step 1
So I spent Saturday morning in the junkyard with Dave (thanks, Dave!), who helped me pull a rear door, a ladder and an extra panel of headliner. Then I picked up a chunk of carpet remnant (right) which should mesh nicely with the body color and look pretty clean once I get it glued and …
Drilling 62 holes
It goes something like this, two 3/8ths-inch holes for each of the 31 keys in Keyboard 1. Takes about two minutes per hole. And yes, my neighbors might hate me. (video lost when we quit Facebook)
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 …