I was up until 1 a.m. last night doing wiring (details later). I was up at 7 a.m. this morning. This is probably the third week straight I’ve been working at this pace. I feel like this: Sad thing is – I can’t tell which one’s me, drug and which one’s the project. (Image via …
Big canopy is up
We got it all rigged. It took the four of us about half an hour to get it all monkeyed together, website like this but by god, it stands – at least it still is as I write this, two nights later in peak winds of 18 mph – and the whole thing hangs together …
Sound check – Clean!
Clean enough, discount anyway. That wicked line buzz is gone. It turns out I needed to ground the mixer to the chassis, link which involved tearing apart and then sewing up the 20-foot umbilical. That took a little while. Pay no attention to my banging. I’m just banging. But it’s sounding pretty lush. And I”m …
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 … …
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 …
Nice slice
Hey, page what the … Why is there blood suddenly dripping onto the pipes that I just cut for the roof-canopy frame? Oh. Yeah. The little chunk of not-quite-cut pipe I just tapped off the end of the length I cut. Sharp metal. Duh.
Shade canopies for the keyboards
It’s hot on the playa. Relentlessly, discount often stupidly, this hot. So we’re putting some shade over the keyboards. We trudged around the Garment District the other day, case haggled with shopkeepers and for $3 a yard, walked away with this very light, opaque and strong synthetic fabric that feels something like raw silk and …
Key polishing? Nah.
After sandblasting the instruments with Dave, and I was dead-bang positive I would want to polish them to a gloss. Then I spent a year grinding away with the power drill and a buff pad during lunch hour today, and changed my mind. An AP photographer stopped by and shot a bunch of photos of …
Light bars
The lighting plan is coming together slowly, rx but surely. I installed lights behind the disc gongs, buy ordered some green EL wire and am eagerly awaiting delivery of the Incredibly Stupid Number of Chinese Strobe Lights, view which may or may not be used in an attempt to dazzle the DMV into giving us …
Playing out
Thanks to Michael Greiner and Doeri Welch for inviting us and XyloVan to meet Michael’s marimba orchestra last night. We had an awesome time banging on each other’s instruments. Here are Michael and a couple of his students working out “Silver Bells” with the loud mallets.
Merry-go-round broke down
“It runs like a fuckin’ champ!” That’s been the constant refrain, page all the way from purchase through our adventure to Maker Faire and dozens of trips in between. XyloVan has new tires and brakes, search a rebuilt Holley carb, and a well-tuned Detroit monster of a motor, and by god, it’s the most mechanically …
Blast away your troubles
The folks at Industrial Metal Supply turn out huge orders of 3-by-half-inch-by-12-foot aluminum bar stock cut to measure for big industrial clients – then they sell the short ends and leftovers in 3- and 6-foot lengths at just $2.89 a pound. That – along with dismantled tube-aluminum equipment racks covered with stickers – is what …
Metal shavings and damage done
So I’ve been cutting up little chunks of scrap aluminum that are too short to make good xylophone keys, more about and fashioning them into little fetishes to give away on the playa. The net result of this is a) …
Metal isn’t soft
Can’t even remember how I got this but it’s about 90 times as painful as it looks, purchase which I’m reminded of every … single … time … I … use … it. Think cuticle torture. And, ambulance courtesy of a week spent splicing wires – an early case of playafingers.
Neatening the mass of spaghetti
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 …