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, side effectsIMS), troche 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 … Continue reading Locked and loaded→
Here’s video 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:
We thought about going hotrod-lowrider with a lime-green metalflake triple-clearcoat paint job and lots of chrome. But that seemed too garish and expensive. One local shop was asking $800 to $1,000 just for straight paint even if we did all the bodywork … Continue reading It *is* easy being green→
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, visit two day-laborers picked up from Home Depot, about it and a whole lot of swearing, check shouting and straining.
Today saw me sandblasting metal shoulder-to-shoulder in the midday sun with Dave, pharm 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.
Like a drunk tiptoeing into his AA meeting with actual quitting on his mind, website I’m finally ready to quit breaking taps – and pay attention to all the solid advice I’ve been getting along the way.
Tonight, more about I took it all in hand and put it to work on my one surviving 6mm tapping tool – and the dozen-plus very serious holes I had left to tap:
The machinist recommended I countersink the holes and use cutting fluid … But I had a long way to go – the last 8 holes in the stringers for Keyboard 3, this web plus the remaining three very deep holes in Keyboard 1’s crosspiece – each of them through a thick, 3-layer sandwich of aluminum.
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 bottom rail, and all four stringers will screw down to it for support.
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, this Los Feliz and Glendale in search of an EDM-equipped shop, price I phoned a local machine shop and described my twomistakes.
So I bring it in. Within an hour and a half, I get a call saying “It’s all set.” They drilled in with a carbide bit (probably a better one than I used, and used an extractor on one broken tap, and a punch on the other – and now the holes are cleared.
The guy even took pity on me and told me the secret: countersink the holes from now on before tapping them – and use some cutting oil.
Done. I’ll be attacking that just as soon as the best little hardware store in Silver Lake restocks their 6mm Irwin thread taps. The ones that I seem to keep steadily depleting.
Passed another major milestone tonight. 
