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, this 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, viagra in nice contrast to the rectangular-keyed xylophones … Continue reading Mounting the disc gongs
No Band-Aids?
No problem!
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 recycled aluminum tubing (thanks again, side effects IMS), 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
After nearly three months of cutting and grinding, cialis 40mg fiddling and drilling, cursing and screwing and painting, the magic moment is here.
Time to mount the xylophones on the van.
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:
And here’s what Keyboard 1 looked like as friend Steve Finkel and I mounted it on the driver’s side …
Continue reading Xylophones, meet Van!
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, approved 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 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.
Really, it’s as easy as … Continue reading Re-mounting the enormous honkin’ rack
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.
It’s tedious, filthy work … Continue reading Sandblasting the enormous honkin’ rack
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:
I started with the drill … Continue reading Bender ender – how to listen up and quit breaking sh#t
