I’ve been running around like a madman the past week. I looked at my first post on this project – it was less than three weeks ago. I’m going to have completed an entire vehicle mutation within a single month. It’s a blur of hardware store runs, power tools and raw material.

Fencing worried me the worst. If there’s to be a cloud deck, I need something to keep the happy people from plunging off of it.

A contractor promised to drop off some recycled fence railing, gratis – and then he welched.

Fresh metal was going to cost at least $300 (yes, as a matter of fact, we are on a budget.) so that wouldn’t work.

So I dropped an ad into FreeCycle:

need about 35 linear feet of scrapped metal railings, the sort you see
on balconies, etc.

It can be rusted, bent or painted funky, but it must be at least 36″
high, with a top rail of at least 1″ thickness (round or square).

I will happily pick it up, and even help you clean up around it if it’s
buried among your construction debris.

Don’t own it, but know where I can get it? Let me know! I need this for
an art car I”m building – need to secure this in next 2 weeks! Thanks!

And lo and behold I got a call the next day. From a Burner.

Having just given birth a few months ago, she was resigned to skipping the Burn this year. But she had a whole slew of steel security bars that she just had taken off a building she’s renovating – and offered them up for free.

I cajoled the kids into helping scrub the crapola off of them

Next I’ll be bolting them together. They’ll be perfect. You’ll see …

Start with a video visualization (click to see animation, courtesy of David, our architect)

This looks about the furthest thing possible from the double-faced god, Janus, much less a double-faced upright piano. But we gotta start somewhere.

The loose-pin hinges make re-mounting the plywood as easy as 1 … 2 …

… 3 …

More

David Hoffman’s architecture for JANUS is based on my design and his experience as a Hollywood scenic designer.

I originally planned to monkey together some kind of framework from metal tubing – I had a couple of old Ikea deck-rocking-chair frames out of swoopy-looking 5/8-inch steel and had planned to (somehow) hang them from tubing bolted to the roof rack. But David came up with something far better – a lightweight, somewhat rigid framework of 2x4s, 1x6es and 4×8-foot sheets of half-inch plywood.

The first order of business after bolting the major framing to XyloVan’s burly roof rack was to cut the plywood’s edges to fit the contours of a 1985 Ford ClubWagon XLT.

We set the sheets up on blocks beside the van, leveled them, then drew the van profile with a stick – one end of which traced the shape of the sheet metal, the other end of which held a Sharpie that drew the shape onto the wood.

Then David and John installed loose-pin hinges, which we’re using so the plywood profiles can be mounted and unmounted easily.

This involved quite a bit of finagling with the jigsaw, as we shifted the panels up/down/left/right to bring them into line with the vehicle and the ground.

This is the right-rear corner, where we’ve cut and installed two plywood sheets. They’re on hinges so, they swing a bit, but we’ll get that sorted out.

The mounting point for Right 2 gave David and me pause ,,,

We had to mount it to the doorjamb – which is about 1.5 inches wide – so that both the passenger front door and the big sliding door (with xylophone keyboard #3 mounted on it – open and shut smoothly. Once we cut down the hinges a bit, removed one of the circular door gongs and trimmed the profile about six times, that panel fits perfectly, and both doors operate smoothly.

Here’s the finished product.

Next – cutting out the profiles’ outer shapes.

We roughed out the major framing today that will turn XyloVan into JANUS, the Celestial Player Piano.

My excellent son, Biomass worked tirelessly with me all day, regaling me with jokes and generally kicking ass on every little task.

Here, he’s disassembling the 1×6 framework that Alan and Dave roughed out yesterday, to make way for the same structure made of 2x4s … More

We started today with the framing for what will eventually look something like this.

Dave and Alan generously toiled in the sun with me at Big Art Labs, and we began roughing out the side rails that will be bolted to the roof rack.

David Hoffman’s design called for 2x4s, but after finding the 8-footers that I bought to be too short for the job, we tried 1x6es. These proved to be too flimsy for the job but they were good enough to stand in until I can get back to Home Depot for the right size lumber.

Then we marked sheets of 1/2-inch plywood against the profile of the van’s body, taking into account little oddities like marker lights, xylophone mounts and the right rear crushed bumper.

Here, Dave shows off the fine 4×8 sheet of 1/2-inch ply he caught from the stern of the van, using light tackle and bloodworms for bait.

A skillsaw made short work of the wavy lines.

We installed a couple of the plywood profiles using loose-pin hinges.

And hey, presto – they fit! It only took six hours to get all this figured out. My deepest heartfelt thanks to both Alan and Dave for helping get this solved.

Next – we’ll replace the frame rails with 2×4 versions, and cut out the other profiles.