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.
I’d like to think we’ve known how to build XyloVan from day one, viagra dosage 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. And along the way, stuff gets built.
So this 3-foot-long chunk of 1.5-inch by .5-inch aluminum is one of the four stringers for Keyboard 2. These serve as the airframe for the instrument … Continue reading Machining the superstructure for Keyboard 2
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 to be big, look heavy, visit this site and somewhat springy, and we don’t want them flexing loose or tearing the metal.
Rogan helped me hem and haw my way through the engineering challenge – how can we make the keyboards ride high enough when stowed that they won’t scrape the ground – but still be easy to deploy and play? … Continue reading First blood, first panel surgery
First mounting hole.
(Rogan‘s photo)
By now, decease 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, search we’re tackling tasks willy-nilly, buy information pills like a crew of chimps with A.D.D. and a pound of meth – frenziedly, for long stretches, whether in teams alone, whenever we’re able.
Tonight, I was alone, so I spent it cutting aluminum stringers to fit the frames and laying out Keyboard 2, which with Keyboard 3 will cover the passenger side of the van.
The full keyboard (about 2.5 octaves) would be seven or eight feet long, but we have to somehow accommodate the van’s sliding door … Continue reading Keyboard 2 of 3 laid out (well, okay, it’s half a full keyboard, but …)
So I spent Saturday morning in the junkyard with Dave (thanks, abortion 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 screw all the floor moldings down again.
I spent a couple of hours cutting it to the shape of the vomitrocious (as my wife says) poo-brown carpet that had served as the van floor for a sober living facility taxi-bus and and for numerous band tours including one (or so John told me whilst selling it to me) involving the Germs.
I then promptly forgot to take a photo of the new interior until all the furniture was back in the van, none of it bolted down.
On Sunday, we yanked off the trim all the way around …
Continue reading Makeover, step 1
It goes something like this, approved 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.
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 right, viagra it should pivot out and away from the van to playing position (about a 20-degree angle from the ground) when deployed, website like this then fold up flat against the van when stowed for travel.
First, information pills I have to modify one of the parts, a sort of T-joint that is too wide to fit between the anchors for the key stringers.
A little circular saw abuse – followed by much cursing and futzing and hollowing out the apparently mis-forged piece so that it actually *fits* over 1.5-inch pipe – and the piece now fits snugly between the stringer ends … Continue reading There, I fixed it – Part 1
Go team!
We got a lot done today on prepping the van – gutting the interior so we can overhaul the carpet, information pills seats and headliner (and see how to mount the xylophones) and scrubbing off the rest of the mid-80s tequila-sunset striping.
alienrobot finished stripping off all that stuck-on trim with a razor blade.
Continue reading Stripdown
Now that the keys are all cut, price we have to lay out the frame.
As I said, I don’t have strict engineering plans for this thing, I’m going by the seat of my pants. But I know what the materials will be, so I’ve laid out the frame – it’s 1-1/2-inch aluminum scaffold tubing, held together with Hollaender Speed Rail and then the keys ride on custom-fabricated 1/2 x 1-1/2-inch aluminum stringers … Continue reading Roughing out the frame for keyboard 1