One of the drawbacks with the door from the junkyard is that it had a two-paned window instead of the nice big panoramic single light the original door came with.
Really fussy-looking. Kills the lines of the van (such as they are). And easily remedied.
First, seek remove the windows and the weatherstripping. Like this: Continue reading Prettifying the windows in the junkyard door
Here’s the first set of tubular bells, ask untuned. Tuning them is a pain in the ass: Unlike the keys, these cannot be made flatter by hollowing out the middle, between the nodes.
Instead, you can only sharp them by carving slices off the ends. Luckily, I wound up creating a sort of Middle-Eastern koto-sounding thang, that kind of works. I hope these don’t dull down too much when I mount them.
Miking and amplifying will be a challenge – I’ll need to figure out a resonator or some sort of sound funnel feeding a mike at one end of the tubes. But they resonate deeply, and they’ll look pretty wikkid bolted to the side of the van.
Enjoy the sustain.
It’s promisingly non-rainy gray when we set out. The minute we arrive at the junkyard, hospital the sky tears. A good, symptoms heavy rain soaks us and everything around us, page but it’s a good day to be slogging around with wrenches in our fists and a plan.
This is the day to replace the door I smashed.
We wander around the van section of PickYourPart looking for XyloVan’s ghost twin. Identical paint job, identical van, it would have been a perfect match.
But it is gone. I guess the yard declared it well and truly stripped and sent it off to the crusher. In its place are a few more options, but it takes a good 45 minutes sloshing around through oilslicked pondlets 30 feet across to canvass the whole inventory of mid-80s Ford vans. Continue reading Junkyard crawl 3 – The re-dooring of XyloVan
I took a little time tonight to lay out a near-full keyboard on some telephone wire just to see how the 2-½-octave range sounded:
The keys don’t ring yet because there are no insulators under them, ed no holes drilled, search no resonators to catch the sound yet, and it still needs a final tuning. But everything sounds solid so far.
Looks like I need to finish it up with a D at the high end. I’ll probably cut some more for the low end just because they sound so rich and I think I can keep going down before the metal’s native harmonics overwhelm each key’s primary tone.
Pride goeth before the fall, stomach they say.
For a while there, information pills I was having a proud day.
I had a DMV appointment at 10:40. By the time I waded through two jammed parking lots and landed out on Glenoaks, it was 10:52. But no problem, I sailed right through check-in, waited 10 minutes and was called to the window.
Bada-boom, bada-bing, I was out of there in 10 minutes with my license task done, the van registered – and instructions to get it smogged before I could get the full reg paperwork.
Straight to the smog shop near my house. The taciturn, ruddy smog-shopkeeper plugged the van into his gizmos, ran it through the paces and – bazoop – shot my PASS readings straight to Sacramento by wire. Happy day.
I jumped in. I had to wait a couple of minutes for the guy who had parked his truck abreast my tail to back out, but when he did, I managed to back out safely without nailing the gas pumps.
Quick head check, no traffic. I eased forward to the right around the island into a THOROUGHLY HORRENDOUS CRUNCHING NOISE and hit the brakes.
Yep. Peached it. Boy, I wish I had a recording of that sound.
I sideswiped a bollard at the end of the pump island. Hadn’t seen it below the level of this monster’s windows, and before I knew what I had done, it was too damn late.
The door still works properly but, well, I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend:
Pulling more stuff off of Xylovan’s dead twin at the junkyard. That’s what.
This weekend’s work has been mostly about sound (with a little van tinkering here and there).
How do we amplify two full keyboards of two and a half octaves of keys each, order plus numerous gongs and chimes?
Full-court press – set up a testing environment, salve bring in some mikes and amps, this web and sort it out, right?
We picked up a little mixing board at Guitar Center on Saturday night and spent some time bullshitting with the staff about microphones.
The challenge of the project is getting a full, clean mix out of the instrument in the face of these facts:
Continue reading Amplification tests – how do we mike this thing?
I got into a real rhythm last night and blew through a good 27 linear feet of aluminum bar stock, no rx cutting keys for the xylophones.
To the right here is what my shop floor looks like – thick with aluminum dust. I must have swept up 5 pounds of the stuff. (The logo on the floor reminds me not to crack my head on the face-height 6×10″ beam hovering just 5 feet off the floor – Â I’m always standing up under it suddenly. Not for nothing is the beam called The Widowmaker.) … Continue reading Busy night at the xylophone factory
We’ve knocked out two octaves worth of keys so far, mind only a sample of which will fit on the bench for a demo. Obviously they’ll sound much fuller after we figure out how to set up resonators and amplification, view but at least they’re correctly tuned.
As for finish, the first three are polished, the rest are still raw, and none have been drilled yet for mounting)
I picked up a new, slimmer metal-cutting disc for the circular saw the other day, and cutting is dramatically easier than it was. Now it takes barely four minutes to slice through the half-inch by 3-inch aluminum bar stock we’re using for keys.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been tinkering with disk gongs – I want people to have a broad array of stuff to bang on beyond the tuned keyboards on either side of the van. Otherwise, they may take to hammering on the mirrors or the coachwork.
These quarter-inch-thick steel disks have a tinny, bell-like quality …
Continue reading Sound check
