Tuesday, August 13, 2013

When did we stop building things? Here is my Burning Man boombike.

Ed Fletcher boombike adds a car stereo and LED lights to his mountain bike






Here's a closer look at the speakers, deck and battery.


Burning man is for builders

The most many people know about Burning Man is that there’s lots of sex and drugs. While that’s true, it barely scratches the surface on what Burning Man is about.
I used an Altolids box as the control panel
One lesser known gems of Burning Man is that is a collection of doers, dreamers and problem solvers. Given the inhospitable nature of the Black Rock desert where it’s held, concurring your environment is the first obstacle. The second and just as important challenge is to do your part add something to the community artistically or recreationally.

This year, I decided that my bike needed more illumination and a sound system.
Illumination is important because there are no streetlights and hard to keep a crew of bikes together with so many blinky dots in the night.
I saw some people cruising around Sacramento with sound systems and wanted it build my own.
I’d assembled a 12-volt camp sound system before. Mainly by assembling a second-hand car stereo setup, adding extra speakers and hooking it to car battery.
This time around I started more or less from scratch and built my own speaker boxes, wired an on/off switch control panel, and put the setup together.
The pole is made from an LED strip light
wrapped around an inner core plastic pole
within an larger plastic pole. 
From doing the wiring to cutting the speaker boxes, there were many times where I wondered whether I'd bitten off more than I can chew. I took more time to home depot and my local hardware store than it should have, but I kept finding solutions and refining the project. At least once I turned to facebook to crowdsource an answer to a question that troubled me.
But I have to say it was pretty fun. When did we stop building things and just become consumers? Some where along the line someone suggested I just buy a boom box. No where is the fun in that.
I’m pretty proud of it already. On my first test ride I got my first offer to buy it. I think I’ll keep this one.