Everyone Loves Parades

Raul

Okay, it's been a while and a lot has happened.  For starters, last Saturday I flew to Phoenix and met the donor vehicle.  After getting up at 4am to catch the Super Shuttle to LAX, I was pretty much exhausted by the time I landed in Phoenix at 9am.  Fortunately, Raul, the salesperson at National Auto Mart, very helpfully picked me up at the airport and drove me to the auction house.  He was a really nice guy, and clearly a family man.  When he asked what I was going to use it for, I explained it was going to be turned into a parade float.  This seems to be the easiest way to explain the project.  He hadn't heard of Burning Man, but he said if I sent him a picture he'd add it to the wall in the office which had pictures of all the nicest and coolest cars that had been auctioned off there.  I told him he'll get a picture of it via email at the end of summer, and that was that.

So there in the parking lot was my new Tiltmaster, and I immediately hit the road.  It was a long day to say the least, and I finally got back to Orange County around 6 at night.  I never noticed it before but pretty much all of California has a 55 mph truck speed limit.  The truck really didn't like going over 65 anyway, and it was actually a lot less noisy and more comfortable going 55.  The CD player is broken, so all I heard was diesel engine for the 380 mile drive back.  It gets 11.5 mph completely empty.  I filled the 30 gallon tank when it was half empty a few times, since I didn't know how much was in there or if the gauges could be trusted.  Aside from the broken CD player and a tendency for it to pull to the right, it performed flawlessly.  The ride is a bit stiff while empty, and the transmission cracks off shifts like a rifle.  I am sure under some load it smooths out a bit. My first day's impression left me motivated to make the first modification: a pair of fuzzy dice.  This thing demands fuzzy dice hanging from the ceiling like no vehicle I've ever owned (there is no rearview mirror).  It's like it was speaking to me.  Kind of like my old Dodge Ram needed a gun rack and for its driver to get a cowboy hat.

The following Monday I took it into Tom's Truck Center in Santa Ana for some maintenance and an inspection.  Once I started noticing trucks, I started noticing that a whole lot of them had Tom's Truck Center mud flaps, and they're a big new truck dealer and I figured they could be trusted.  Personally I'm more fond of those Yosemite Sam "Back Off" mud flaps, and have been eyeing those too.  All kinds of strange personalization ideas come into my head.  Don't get me started on the appropriate license plate frame.

Anyway, so I quickly learned that medium duty commercial trucks are really expensive to maintain.  Try $490 every 26K miles for transmission fluid and $190 every 6.5K miles for engine oil.  For either, it takes 13.5l of oil or fluid (about 3.5 gallons).  The power steering fluid should be changed every 32.5K.  And it keeps going. The drive belts have to be replaced periodically too. I had all those done and later on read the owners manual to find out the differential oil, air cleaner, and valve lash also probably need to be done.  Who knows when the prior owners did it.

The prior owners did maintain the brakes at least.  The alignment was less perfect, since it pulled to one side, and plus the front tires were shot.  I got two new (next load rating up) tires on there and got it aligned.  Now I'd been noticing some diesel exhaust smell in the cab while idling, and sure enough they found a broken manifold stud and an exhaust leak.  $700 later that was fixed, since I don't want to drive this around at 5mph and accidentally get asphyxiated.  All told, I got all this service and repair done for under $3K after negotiating myself a 10% discount.  Plus I think the service guy liked me and gave me a break for explaining that this will become a parade float.  Everyone loves parades!

Thief Resistant - New Design Criteria

For the last several Tuesdays, the group sponsoring the maker's space (SLACerspace is the name... acronym stands for something) have been meeting for beers.  And discussing some business.  The space will be officially opening this Saturday with a morning garage sale to get rid of excess clutter, followed by fabrication of work benches.  I appreciated the chance to bounce some ideas I had off the group.

Unfortunately, there is a design requirement I hadn't even considered in my plans before.  I have to make this piece theft-proof during and after the construction phase. I learned that apparently thieves case the warehouse area every few hours and occasionally try to break into the unit.  And closer to home, on Sunday, my road bike was stolen out of my garage due to my own forgetfulness when I left the garage door open.  That was another harsh reminder.  So my idea of building things on the flat bed truck and leaving them there is not a good idea.  There is a high likelihood they will get stolen right off the back of the truck if they require under 20 minutes of wrenching to remove.

This basically means I need to weld all the structure onto the truck.  I don't yet have good welding skills, and was planning to do everything with bolted joints, since I'm good at engineering those so they'll work.  But now, I need to weld stuff.  This is going to be a new challenge.  I was just this weekend looking at scaffolding on Craigslist because I thought that would be an ideal way to get the 2nd story platform onto the truck and keep the weight down by getting aluminum tubes.  It would sure weigh a lot less than a wooden deck supported by 4 x4s or even steel frame bolted onto the truck bed.  Here was my idea for the scaffolding, a 5' x 7' x 5' collection :

Scaffolding would be too easy to remove by thieves.  Theft prevention is a new complication and I'll have to factor it into the design.  Perhaps I should bolt everything together, but then tack weld the joints to make them permanent.  If anything needs to some apart, a quick hit with a grinder may be all it takes.  For now, I'm gonna rent some storage space inside the SLACerspace to keep the metal beams and sheets of plywood.  If I can get the metal frame onto the truck in a semi-permanent way, maybe I will still be able to bolt things to it without fear of theft.  Maybe it's just the obvious loose things which will get stolen.  Anyway, it's pretty frustrating.  And after losing my nice bike this weekend, I really don't want another financial setback by losing the building materials I haven't even purchased yet.

Oh, and I am trying to get the truck insured now.  As predicted, personal auto insurance will not insure a commercial truck.  So Allstate is going to have to write me a commercial policy.  Hopefully they won't rip me off too badly.  So far we're on day two and I don't have a quote or policy, so this is apparently not a no-brainer.  My current thought is to keep registration and insurance through Burning Man, and then put it into proper fenced storage, register it non-op with the DMV and cancel the insurance.  Then about 9 months later, fix it up a little over the summer and take it to Burning Man for a 2nd time.  Then it's over, the thing gets dismantled and the truck will be sold.  It's a temporary thing... as is life.

I did get my airplane ticket to Phoenix today to pick up the truck.  Using 12,500 American Airlines miles, and paying $85 for "last minute ticket issuance fees", I'm able to get out there on Saturday morning.  The guy from the auction house offered to pick me up at the airport, so I'm gonna take him up on the offer rather than pay for a 20 minute cab ride.  This guy and his company already has my money for the truck, so hopefully my trust was well placed.  I did check the BBB on them before wiring the money, so I do think they're legit.

Transformers: Chevy Tiltmaster to Sinking Ship

So I wired the money to the used car sales place.  I'm soon officially the owner of a 2006 Chevrolet W3500 Tiltmaster.  I'm gonna just start calling it a Chevy Tiltmaster, so people go WTF is that?  After camping Friday night with the OC Burners, I have learned a little more about art cars and heavy trucks.  Apparently, I'm going to be surprised by how expensive insurance is.  You see, heavy duty trucks are usually used for commercial purposes and therefore insurance companies think they'll be used 24/7 for making money.  They don't anticipate someone parking at a parking lot for 4 months turning it into an art project.  So I'll probably just keep it registered and insured through Burning Man and then off to storage it goes for a year.

I checked on high-performance alternators today to see if I could run the whole thing and all its lights on 12V power alone from the engine.  Nothing really came up, so I'll just have to investigate later.  The truck has a 5.2 liter four cylinder diesel engine, but I've seen these things used as ambulances so I'm guessing there must be a high performance alternator out there for it.  Or maybe I can just bump up the idle speed and install an ammeter.  Art car veteran suggested I hook up a trickle charger from a generator to keep it going.  But then I will need a generator.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and get a proper generator, so I don't have to worry about depleting the 12V battery.  To really get major concert-level bass from rental speakers, you need 480V anyway.  So that's a possibility:  get a used really fricking huge generator capable of pumping out 480V.  Plus then I could weld anywhere and wouldn't need to be at the shop.  So many options.

And I've been thinking more and more about the design options.  I could fairly easily design this thing to be like a giant Transformer toy that unfolds and turns into the ship.  Honestly, it's really not that hard for me to imagine and would just have to do some 4-bar linkage calculations.  Think about designing a garage door which opens and closes into two positions.  It's really not that complicated.  What makes a garage door or convertible top on a car difficult to design is predicting the forces needed to do the opening and closing.  If I get rid of all the springs and electric actuators, then it's simply a matter of having a few people retract and expand the pieces.  After all, why did I get two degrees in Mechanical Engineering?  I can assure you it was not so I could calculate and design supersonic flow through nozzles (basic rocket science), although at one point I definitely spent a semester doing just that.  No, I secretly wanted to design and make life-size Transformers as a kid.  I'll have to sketch some concepts up and attach to a post.

Oh and I renamed it again:  now it's the M/V Abandon.  It's rule #18 of Burning Man:  When the captain says welcome aboard Abandon Ship.  Do that.

The one that didn't really get away

It turns out that the truck I bidded up the price on last Sunday has now been offered to me.  Apparently the original high bidder was unable to finance the truck with his bank because it has over 200,000 miles, so I got the chance to buy it as the 2nd highest bidder.  And I've accepted!  So now I just have to get it somehow.

I've been excited about this all day... what fun, I get to buy a strange truck and turn it into something stranger.  The book value on similar trucks seems to be in the $9 - $11,000 range, so I actually think this is a steal.  I should be able to get this beast home for around $8200 including California registration, tax, the $80 flight to Phoenix, taxi to the auction place, diesel to drive home, etc.  So that means when I'm all done with this adventure in the Fall of 2013 after taking it to two Burning Mans, I won't be losing too much money.  Lets face it, this is not about the money.  This is about a crazy dream and following it to see where the dream leads me.  This is a statement of expression that I am compelled to share.

I'm relieved that the truck search is now over, because it was starting to get very time consuming.  And by choosing to go with the flow and take what the universe throws into my lap, the truck is smaller than my recent ambition.  Actually it's more in line with my original ambition, and should be a fairly reasonable size.  It's not excessively large.  This is not about my ego anyway, at least I hope it isn't.  I really want to express my craft of automotive engineering with this thing, and hope I'm not unlike all those other artists at Burning Man who toil away building things that are their passion.  This is not about me or making my name, but about having a vision and creating it and bringing it into a collective reality.

My first year at Burning Man in 2006 was an experience which blew me away.  I'll never forget my first day at Chillonia on Esplanade and 2:30, when off in the distance I saw a pagoda.  I thought, that's cool, an installation way out there in the dust.  Then in the dusty distance, it moved!  Right then I was hooked on Mutant Vehicles.  I got to see the inaugural year of the Never Was Haul, a 3-storey Victorian mansion on wheels.  And last year I was privileged enough to camp and help out Tahoe Twisted, an awesome group out of Lake Tahoe who brought the biggest and baddest Mutant Vehicle ever, Christina the 65 foot Chris Craft on a cement mixer chassis.

So back to 2006.  My vision is really simple.  I want this truck to look like a piece of art.  And then I want to blow people away when they see it moving.  I'm pretty sure very few people have seen a shipwreck.  And I am sure that nobody has seen this:  A slow-moving shipwreck, coming your way.  How's that for a metaphor?

BTW, here's the link to the truck: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140743976597#description

Symbolism

So I will admit over this rainy weekend and Monday evening I've been listening to a lot of lectures about symbolism and astrotheology.  Basically there's a field of study which tries to understand all the ancient symbols that are still in use today, and determine where they come from.  So many iconic images have roots in astrology, ancient sun and moon cults, and tarot archetypes.  So I will put on my scholar's hat and try to explain what this sinking ship could possibly mean, from an unconscious and archetypal point of view.  I already explained the overt symbolism in my first blog post.

So here are a couple of thoughts about what the subconscious meaning could be.  If the ship is considered to be in a vast sea of water, often water symbolizes the emotions.  The ship represents a belief or idea, but it's sinking in the water of emotions.  Basically this archetype says "let go of the idea" because it's going down; it's an idea which needs to be released.

A similar interpretation could be the sinking ship represents an individual feeling consumed by society. It's a sort of drowning of the individual, because the beliefs (the ship) don't match society (the water).  It's a kind of wake-up call to examine the beliefs that you cling to, or at least reexamine them and decide if you're really on the right path.

Another viewpoint, especially since this will be sitting in a dry lake bed environment, could be that the ship has already been consumed by the water.  But the water (emotions) have all dried up and gone away.  All that's left is the frozen shell of the ship, as a warning to others.

There you have it.  And as I look at the shadow this casts over my own motivations for building it, I can't help but wonder what the hell is so screwed up in my life that I'd want to build something which represents this.  Nevertheless, it must be built.  Oh and I've considered that in year 2 that the outer shell should be burned.  So people will have seen the truck driving around for 2 years at Burning Man, and then one day late in the week the outer skin could could be removed and placed around temporary support structure.  It would be kept all lit up, and to some people it would look like the mutant vehicle they saw all week driving around.  Then it would burn.  That would be a fitting end.  I don't really want to have this thing around for more than a couple of years.

One last piece of info:  so I inquired about moving truck bodies and it's really simple.  If I had a bare chassis and no box or flatbed, I could get one installed for $1800 and a beat-up one for $1500.  If the truck already had a box, they'd give a few hundred dollar discount if it were a swap.  So I figure if I get a vehicle with the wrong body configuration, about $1000 would fix the problem.  If it's a nice box with a lift, the cost difference could be even less.  And for the record, the contact was Robert at Central Auto Sales at (909)356-0388.  So I will reconsider my budget once again, but expand the search to include bare chassis trucks and box trucks.  It doesn't have to be a perfect match.  Oh and they don't move ladder racks, but they would build/ weld something up to order if I want to pay for it.  So there's a lot of options!

The one that got away

Today was a bit exciting.  So in my travels around the internet looking for a suitable truck to metamorphose into a sinking ship art project, I happened upon this prime specimen.  It was significantly newer than anything I'd looked at, and frankly a little on the light duty side.  But in keeping with the idea of trouble-free modern art car, this seemed like a good deal.  And for the original starting bid of under $3,000, the price was right. 

So I watched it and read all the fine print.  I figured a truck like this should sell for around $9 - $11,000.  But maybe I could get it for a real steal.  There was also a $300 dealer fee and of course retrieving it from Arizona would cost at least $300 and probably more to fly there and drive back.  But with a diesel engine and under 200,000 miles, I figured it would be perfect.

Then I forgot about it and went over to a friend's place to (literally) help change a lightbulb.  In his car, and it required special tools (which I had) and a different light bulb than he'd bought.  So we went out to dinner at the local Crow Burger.  After a couple of beers and an excellent burger and string-bean fries, I remembered about the auction.

As it turns out, Chris also happens to be from Phoenix and goes out there every other month or so.  And I asked if he'd be willing to bring this truck back if I flew him out there.  And he said yes, so next thing I'm checking Ebay on my phone.  Sure enough, it's only 10 minutes before the auction ends and it was still only at $4000.  So I confirmed one last time, "If I buy this, will you really drive it back for me?" and he said yes.  So then the bidding began.

It quickly became obvious that someone had set up an autobid process on the truck, because every time I would bid, it'd immediately bid another $100 above my bid.  When I hit my pre-determined $5,000 max bid mark, I had to take pause.  There was 8 minutes left.  After discussing further with Chris, we determined the next bid needed to be higher than the $100 increment to find the bidder's cut-off price.  I entered $5500, which I thought was my maximum.  And was outbid.  At this point there was a minute and a half left.

Further discussion ensued, and we both agreed the other bidder probably had a $6000 cut-off.  It sorta made sense, because like I said the truck was probably worth at least $9K.   I entered $5700 as my next bid.  This was pushing the envelope... since it was not exactly the heavy duty truck I wanted and was going to be a pain in the ass to retrieve from Arizona.  But still, I need to get the donor vehicle purchased and begin the build process.  This seemed to fit most criteria, and had the added benefit of being just slightly smaller than I wanted so maybe that would force me to make it a reasonable size project.

By then, there was under a minute left.  I was outbid again.  $5767 was the next bid.  The very odd sales price told me that I had found my competitor's maximum.  The minimum bid was $100 higher.  If I entered $5867, the truck would be mine.  Should I do it?  I entered $5867 and hit submit.  But it was too late!  The auction had ended.  The truck went to someone else.

Thus ended my first bidding war on Ebay for a truck.  I am going to call tomorrow on the leads given to me by Tom's Truck Center about local companies that will switch truck bodies.  I still have my eye on that $7300 Class 6 truck with the 25,950 lb GVW with the 24 foot box for $7300.  If the box can be swapped for a flat bed as an even trade, I'm gonna take it instead.  Plus it's local, and already has California plates.  This is starting to be fun!

By the way, all the photos of the proposed vehicle are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sinker9/ in case you didn't see the link before.

Truck Search Continues

Well after considering getting a cheaper and older truck, I'm tending back towards where I started... getting a fairly modern and heavy duty truck to avoid having to deal with breakdowns and spare part availability issues.  Currently I'm gravitating toward a GMC T6500 or T7500 similar to this one:  24' Foot Box Truck 2000 GMC T6500, Automatic transmission, Air ride suspension, lift end tuck away lift gate, roll up door. Priced for quick sale and priced low, no need to haggle.  Contact HiTech Transport at 562.250.7793

I have a couple of contacts now after reaching out to a local commercial truck dealer about places that will buy your truck body (in this case, a 24 foot box) and swap it out for something else.  What I really want is a flat bed with a rack over the cab.  That would make it somewhat simple to just hang 4 x 8 sheets of plywood from a bolted-on or welded-on scaffolding, and then the rest could be wooden deck-like platforms attached to the steel flat bed.

And since I haven't been laid off, and just did my taxes, that means I may not have to scrimp and save and cut every corner.  Just occasionally enlist professional help to repair or maintain the truck, and get the body where I want it.  I'm starting to imagine a summer where I'm not laid off and will still have my day job.  But I'm imagining it where it won't consume my entire weekend and and weekday life, so I would actually have energy to build something.  If the 2013 warehouse space comes together (not looking good... needs more $$) then I have just about everything needed to start this off starting in May.  Once I have the truck and basic framework, I can always scale the entire project back to a more simple design if I lose ambition or free time.

So why exactly am I compelled to build this?  I'm really starting to question my motivation again.  What concerns me is if this is some sort of ego-gratification trip, because I thought I was past that.  In the past, I somehow needed to prove to myself that I could achieve the new Mercedes-Benz and have a beautiful, large colonial house on a quiet street.  Looking back, I really wasn't buying and having those things to impress people and project some kind of image (although they did).  No, I bought them to prove something to myself. Clearly some deep insecurity about wealth and the trappings of prosperity compelled me to bring those into my life.  In the process, I learned that after two years of leasing a new Mercedes you need to give it back.  And when the housing market collapsed in 2008-9 taking $100,000+ of equity out of my house and leaving me with an upside down mortgage, I have come to take all of these material things a lot less seriously.  I'm now strictly on a enjoy now, pay now basis, as a philosophy for living.

Then why would I want to build some extravagant large art car, and not even go after a reasonable little one as a starter art car?  This is the question.  I haven't even ridden on art cars at Burning Man very much even though I have gone 6 times.  Mostly I admired them from afar.  I can only conclude there's some insecurity still there.  Or, are my dreams just that big?  I'd like to think that's the real reason.