National Geographic's Mad Scientists: The Clockwork Motorcycle

I appeared as the subject of an episode of the National Geographic Channel's Mad Scientists. I told them about a few of my dream projects and they challenged me to build one of them in 48 hours: A clockwork motorcycle. Using what I had around the shop, I had to conceive, design, construct, and ride the bike within the space of two days. It was very difficult but an extremely satisfying experience. You can find details on the bike at Clockworkmotorcycle.org.

Art By The Ton

The summer festival season is upon us and I have rejoined Dan das Mann and Karen Cusolito as a fabricator and heavy equipment operator. My work as an artist's assistant seems to be unbounded in size; Art by the Ton makes colossi or monumental sculpture. The photo above shows me at work on Manu, a scrap and fire art sculpture. Working with art this size requires a safety-minded, industrial artist who is quick with his mind and his feet. Our shop has 10 of these sculptures and we install them at several festivals a season. Behind the exploding fire art scrap giant is a lot of patient crane rigging and semi-trailer loading.

Burning Man 2009

Prior to the start of the event, this was the first year where the bike crew had distributed all leftover Burning Man bikes to charity: To the Reno Kiwanis, to the Reno Bike Project, and others. Burning Man likes the idea of shipping some to my African bike project but I would need to raise the funding for the shipping. A shipping container of only costs $4-6,000 to ship to Ghana, but transporting the bikes out of the desert will be expensive as well.

Maintaining and deploying 1000 yellow bikes has become a smooth operation. I was able to get in some time in the metal shop, which may have the world's widest selection of odd metalworking jobs. Among other things I was able to work on a stunning variety of art projects and art cars, as well as a memorial metal book cover for Tom Kennedy. This was also the first year I worked on the Man itself, on the massive brackets that fit the 4' X 2' wooden sections in its base:

Allpower Labs

I'm excited to say that I've begun to fabricate for Allpower Labs, makers of the only commercially available complete gasifier kit. Joining the crew was a meeting of minds; I've always been a "power hacker" of sorts and this is a chance to work with some folks at the forefront of this technology. Allpower is located in The Shipyard, an Oakland shipping-container based art & energy space.

A gasifier is old technology. Back before Standard Oil and BP and all the old cronies decided to get us hooked on oil, newly emerging engine technology was designed to run on agricultural byproducts. We were a farming country and it just made sense. The diesel engine was designed to run on vegetable oils and the gasoline engine could run on wood gas, propane, or the product of a gasifier.

Basically you stuff anything that burns (such as available byproducts like coffee grounds or walnut shells) into a bucket and burn it at a high temperature in an oxygen starved environment. Gases are produced which you run through some filters then guff into the carb of an engine or generator.

To explain it extremely simply, it's a fire in a bucket. The fire is starved of oxygen. Complex hydrocarbons are broken down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The gas passes through a few filters and is guffed into your engine's carb. Pretty straightforward. The fidgeting is just to get it to burn clean, which it can do much better than a gasoline engine.

So why doesn't everyone do this? Well, they did, back in the day. It popped up again in Germany during the war when they couldn't get any petroleum. You see pictures of gasifiers on the back of buses in China. It takes some fidgeting to get it right, which means it's not push-button idiot-proof, which is pretty much the standard for product design these days. But can you run your car on pecan shells, wood chips, agricultural waste, or construction debris? Absolutely. With clean emissions. And the byproduct is an excellent soil conditioner!

Most of Allpower's customers are researchers, bunker people, and alternative energy enthusiasts. Anybody with a source of biomass such as horse manure or corn husks can buy one of these units and run a generator off of it pretty easily for free power. The company's business is booming, we have orders out the wazoo and are making them as quick as we can. The shop produces about five to seven a week.

Next year we'll be competing in an alternative fuels race for the Automotive X-prize.

Keep an eye on my Youtube channel for videos about how gasification works.

Sand By The Ton

Freshly relocated to Oakland, California, I reported to noted scrap master Dan Das Mann to prepare for American Steel's "Sand by the Ton" party. We took a 250,000 sq ft warehouse and trucked in 200 tons of sand, building a bordello and carnival midway, all for a one-night party. Afterwards we were left with one heck of a sweeping job!





My responsibilities included giant-woman-wrangling, bulldozer modification, pool filling and draining, forklift repair, sand-sifter fabrication, fire inspection compliance, and sweeping.

Maker Faire / Mousetrap

I worked on the crew of the Life Size Mousetrap, a giant Rube Goldberg device modeled after the board game. Once you're flinging real bowling balls around this thing gets dangerous!



The device ends with an actual safe dropping, usually on something crushable.



Mousetrap was a centerpiece of this year's Maker Faire. It was an inspirational weekend working amongst so many active and creative people. I left with more ideas than I arrived with and I wouldn't miss a chance to work another one.

See a video of the Mousetrap here:

Corinbank 2009

With the Pedal-powered Bumper Cars up and running from last year, I was free to express myself more creatively at this year's Corinbank festival. The festival had acquired a burn permit and weather conditions looked like they would allow for some fire art.

I wanted to express aspects of Australian culture in my work. I acquired various pieces of metal that are important to Australians, such as a bowls mower, a lawnmower leaf catcher, a "barbie", a tea kettle, and various farm equipment. Only the Hills Hoist clothesline inspires more pride in the Australian heart than a barbie and a lawnmower. I added to this the legend of the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly and created NED 3000, a robot chopper outlaw burn barrel:





His head is surrounded by a barbed-wire crown of thorns.

Ned carries a removable zombie-killin' shotgun with underslung brain corer:



The second sculpture was "Evil Tick-tock," a portly wood-devouring robot comprised of cultivator blades, a barbeque, and a tea kettle:





His hand was beaten on the forge out of an old pitchfork. When you place a log in his hand and pull down on the lawnmower handle, his mouth opens and he dumps the log into his flaming, greedy jaw.

These pieces will appear at the in2CHANGE gallery show at the Belconnen Bus Interchange in the Australian Capital Territory April 20-May 8

Pedal-powered Crane

This pedal-powered crane was built for Redmoon's Summer 2006 spectacle Twilight Orchard. A simple rule for a crane is that the weight on the end times the ratio of the boom to the counterweight's length equals the weight of the counterweight. The original design called for an 800 lb. counterweight which would support 50 lbs at the end of a 16 foot boom. Consequently this vehicle was extremely overbuilt, with ATV wheels, a differential, and a gear ratio that would allow a single person to move that kind of weight.


I had to fabricate my own axle stub brackets.


The vehicle was dressed by other designers and audio techs, and Laura Annis built the boom. The crane was equipped with a speaker on the end for a private party and then used to hang a disco ball for Twilight Orchard- in typical Redmoon style this allows the techs to be seen by the audience and perform their job with whimsical gadgetry. Here's a picture of it loading a mouse into a giant mouse wheel during Looptopia 2007:


This project represents a particular combination of form and function that I always strive for and am quite proud of in this creation.

Popular Mechanics Online

Popular Mechanics Magazine did a feature on their website about five bike builders who used non-bike equipment in their rides. That magazine has always been about doing it yourself, and they even include (reluctantly) instructions for making your own. I don't like to hoard techniques, I would prefer if people went and used my methods and improved upon them.

Check out the article here.