Burningman2003

Burningman 2003

	RECAP: Year 2000 - Chairs were from my neighbor. Steering post had throttle and disk brake control all in one lever. The differential was from a Mazda. Problem: The rear wheel fell off.
	Year 2001 Chairs were covered and the floor was nicely painted although I don't think I have any pictures. Problems: The rear wheel fell off. Apparently one cannot weld car axle metal. Who knew? Also the front wheel assemblies gave out as you can see in the Mochair movie.

Also in 2001:
Built the Emergency Back up Vehicle. Three wheeled, rear wheel steered, side by side sociable with independent front wheel drive and bucket seats. It was hard to turn but almost as much fun as the motorized couch.
To keep the steering from being reversed the chain to the steering post made a figure eight. The frame was made from stainless pipe salvaged from Twenty Tank Brewery.
I sold it to a friend who used it in 2002 and a few months later I saw it abandoned in a field in San Francisco. I wish I would have picked it up.

In 2001 I made this couch for Leah and Damian. They used it in 2001 and 2002. It is powered by surplus bike electric motors that rub on the rear tires. Very simple design. They both said the couch ran great. I hardly believed them.
In 2003 they split up and gave the couch back to me.

I also made a duplicate couch like this for a guy from NY City. It had a few improvements but I never heard from him again.

I hadn't planned on going to BM2003 but almost at the last minute Perry said he wanted to go so I said why not, we already have a couch. Perry and I restored the mechanics over a couple of weekends. We learned that the couch was much faster with the batteries in series to make 24 volts instead of 12.

Year 2003:
With 24 volts the motors wore the tires out in about two hours. Both tires popped within minutes. Fortunately we were in Center Town and patched the tubes and hobbled home. The next day we went into Gerlach (or Whatever the name of that town is) and found a makeshift hardware store with several contraptions with tires that fit our couch. We thought we'd have to go all the way to Reno. You can see the blue buggy type thing in the center of the picture.

	We switched it back to 12 volts and the new tires never wore out. We wore out one axle and we had a few other little problems but nothing serious. The compressor for the truck air horn got hot and popped the plastic hose. And the wire to the PA system fell off one time. The biggest problem was that we had to recharge the batteries often.
	We had installed a little two stroke generator that put out 90 amps at 12 volts. So when the batteries went dead we start pulling on the starter rope, taking turns until the tiny monster started up. It was a screamer and it got so hot it started the couch on fire one time. It was hard to tell that the couch was on fire because the little generator put out so much smoke anyway. But it was strong enough to drive the couch back home, where we switched out the batteries. We would always have to find a theme camp with a big generator and ask them if we could charge our batteries but I didn't bring a big fast charger. I only brought a small slow charger. That was a mistake. Many theme camps would not let us use their electricity. I resolved to have a gas motor in 2004.
	Perry took all the pictures. So there are no pictures of Perry except this one.

When They burned the man, we got there a little early in the couch but the rangers made all the vehicle move way back because the crowds might panic. So we could not see anything. I had a feeling that there were naked dancing girls with fire somewhere up front.

I was tempted to get off the couch.
So I started thinking.

We need some way to see over the crowds.

I remembered seeing a scissor lift like this one earlier in the day.

Finally I turned to Perry and said, "I've got nothing. How about you?"

Perry said, "Why don't you make a couch that raises up?"

I said, "Good idea ." And that is the story on the next page BM2004.


	2003 couch in lower right.