Fossil Fool
Rides and performance updates:
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I like to Customize bikes and then I rap for you.
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El Arbol |
The Blue Whale |
The Choprical Fish |
Below are blog posts about specific aspects of these and other custom bikes.
Fossil Fool, Shredder, Ma Muse perform at Gaia Fest 2012
20. February 2013
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Rock The Bike organized a group ride to Gaia Fest from San Francisco. Here’s a video we produced from the experience. Enjoy!
LiveOnBike performance at BMF 2012
13. September 2012
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El Arbol Canopy Layer nearly complete, sounding amazing
14. February 2011
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photo: Aufdencamp
In December I started building the Canopy of El Arbol, sculpting pink household insulation foam and glassing it. It’s basically the same process as papier mache, but using the strongest glue on the planet and glass fibers instead of newsprint. Less than two months later, the Canopy is operational as a speaker, rolls well and doesn’t get tangled on utility wires, and is on its way to being a aerial rig.
In the first mockup, the aerial rigging point on the rear branch was much lower to the ground and closer to the trunk than it is now. Now it’s over 12 and a half feet up and four feet out from the trunk. The branch is about 6-8″ in diameter and about 1/8″-1/4″ thick fiberglass throughout. It’s extremely stiff. A tension cable, as represented below by the yellow measuring tape, will make the rear branch strong enough for aerials. We plan to test it with a 1000 pound load.
Up close view of the roots of El Arbol
22. December 2010
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Performing LiveOnBike with the Blue Whale at the Barcelona Bicycle Music Festival
11. October 2010
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El Arbol in action
9. July 2010
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El Arbol is a three-seater quadricycle in the form of a tree. It features a 650-watt modified JBL sound system with a 5 channel mixer built in. It’s ideal for street performing or festival performing. It’s a self-contained 2-person Pedal Powered Stage. It’s electric generator rear hub doubles as a transportation boost; El Arbol has a touring range of 50 miles a day.
Breaking the mold of El Arbol.
8. April 2010
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El Arbol grows in the Mission.
22. March 2010
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I’ve spent the past 3 weeks shaping slabs of foam into the trunk, root, and branches of El Arbol. You can see here that all three of the speakers — low, mid, and high — now have fiberglass panels or cones ready to receive them, and the rear facing LiveOnBike performance seat has also been glassed. Roughly 10% of the overall surface area has received its first coat of glass.
Below: revealing the rough shape of the tree from a rectangular block of foam formed around El Arbol’s aluminum frame.
I’ve been working every morning and evening, meeting lots of my neighbors, trying to complete El Arbol in time for this year’s biggest Pedal Powered Stage events: Maker Faire, Bicycle Music Festival, and more. Early March had a bunch of rain that I tried to push through. This hail storm caught me by surprise:
Below: Prior to taking the foam shaping approach, I spent a couple weeks fine tuning the mechanisms (and giving demonstrations ) of the Root Deployment System. At this point I was using sculpters’ armature wire to show the approximate form of the tree.
Below: testing the LiveOnBike position with a red tractor seat that I used as the positive form.
Below: Neighbor Kenny trims the lip off the tractor seat with his band saw.
Below: experienced tall biker Kipchoge testing out El Arbol.
Below: Shaping El Arbol at Sunday Streets with a pedal powered hot wire session. Rock The Bike crew member Kai is perched on the captain’s chair, taking a break from pedal powering the tool to keep the bike free of vibrations while I slice off slivers of foam, seen collecting in a pile on the tarp beneath the bike. The hot wire tool is like an archery bow where electrical current passes through the wire, heating it up to the point where it instantly melts foam.
El Arbol rides, plus more amazing tall bike testimony from Flickr friends.
14. February 2010
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Above: The view from El Arbol.
Riding El Arbol back from the Richmond District. The green light is pedal powered from the rear hub. Photo: Aufdencamp
El Arbol rides! Oh boy, it’s fun. The comments from the sidewalks are childlike and fantastic. “How’d you get up there?,” “Are you scared?,” and “What the…,” trailing off.
Debuting El Arbol at Feb. 5th Bicycle Music Festival benefit. Be there!
28. January 2010
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If you’ve been following along as I post shots and updates from creating my latest Soul Cycle, El Arbol, here’s your chance to see it in action at the Feb 5th Bicycle Music Festival benefit, “The Road To BMF”.
It won’t be a complete Arbol yet. The fiberglass tree trunk that will turn El Arbol into a functioning music bike won’t be formed.
But, by next Friday, my plan is to be able to…
Pedal it into the room.
Deploy the 6′ 3″ wide roots seen above, but stepping on the root deployment lever.
Get down off the bike.
Pick a hot volunteer from the crowd, who will…
Pedal power a song or four, and get the dancing going.
Jay and I are putting in a lot of time in Bayview, making sure the mechanisms of the roots are ready to go. I’ll probably have to but some type of temporary seat on the lower position, perhaps another tractor seat, like I used for the LiveOnBike rig: