The 2009 Maker Fair attracted a big crowd to the San Mateo County
Fairgrounds in the San Francisco
Bay area. Billed by its
creator Make magazine as the world's
largest DIY event, the Maker Faire is an engineer's dream venue. Tens of
thousands of people listened to speakers discuss constructive creativity from
huge stages or watched from bleachers as robotic model warships trundled around
a manmade pond and fired at each other with deadly intent. But many people were
very busy creating ... something.
In one building, young children assembled foot-long model
rockets, decorated them and then took turns firing off their new creations from
a large launch complex set up in an adjacent parking lot. Next door, parents helped
their young children reduce mountains of discarded electronic equipment into
component parts, which they then reassembled into fanciful creations using glue,
bolts and screws. In a third building, robots competed for prizes. In a fourth,
crowds of people from all age groups labored over sewing machines to create new
clothes from old. In short, the 2009 Maker Faire was a heavily attended, chaotic
mashup of unbridled creativity.
Rampant creativity was abundantly apparent in the oddball collection
of strange and unusual vehicles that either tooled around the fairgrounds or
sat on display. The diverse set of vehicles ranged from electric-powered cupcake/muffin
art cars and a mobile recliner chair that silently scooted amongst the Faire
goers to an exquisitely executed fire-snorting Snail Car with a beautifully hand-crafted
body on a 1967 VW bug chassis. Throughout the day, a solar-powered electric
chariot pulled by a roller skating robot wearing a rubber mask of Barack Obama silently
sailed through the thick crowds. Finally, there were otherworldly steampunk
vehicles to look at and to ride.
With a Blueberry on Top
The cupcake and muffin cars are the brainchildren of Lisa
Pongrace and Greg Solberg, who originally developed the concept for the Burning
Man event in 2004. The electric vehicles employ 24V motors and deep-cycle
marine batteries. They can go as fast as 15 mph. Each car is just large enough
to hold one person, with the person's head sticking up through the cupcake or
muffin top. The wheels are not apparent on the low-slung vehicles so they look
more like air-cushion or anti-gravity vehicles. The cars' cupcake-tin body is
formed from accordion-folded 26-gauge galvanized sheet steel and the cupcake or
muffin top is made from chicken wire, batting and fabric. The cars cost $500
to $1500 to make and there are currently about 16 of them. Many are stored at a
"secret" facility in Berkeley,
CA. Pongrace's car is styled
as a blueberry muffin and she scoots around in it wearing a large fabric
blueberry for a hat.
Meanwhile, mechanical engineer Lyn Gomes piloted her
electric recliner chair through the crowd using the tail of a stuffed-toy lap cat
as a joystick. Gomes built the mobile recliner around an electric wheelchair
and she looked quite relaxed as she glided through the crowd. When she's not running
about in her roaming recliner, Gomes is an HVAC engineer and lives in Walnut Creek, CA.
Ess-Car-Go?
Oakland
blacksmith, metal fabricator and sculptor Jon Sarriugarte took an
inexperienced team of metal workers and built the Snail Art Car but the concept
didn't originate with Sarriugarte. It was his wife's idea. "We were driving in
the desert," he said, "and she said she wanted a snail car." The original idea
was to create the car's body in fiberglass but one morning at breakfast, the project
suddenly gelled in Sarriugarte's mind and he quickly drew the concept for a
riveted and welded metal snail body on a napkin. Then he bought a partially
restored 1967 VW bug from a seller on Craigslist for $400; he sold the body for
$200 and he ended up with a low-priced, fully functional chassis and drive
train for the Snail Art Car.
Sarriugarte assembled a team of eager students who wanted to
learn about metal working but had little experience. To train them, "I had to
make rules for them," he says. For example, there was a rivet rule that
allowed a student to figure out where to place a rivet without needing to ask
the teacher. There was a "golden mean rule" that governed the symmetry of the
project. In all, it took the team three months to complete the Snail Art Car,
which is street legal and sports an official California license plate. Like the cupcake/muffin
cars, the Snail Art Car has also made the pilgrimage to the Burning Man event.
Machinist Bob Schneeveis developed the idea for a
solar-powered electric chariot pulled by an anthropomorphic roller-skating
robot a few years ago. An electric motor drives the chariot's robotic legs through
cams. The robot smoothly skates from one foot to the other and the movement silently
propels the chariot forward. At last year's Maker Faire, the robot sported a
rubber face mask of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the robot
held a globe of the world in its arms. A YouTube video shows
the robot dressed as former President George W. Bush in a Roman Legionnaire's
costume. This year, the robot wears a President Barack Obama mask and holds an
American flag. Schneeveis lives in Palo
Alto, CA and
has been building electric vehicles for 30 years.
Four friends in Santa
Rosa, CA – David
Farish, Dan Kirby, Skye Barnett and Clifford Hill – built the Hennepin Crawler,
a human-powered, four-person steampunk vehicle. Two of the four people involved
with the Hennepin Crawler appeared at this year's Maker Faire in steampunk
attire. Haven't heard of steampunk? Steampunkers are fascinated with Victorian
dress, steam power, gears and ornate brass trim.
Steampunk traces its roots to the stories of Jules Verne,
Mark Twain and Mary Shelly but the subgenre exploded in 1990 after the
publication of The Difference Engine,
which describes a world with an alternate history where coal-fired steam power and
elaborate geared mechanical transmissions run everything from communications to
computers and hackers are called "clackers." Essentially, the book asks "What
if Babbage had succeeded in creating all-mechanical computers and electronics
had never evolved?" (Watch the 1999 movie remake of the TV series Wild Wild West for a fun, fast look at
steampunk.)
Built for Burning Man
The Hennepin Crawler was purpose-built for the Burning Man
event. "We went to Burning Man," says Hill, "and saw people with big, cool
things. We wanted one but couldn't afford to buy one, so we built one." A
carport served as the assembly area and the project team used nothing more than
a bucket of hand tools, two grinders and an MIG welder to assemble the vehicle.
"It's surprisingly easy to MIG weld," says Hill. It took the quartet about 250 person-hours
to fabricate the Crawler using discarded or recycled parts from various pieces
of lawn furniture, a free-standing hammock frame and a porch swing. Each of
the four seated riders provides motive power to the Crawler's rear axle through
an independently geared bicycle pedal crank and chain.
One of the most prominent features of the Hennepin Crawler is
its unique wheel design. Each of the Crawler's wheels consists of a central
metal hub made from a conventional "Hyundai or Ford Escort" steel rim. "We
stole those from somebody," quips Hill. The outer wheel was made from a short section
of 48-inch plastic culvert pipe. Roughly 200 steel aviation cables plus eye
bolts, washers and crimp rings link each wheel's inner and outer rims for a
total of about 900 parts per wheel. The wheel treads consist of mountain-bike
tires that have been filleted and riveted to the culvert pipe sections. "Each
wheel [assembly] took about a case of beer," says Hill. "They're not exactly
true, but they're close enough." The fabrication exercise was obviously worth
the effort because the Hennepin Crawler drew large, admiring crowds wherever it
went throughout this year's Maker Faire.
While waiting on the Caltrain platform for my return to San Jose, I spied a dad
with two kids: a brother and sister who looked like they were perhaps 9 and 8
years old respectively. Each child held a foot-long purple rocket with an
expended rocket engine still in place. The girl's rocket had lost one of its
four stabilizer fins, probably from a bad landing in the parking lot after its
inaugural flight. It didn't matter. She wasn't letting it out of her tight grasp.
She'd made something herself. She'd launched it herself. It streaked into the
sky and returned to earth. Now she was taking it home. In just a few short
hours, that little girl learned about the power and thrill of making something spectacular
and then using it. She'd touched the exquisite creative joy that sits at the
core of engineering just as the vehicle developers at the Maker Faire surely
have. You could see it in the way she held her rocket. She now had bragging
rights. I suspect that the family I saw on the train platform will return to
the 2010 Maker Faire. Let's hope there's a cupcake car or an electric reclining-chair
runabout or a fire-snorting snail car in that young lady's future.
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