Last time, we prepared to set off for the integration weekend. Today, we talk about what transpired there (at least the first part of it!)

Marc had arranged with some friends of his for a large field to be available for the weekend. This allowed us to spread out and use a lot of space to setup. It also offered some interesting logistical challenges. You see, the large trucks (26′, I think) couldn’t make it all the way to the back field, so we had to offload onto pickup trucks[1] for the last leg of the journey. Thankfully, we had two on hand[2]:

There was a lot to move, with teams at the large truck unloading, doing transport via pickup truck, and unloading the pickup trucks at the back field.

So, if you’ll recall, the purpose (for us) of this weekend was to do as much of a build as we could, an integration test to make sure that our design and construction for Mirror Blaze were sound. Here’s the overhead view:

Here’s the list of the mirrors and posts that we ended up using for the integration test. Note that we constructed the inner triangle surrounding the flame effect, along with a small corridor on the left so we could test the feeling of being inside the maze ablaze:

The next couple of pictures should give you a sense of the size of the area that we were fortunate enough to have to play with for the integration weekend (and the incredible number of people who came to help out, my apologies for names I’ve missed). Also, you can see the staging area where the pickup trucks would drop off parts for the various installations:

Here you can get an idea of the scale of Riskee Ball:

Silicone place mats did the trick, preventing abrasions from the metal stand onto the quartz tube!:

Not visible in this picture: The rebar holding the post:

I really enjoy making .gifs, especially ones that include such joy:

Stay tuned next time for more integratey goodness!

[1]This was similar to the occasion when we had to move biosafety cabinets from one part of campus to another, where the loading dock was around a corner where the large trucks could not go. The solution was the same, offloading onto a pickup truck.

[2]I think one was Seth’s, and I don’t remember who had brought the other one.

Last time, we talked about learning to weld, so that we could build a stand for the quartz tube for the first integration weekend[1].

First, we had to make sure we had all of the parts for our flame effect (and that we had built it!). Luckily, we had purchased all of the parts during our expedition to the excellent Helios makerspace in Montreal (post forthcoming):

We called our flame effect ‘Flamey’ because we are creative like that:

A few days before integration weekend, I recall running around to hardware stores looking for non-abrasive things with high melting temperatures. I found the fabric below (in the welding supply section of a Home Depot, IIRC), along with silicone placemats (not in the welding supply section):

Also, we had not been camping in many many years, so I went to get some inflatable pillows. They were okay, but I would bring ‘real’ pillows next time, unless space was a critical consideration:

(Not shown. Tests of the flame effect. S might have pics of this, to be shown later.)

Then it was time to pack up and go! Trish drove the truck over to our place (Francis had been at least partially living in our garage for a while), and we started packing! We are still thankful for the many volunteers who tolerated our hinged posts:

There were some moments of pure joy juxtaposed with moments of pure contemplation:

‘Truck-packing‘ is one of the lesser known NP-Complete problems:

This tiny potato believes in us[2]:

Finally, we noticed that the ramp on the truck had a broken phalange, luckily (I think) Trish had found a long (like 10″) nail[3] which we were able to use to solve the problem most adequately:

And then we were off! Stay tuned for next time, when we travel to the countryside and join forces with many other volunteers to build fiery mayhem!

[1]Organized by many people, all of whom we will try to thank photographically

[2]This is possibly the best thing you can say to someone who is participating in building a ridiculous and difficult thing.

[3]Also galvanized, but that is not important to this story.

Last time, we paid tribute to some of the many people who came out and helped us build. Today, we’ll talk about our adventures in finding/making/etc. an appropriate stand for the 7’x1′ quartz tube. Your assignment is that you need to find or make or have made a stand that can hold 100+ pounds, is fireproof, and yet is gentle enough on the quartz so as not to cause abrasions or cracks.

This is the tube in question. From the original email, the Outer Diameter was 300mm, with 5.5mm wall thickness x 2134 mm length:

IIRC, when we had talked about the issue of making a stand for the tube at one of the S3FA meetings, Carrie had quickly sketched out a diagram which very closely matched what I ended up building. But, since I had never welded before, it took me a while to come around to the idea. We had a couple of weeks left to make this happen (before the integration weekend), so I first tried to go to a custom welding shop to pay them to do it.

Viking Engineering and Costa Railings were both recommended to me, and they both seemed very competent, but they were far too full of work to give me a hand with so little lead time.

I then stopped at a Structube on the way home, on the off chance that there might be something there that could be repurposed into a tube stand. I kept coming back to this chair, which seemed to be a reasonable height off the ground (we needed about a foot for the flame effect under the tube):

I also met these friendly brontosauroid elephants:

But then it was time to knuckle down and actually learn to weld. Dani was kind enough to teach us on very short notice, so I went and purchased the parts (square tube steel is surprisingly inexpensive, and available easily at Canadian Tire).

So, we were taught MIG welding, and here are the machine settings possible, to give you an idea of how it works (IIRC, we were using square steel tubing somewhere between 12-gauge and 16-gauge[1], and I think we were using the center column):

Welding was really interesting. MIG welding is even easier than soldering (after you get over the initial terror of using a metal chop saw, and only being able to see while the arc is actually arcing). You put your welding tip on the location you want to weld, and it extrudes metal with flux inside automatically, and welds things together. It’s easy to also dissolve the metal you’re trying to weld together, but you can usually fill that in.

Here, you can see a closer view, with a better view of the metal build-up on the weld:

The way we learned, it’s good to start with a small dot to hold things together while you do the more serious welding. Here, you can see the larger ‘H’ of one quarter of the tube stand taking shape:

Oddly enough, I don’t seem to have photodocumentation of the rest of the process, but I can show you a pic of the completed stand from the integration weekend, with tube for scale:

Stay tuned for next time, when we finish our prep for the integration weekend!

[1]I’m using a Lowe’s link because it was easy to find, but I can’t remember if I purchased the steel tubing at Canadian tire or Home Depot.

Yesterday, we talked about some friends who came to help with Mirror Blaze. It turns out that many more people also wanted to come and help![1]

Those hinges made the maze possible (especially the assembly in the intense heat, uneven ground, and otherwise terrible conditions on playa), but they made the posts almost impossible to stack or pack (Sorry Mike and Marc!).

The following set of pictures are of our hardy team assembling the inner triangle which would eventually house the flame effect (inside the quartz tube). Note that the posts are 8′ tall, but the two-way mirrors are only attached to the top 6′ of the posts. This made assembly significantly trickier, as they had to be held up while being attached, but it was necessary so that we could attach a swing panel to the bottom so that we could access the flame effect shutoff valve in case of emergency. (Also, two-way mirrors are horrifically expensive, and the fact that they were 2′ shorter was a significant savings.)

Thank you to all who helped! (I think I managed to get pictures of just about everyone who came out!)

Next time, we’ll talk about our adventures in finding/making/etc. an appropriate stand for the 7’x1′ quartz tube. Your assignment is that you need to find or make or have made a stand that can hold 100+ pounds, is fireproof, and yet is gentle enough on the quartz so as not to cause abrasions or cracks.

Stay tuned!

[1]We have the *best* friends!

Last time, we had just made our first panel, and had convinced ourselves that our system would work to build another twenty or so.

Now we just had to make them. So, we put out the call to our friends (and the local burner community), and people came out of the woodwork[1] to help[2]!

Above, you can see Mel and S helping Geoff[3] drill the base of post number 5. If you look closely, you may be able to see that post 5 connects to post 6, that the drill bit is a spade bit, and about 18″ long, and the taped guide on the right side of the post.

You may recall that we were drilling the bases of the posts so that they could accomodate 1/2″ rebar. 1′ of rebar into the posts, and 1-2′ of rebar into the ground (1′ into the ground in the middle of the maze, 2′ into the ground around the perimeter). This drilling was surprisingly tricky to do at the correct angle. You couldn’t do it straight down (so that gravity would help), as the posts were 8′ long. The other issue was that when you tried to drill them sideways, you had to make sure that you were drilling straight in two dimensions at once. The way we solved this was to get them as level as possible, then attach a guide so that the driller could have a chance at seeing both axes at once. From above and behind, the driller can see yaw pretty well, but it’s easy to miss pitch, especially because the drill is heavy. The side guide helped considerably, so that the driller could line the pitch of the drill (and especially drill bit) up with the guide[4].

E literally came out of the woodwork (or at least the shrubbery around the side of the house). It was an eventful day. Even more people came to help! Stay Tuned!

[1]Literally! (Or at least the shrubbery…)

[2]It’s interesting to think about this. I know we’ve enjoyed helping people build large projects in the past. I think people like being part of something, like building something, and it can be very relaxing to work on a task that you know ‘needs’ to be done, and you can focus on the task and not worry too much about the larger project.

[3]Gillian was also there, but I couldn’t find any pictures.

[4]Other fun things were the placement of the hinges so that the hole could be drilled for the rebar without disturbing the hinge screws. Structurally, you would want the hinges attached as close to the bottom of the posts and mirrors as possible, but you’d really want to leave at least a foot at the bottom of the posts so that you could drill into them and not ruin your drill bit on the screws.

Last time, we talked about the Tube(!) arriving, and various bits of design we had to do to safely encapsulate a flame in an acrylic maze. Today, we talk about how we started to build the ‘production'[1] maze.

Here is the ‘mirror panel production’ setup that I put together, using other 4×4 component posts to hold the mirror and posts we were working on up, along with supporting the mirror in the middle so that it would be as flat as possible for repeatable drilling.

I had a number of drawings like this in my book. Note that this one shows that crossed hinges on the same side of the post were untenable. More on this later. Stay tuned!

[1]The maze that we would actually take in pieces to the desert, and assemble, and have people walk through.

Last time, we talked about how one would make posts (and an installation) able to withstand a 90km/h windstorm. Today, we talk about a different component of the maze, the infamous quartz tube!

The main goal of the mirror maze was to make the participants feel like they were in the middle of a fire (and incidentally, not be able to see where it was coming from), while still being totally safe. There were a number of safety measures that we put in place:
– Quarter-turn valves by the tank and by the flame effect
– Using only propane-rated pipes, hose, solenoids, other valves, and tanks
– Using propane instead of a more dangerous fuel[1]
– Actively controlled flame effect
– ‘Lifeguard chair’ so that the flame effect operator could see the entire area around the flame effect (and the entire maze)
– Multiple physical barriers between the participants and the flame effect

It is this last one that we want to talk about today. We had long decided that we wanted to enclose the flame effect within one of the four foot mirror triangles. This would give a physical barrier (the mirrors) between the participants and the flame effect. The trick was figuring out how to enclose the flame effect so that it wouldn’t melt the acrylic.

(Note that acrylic melts at 160C, normal glass melts at around 500C[2], and propane flames can reach 1980C if they are focused.)

We knew that we couldn’t use normal glass. For a brief while, we toyed with the idea of using ‘fireplace glass’, some sort of screen or glass that you would use to cover a fireplace, but there was nothing commercially available in the right size 7-8′ tall, and about 1′ wide.

Then S saw some of those outdoor flame effects inside glass-looking tubes, and (I believe it was Seth) suggested Quartz as the best solution for heat-resistant transparency.

(Note that Quartz has a melting temperature of around 1700C, but propane can only exceed that if it is specifically focused (blue flame), which our flame effect would never be for any length of time or for any significant volume. Thermal conductivity and heat dissipation would work in our favour here.)

Okay, so we knew that we wanted a quartz tube of about 1′ diameter, and 7-8′ in length. So, how do you acquire such a thing? S made a number of inquiries, finding a few suppliers in the U.S., and a bunch of suppliers in China.[3] The U.S. suppliers being thousands of dollars more, we made the decision to attempt to source the tube from China.

Weeks later (and some frantic middle of the night Mandarin phone messages later), we had our tube!:

Just to give you a sense of scale (and triumph):

More on the tube later! Now on to hinges!

So, we had talked earlier about how we selected T-hinges over piano hinges because they were much stronger. What we had not mentioned was that there were numerous sizes of T-hinges, and other similar shapes of hinges:

Also, when I was going out to purchase hinges, I would return to the same stores again and again (all the stores within bicycle range had been picked clean halfway through the project), and the double-price hinges (because they were extra galvanized or something) would start to look more and more tempting.

I strongly prefer using commodity items when building things, even if they’re not exactly what you want, because the economies of scale and mass production are difficult to beat.[4] However, when you combine this with building a large project and purchasing from retail stores who do ‘just-in-time’ resupply, you can often be left hanging after you’ve exhausted all of the stores in an easy radius.

For this project, we needed 6 hinges per mirror, and we had in excess of 20 mirrors. Each store would have perhaps 12 useful hinges when it was fully stocked. We were lucky that I enjoy being a scrounger.

Of course, when one is scrounging, one sometimes scrounges something unexpected:

Stay tuned for next time, when we build our first complete production mirror panel, and some friends arrive to help!

[1]It is said that if you use a gaseous fuel, if you make a mistake, you lose some hair. With a liquid fuel (such as gasoline), if you make a mistake, you lose skin (or worse). Be safe!

[2]Glass is a fascinating topic that is far too complex and out of scope for this post.

[3]As far as she could tell, they might have been the same supplier, as they had very similar responses to inquiries.

[4]And it’s kinda fun to work around constraints like that.

Last time, we showed our first integration test of the mirrors for Mirror Blaze. Later, we would test out the ‘Blaze’ (flame effect) part.

But in the meantime, we had to figure out the solution to a different vexing problem. There was a list of constraints we were designing for:
– Make a mirror maze
– Large enough for the public to walk through
– Large enough to feel like they’re getting lost
– Small enough (or with enough escape hatches) that they can get out quickly if something goes wrong
– Tall enough that people feel like they are completely inside and cannot escape that way
– Able to withstand alkali playa dust for a week
– Able to withstand 4 hours * 7 days of intermittent flame effect firing
– Inexpensive enough that we could afford it
– Able to withstand a 90km/h windstorm

It was this last constraint that vexed us the most. I had calculated that the wind force could reach something like a ton, but we didn’t want to go with the obvious guywire solution, because they would need to stick out for meters in all directions, and we’d be constantly tripping over them[1].

So, with this in mind, we returned to Home Hardware (New Canadians Lumber, really friendly and helpful people, we recommend them).

We looked at a number of different options for holding the posts in place. The one below was the most expensive option (They were about $15-20 each, IIRC), and I couldn’t imagine how back-breakingly difficult it would be to remove them from the ground when we were done. (Also, how would the mirrors fit around them, at the base? And, how would they stand up to wind? Would they bend up out of the hole?)

Some other options were not much better:

But we kept coming back to this one:

It felt mostly like the correct shape, if only we could make the rebar longer, and better connect it to the post… (We had been told that for proper securing against a 90 km/h windstorm, you want your rebar to be 1-2′ into playa. We also knew that would torque the posts around a small connector like that something fierce.)

Then it hit us[2]! Just drill the rebar into the center of the post! Brilliant! All we needed was a 12-18″ drill bit[3]. It was time to go and test!

But first, we needed to go purchase some 1/2″ rebar:

Welding, or un-welding, the sparks are always impressive:

Then it was time for drilling[4]:

We managed to wear out more than one of the 18″[5] spade bits. Sawdust jam was frequent, even with the corded drill. (I can’t imagine doing this particular job with a cordless.):

And success! Here is the finished post:

And here it is, freestanding, showing that we could put them up using only rebar, and no guywires[6]!

Tune in next time, for when we go into production, and a wide and varied cast of characters literally come out of the woodwork to help. Stay tuned!

[1]And they look terrible.

[2]I honestly don’t remember where this idea came from. We had been asking people this question for months. It might have been one of the kind gentlemen at New Canadian. (I really cannot recommend them enough.)

[3]Spade bit, but we’ll cover that later.

[4]This is actually a picture from much later, in our production process, but I couldn’t find any from the prototyping stage.

[5]18″ or 24″, I can’t recall.

[6]Well, we would also need top wind-bracing, but that’s a story for another time.

Last time, we talked about some of the basic components in Mirror Blaze. Today, we’ll talk about how we combined them for the first time.

As I mentioned before, we had purchased four 4’x8′ acrylic mirrors, three single-sided, and only one double sided (as they were significantly more expensive). The designs we were thinking of involved dozens of mirrors, including one or more sets of triangle-enclosed flame effects, but we needed to test all kinds of things before settling on a design.

One of the best decisions we made was to use 4″x4″ cedar for our posts. The options were treated wood (the green-tinted wood that you see used for many outside emplacements), and cedar. We initially liked the cedar because it smelled better, but I think the fact that it was about half the weight was what decided it for us. 8′ 4″x4″ posts are not too too heavy, but when you have to stevedore them repeatedly, and pack and unpack them from the garage each time you want to do construction, each kilo saved is worth it.

This was our test of two different types of hinges. We thought to try piano hinges and T-hinges. S recalls that the piano hinges were almost flimsy, bending when we lifted them. Thinking about it, the T-hinges are designed and build for exactly what we were trying to do with them.

We also had an incident with the acrylic sometime during the early part of this test. As I recall, the first time I tried to drill holes in the acrylic, it cracked, and made the missing corner you see in the picture below. We eventually concluded that this was probably because the acrylic was too thin (our test acrylic was less than half of the thickness of the acrylic we actually used for the project), but I remained terrified of the prospect throughout the remainder of the project.

The two types of bolts used for piano hinges and T-hinges:

IIRC, we ended up drilling 1/4″ holes for the bolts.

I should probably mention at this point that we screwed the hinges into the posts, and drilled holes in the mirrors so that we could bolt the hinges to the mirrors. This worked out for testing and assembly. It worked well enough that even though we had never assembled more than about 1/4 of the project at a time before going to the Burn, it all fit together exactly once we got there. I remain proud that we accomplished this.

More geometry testing:

We had a lot of fun with the two-way mirrors. Note how clean and pristine they are here, compared with how things looked on playa.

This was our first time putting three mirrors together in a triangle. This, and the next video, were when we really started thinking that this could really work!

Our first flame test with the two-way mirror! It worked! 😀

Last time, we talked a little about some of the inspirations and lead up to the Mirror Blaze project. Today, we’re going to show our first experiments with mirrors and posts, from May and June 2015.

First, a note about how cats react to power tools:

Lyra reacting to power tools.

The first mirrors arrived sometime in February, a time of somber reflection:

This first set of mirrors, which would end up being about 90% of the mirrors in the final mirror maze, were a wonderful gift from Trevyn. It’s not overstating it to say that this project would not have been possible (or would have cost twice as much) without his generous help:

It being cold, and the mirrors being held together with double sided tape, we separated them as best we could, and went inside to wait out as much of the Canadian winter as we could.

We spent the time plotting geometry, and trying to uncover which shapes were most likely to contain a cat:

Note that the triangle in the photos above is 4′ per side, as the mirrors we were planning to use were 4′ or 4’1″ per side.

On June 6th, it was finally time to do our first experiments and build! We knew that we would have to purchase at least three two-way mirrors (to surround the flame effect), so we had purchased some half-thickness mirrors (three one-way, one two-way), in the hope that they would be thick enough to use.

We had two major problems that we were still trying to solve, though. The first was how to keep the structure up without using guy wires. We had experienced the horrors of tripping over guy wires every night in 2013, and we wanted to avoid this at all cost.

We had the bright idea of attaching the wooden 4″x4″ posts (we had at this point mostly decided on 4″x4″ wooden posts, after all of our ideas of custom-made metal 6-way symmetric metal posts fell by the wayside) into the ground with some sort of post or attachment. These ‘carport rebar’ devices felt very close to what we were looking for, but we were designing for 90km/h windstorms blowing on upright 4’x8′ panels. It’s difficult to see in the picture, but the rebar is only about 8″ long coming out of the bottom of the saddle, and we thought we would want at least a foot, probably two to be able to withstand the wind. Also, my wood-splitting and torque fears were triggered by the idea of only having one sideways bolt holding the post in place about 2″ from the bottom of the post, where it would be subject to the highest torque with not much wood right at the tip of the post taking all of the strain. However, as you’ll see later, this was the genesis of an idea:

The other main problem was how to reliably and precisely make 60 degree angles between the mirrors, so that we would get the true tessellated triangular prism ‘hall of mirrors’ effect. We thought of using ‘Skewable Angle’ bendable metal connectors:

But looking at them, it occurred to us that we could just use hinges. They’d be more expensive, but but much more flexible, and likely much more durable. Thinking about it, hinges would allow more flexible assembly (and a lot of headaches, but that’s another story). We decided to try two different types of hinges, piano hinges:

And T-hinges. (It’s funny, looking at the product pages now, it’s clear that we wanted T-hinges, for their durability, and the simple fact that they’re built specifically for outdoor doors and gates, but at the time, it was difficult to know what was important in the design. We could only test and hope.):

Next time, we’ll talk about how we used all of these components for our first integration test! Stay tuned!