MADE ON EARTH

Report from the world of backyard technology

Raygun Reverie

Photography by Paul Loughridge; photograph far right by Cindy Loughridge

“You know, guys never really grow up,” says Paul Loughridge. His hand-built, retro raygun models have the authentic menace of Star Wars and the wacky form factor of Men in Black. But their mid-century, all-metal look is straight out of his childhood favorites: Flash Gordon, Amazing Stories, Lost in Space.

Collectors think he’s on to something. His work has a satisfying heft from a time before plastics and semiconductors ruled the Earth, when science fiction was built to last with rivets and bolts, copper flanges and chrome fins. Who wouldn’t love to fry a Martian with the Aluminizer, the Shrink Ray, or the Double Barreled Intergalactic Self-Defense Mechanism?

Loughridge, 51, is a Silicon Valley graphic designer, trade-show director, and compulsive collector whose itch for vintage toys took him down the DIY path. Maybe it was his wife banishing his collection (“ray-guns, rocketships, and robots ... all pre-Star Wars”) to a storage unit. Maybe it was the raygun that got away.

“I’d just got back from a toy show,” he recalls, “and must have seen some bitchin’ raygun I couldn’t afford. I decided to make my own out of metal. Used an old drill handle that had belonged to my dad.” He Googled “raygun,” and master maker Clayton Bailey became his inspiration. Dozens of rayguns followed.

In a garage outfitted with a drill press and grinder, Loughridge bolts together flea-market junk. Pistol grips come from old air tools and hacksaws. Barrels and muzzles might be a mean-looking orange juicer, BMX foot peg, or — just once — a perfectly good flower vase. (“Sorry, honey!”) Finishing touches include cocktail shakers, brake hoses, and copper toilet floats.

“Rayguns are definitely a guy thing ... it’s a Tim Allen grunt kinda thing. Boys want to touch them.” But he’s broadening his audience. “I made a couple robot dogs and female robots, and women are buying them.”

Now when he’s not tending his bonsai tree collection (he’s got 70 in the backyard), you might find Loughridge in the garage, creating toy robots, rocket-ships, and rayguns. “I just love old retro stuff. It all has to do with being a kid.” —Keith Hammond

≫ Rayguns: lockwasherdesign.com/index_4.htm claytonbailey.com/galleryrayguns.htm

Illegal Soapbox Derby Races

Photograph by Telstar Logistics

There are no permits from City Hall, no advance promotions, no schedules, and only one ironclad rule: every car must have a beer can holder. Yet even that edict often falls by the wayside because no one knows who’s in charge of enforcement. And besides, at the Bernal Heights Illegal Soapbox Derby races — held each autumn in San Francisco —the point isn’t to follow the rules, or even to go fast.

Instead, it’s about figuring out how to build a gravity-powered car out of whatever materials you can find, then taking your homebuilt wheels on a white-knuckle ride down a twisty mountain road that overlooks the sprawling city below.

“Some guys want to win more than others, but pretty much it’s all just for fun,” says Scott Strebel, 29, co-creator of a car unofficially known as the Keg Racer. Built over the course of a week by combining the front end of a Quarter Midget go-cart, a few wheels purchased at Orchard Supply, and three old beer kegs he found lying around his garage, Strebel’s vehicle looks like a Homer Simpson-inspired cross between Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder and Anakin Skywalker’s Pod Racer — though he insists the similarity is purely coincidental.

“We just arranged all the materials on the floor, then figured out what we could build with them,” he says. Other cars on the hill in 2006 included a bullet-shaped streamliner with a fully enclosed cockpit, a four-wheeled surfboard, an unmodified 1960s pedal-car called the Dude Wagon, and a rolling coffin emblazoned with Dale Earnhardt’s signature “3” logo.

Soapbox derby races have been taking place atop Bernal Hill since the 1970s, but it’s not entirely clear what makes the event illegal — some say the outlaw tag refers to the unauthorized appropriation of a normally serene city park, while others claim the race is a defiant antidote to the more uptight (read: rule-book) American Soap Box Derby.

Of course, the AASBD doesn’t require each car to have a beer can holder. But then again, at the Bernal Heights Illegal Soapbox Derby Races, no one really does either. —Todd Lappin

History Junkies

Photograph courtesy of San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park

As an undergrad, John C. Muir came across 19th century photos of Chinese junks sailing the San Francisco Bay. Curious about what these foreign vessels were doing in California, Muir dove into maritime research and was soon building a replica himself.

Muir learned that several immigrant Chinese shrimping communities settled in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bays between 1860 and 1910. Little remains of these villages, but the well-preserved remains of two redwood junks were discovered during low tide in the mudflats of China Camp State Park in Marin County.

Muir, now a curator of small craft at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, decided to recreate a traditional California-Chinese shrimp junk from the ground up. With Park Service approval he snowshoed through the mud to take photos and measurements, and enlisted the help of third-generation China Camp resident Frank Quan and a crew of mostly amateur boat-builders, who called themselves “Junkies.”

To build the 42-foot replica, they used traditional techniques Muir learned from trips to boatyards in the Guangdong province of China. The Junkies bent the redwood of the keel and planks over a fire, shaping them around a fulcrum while clamping or weighing the ends down with buckets of rocks, and constantly spraying the lumber with water, to prevent burning.

“At first fire-bending seemed counterintuitive,” says Junkie Inka Petersen, “but it works instantaneously. Plus we got to have a bonfire on the beach every day.”

When it was time to piece the vessel together, volunteer blacksmiths taught the Junkies to forge headless iron nails based on samples Muir brought from China. Headless nails are integral to the art of edge-nailing, which joins the planks to each other as well as to the main structure.

Six months later the junk was christened the Grace Quan after Frank’s mother. The crew raised the hand-sewn and tanbark-dyed cotton canvas sail, perhaps the vessel’s most stunning feature, and the Grace Quan set sail on San Francisco Bay.

—Audra Wolfmann

≫ Shrimp Junk Project: nps.gov/archive/safr/junk.html

Purrfect Relaxation

Photograph by Todd Thille

Feeling stressed? You need a visit to the studio of Duncan Laurie, a three-story structure perched on a gorgeous spit of land that overlooks Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. Laurie built the structure from mostly salvaged parts, and if the salt air and crashing waves outside don’t ease your mind, the studio’s Purr Generator surely will.

The Purr Generator is based on Radionics, an alternative technology founded by Dr. Albert Abrams in the early 1900s, on the observation that all matter emits radiation. Radionics surmises that a healthy person attains energetic equilibrium, while unhealthy people are essentially out of tune. The Purr Generator aims to restore balance with healing frequencies that neutralize energy blockage.

The Purr Generator attempts to replicate and amplify the sense of relaxation people experience while holding a purring cat. The device produces its main signal wave at a happy-feline frequency of approximately 25Hz, and directs it into the user as sound, physical vibrations, and “radionic intent,” bathing the body in good vibes. A second channel generates a signal that’s close to the first but offset by a user-adjustable +/- 2Hz, which adds a dramatic spatial effect and a throbbing beat frequency.

To use the device, you lay on a bed suspended inside a cube-octahedron structure. A coneless magnetic coil under the pillow generates a tuned magnetic field, two Buttkicker-like transducers make the bed vibrate physically, and speakers attached to the geometric shell above and below the bed produce sound. A controller box at your right lets you tweak and mix the various waveforms, insert a radionic command, and add in white noise.

Laurie’s studio is filled with other fascinating equipment: a brainwave-to-MIDI converter, Faraday cages, and ultrasound microphones. But the Purr Generator is a popular favorite. Laurie has successfully used it to encourage bone healing for his own hip replacement, and rumor has it the Purr-cure also works for ailments ranging from back pain to depression. Purrfect!

—Steve Nalepa

≫ Duncan Laurie: duncanlaurie.com

Throwing to the Dogs

Photograph by Charles Platt

When Ken Schroeder was repairing appliances for a living, he decided that a spring-loaded switch from a dishwasher would be ideal as a trigger for some kind of device that his dog, Bender, could activate. Two years later, while studying industrial design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Ken mounted the switch behind the sensor plate of the world’s first automated dog-biscuit thrower.

Bender places his paw on the sensor plate. An electric can opener turns gears that feed a biscuit from a magazine. Bender waits expectantly. Tension builds. The motor from a handheld kitchen mixer starts whirring, driving eggbeaters coated in silicone caulking. The biscuit hits the beaters, which kick it out of an ejection port. While Bender chases the biscuit, the machine resets itself, ready for the next cycle.

The bone thrower satisfied three goals for Schroeder. “I had to make a project that involved gears and electrical,” he recalls. “Also I made a video about teaching an old dog new tricks, for a psychology class. And, Bender and the bone thrower were attractive to potential girlfriends.” He pauses. “Can you express that in the nicest possible way?”

Schroeder has a long history of building gadgets. “When I was a kid,” he says, “I used to take Legos and add motors and paddlewheels, and play with them in the pond. Also I used an angle grinder to cut notches in the rims of bicycle wheels, so that I could ride on ice. Unfortunately, that didn’t work very well.”

Currently Schroeder lives in Florida, where he and his brother hope to start a business selling furniture fabricated from unusual materials, such as string soaked in resin. What motivates him in his design projects?

“It’s fun to be creative and make things,” he says with a shrug, as if the answer should be obvious.

—Charles Platt

≫ Dog Biscuit Thrower: ktschroeder.com/Products.php

The Sound of Music Blocks

Photograph by Jeffrey Traer Bernstein

The Tangible Music Sequencer lets people of all musical abilities feel like Julie Andrews conducting an orchestra of robotic von Trapp children.

The Sequencer is a collection of candy-colored, palm-sized boxes that semi-autonomously “play together” by making sounds (and light) and then triggering adjacent blocks to follow. Simple software lets you drag-and-drop any sounds, such as drumbeats, words, or even whole songs, onto icons representing the blocks. You then place the physical blocks in any configuration — next to each other, one after the other, or in forks — and press their Play buttons to hear the sequence of sounds you’ve created. If you press multiple Play buttons, you can create polyphony or other overlapping sequences of simultaneous sounds. You can also move the blocks back and forth to make them repeat.

“I’m taking advantage of the knowledge people have of interacting with their surroundings, and giving them a simple, yet expressive way of using it,” says Jeffrey Traer Bernstein, a Ph.D. student at Princeton’s Sound Lab, and the maker of the Sequencer.

Each box is controlled by a Freescale 8-bit microcontroller, sends signals via infrared, and uses Panasonic low-power RF modules to communicate with a hub on the host computer. The host doesn’t just upload sounds to the boxes; it also calculates what each sound “looks like” in blinking light, and uploads this info to the blocks for great visual effect.

“I wanted to make the simplest musical instrument possible that allows for expression and yet makes immediately recognizable music,” says Bernstein. “The idea is not to make John Cage.”

For Bernstein, the success of his Sequencer will be determined by the surprising interactions between users and the instrument. He’s working on manufacturing his Sequencer, and ultimately getting it into the hands of everyone from DJs to kids to orchestras.

“People have this idea that what they make is theirs, that they have exclusive control over how it’ll be used, but I think that’s counterproductive.”

—Nicole Oncina

≫ Princeton Sound Lab: soundlab.cs.princeton.edu

Hacker of Yesteryear

Photograph by Jake von Statt

When Jake von Slatt was 14, he was the only kid in his neighborhood (maybe the only kid in any neighborhood) who owned his own brazing torch. At 16, he lost part of a finger in a “hovercraft incident” (now that’s an emergency room visit you don’t see every day). Jake von Slatt’s not even this colorful character’s real name, but a persona he uses online, his “brand,” as he calls it.

By day, he’s a Linux sysadmin for an aerospace firm outside Boston, but in his spare time, von Slatt likes tinkering with and modding castoff tech of the past. He has several websites chronicling his progress in everything from converting a 1989 Thomas Saf-T-Liner MVP bus into a gorgeous motor home to his Steampunk Workshop, where he mods kerosene lamps and experiments in brass etching. And then there’s his page where he enthusiastically logs his town dump and dumpster-diving finds.

Given Herr von Slatt’s interest in tech resuscitation, it’s no wonder that one day he looked at a Western Electric Bell Model 500 rotary phone, that icon of 20th century telephony, and saw its future as a 21st century mobile.

Unlike other retro handsets he’d seen tethered to a mobile phone, von Slatt wanted his creation to be totally portable, sans cord, so he got out his Dremel tool and grafted his mobile LG phone’s belt clip onto the back of the Model 500’s earpiece. He upgraded the electret in the Model 500 with an element from a computer mic, and used a mini-plug out of the Western Electric so he can still unplug the mobile phone and use it without the handset.

Some wire soldering, J-B Welding, and black Krylon painting later, a comfortable, hands-free mobile Model 500 emerged that fits perfectly into the brassy von Slatt lifestyle. Picture him tooling down the street talking on his Western Electric cellie in a steam-powered car (a project he’s considering tackling next).

—Gareth Branwyn

≫ Jake von Slatt: vonslatt.com