One of the things which really sets Burning Man apart from other festivals is the art cars. People put huge time and effort into turning up with the biggest, loudest, brightest, most fun and most creative vehicle possible.
The range of cars you see driving around the playa is ridiculous, from converted garden swings with a 2-stroke welded on the back (I got a lift from this one on Thursday night), to fire-breathing penises, to fire-breathing dragons, to fire-breathing gothic palaces, to VW Beetles converted into UFOs (that one was really cool), to bright yellow ice cream trucks.
I mention the bright yellow ice cream truck because that was Crystal – our vehicle:
The idea behind Crystal was basically that it gets incredibly hot in the desert, and what could be more refreshing and welcome than a nice ice cream, made to order according to your specifications? Also, fire is obviously a big part of Burning Man, and we thought it would be an interesting idea to go to the other end of the scale and freeze loads of stuff.
Of course, taking a freezer out there would have been difficult, power-hungry and boring. So instead, we decided to use liquid nitrogen to do the freezing part (you can see our 230L dewar in the back right of the truck). Pat has experience with making cryogenic ice cream from his side project The Hungry Scientist Handbook (pre-order your’s today!), so we knew basically what we were doing. However, we had only made ice cream in pretty small quantities before, and always in a convenient location (like our kitchen), so getting the van ready was a big, big task.
Structural work
When we got the van, it was in pretty good shape, but was still outfitted to be a DHL delivery truck (hence the colour). The first thing we had to do was strip a lot of the shelves, and cut some tactical holes in the van walls.
Crystal as she was when we bought her
Starting to take out the shelves
Repairing some damage to the back corner
Pat making some room for the dewar
Cutting out the ice cream hatch
By this point, we had most of the shelves removed, a clear space for the LN2 tank and a hole cut in the side of the van for us to serve ice cream out of. We also pressure washed it at some point: DHL vans get gunky.
‘lectrics
We knew we couldn’t compete with the big boys in terms of lighting and sounds, but it seemed pretty obligatory for us to have made an effort. Our plan was to have a pretty basic speaker system mounted on the van, and some electro-luminescent wire picking out the outline of the truck.
I managed to pick up some decent Sony speakers at a thrift store for $17 and a car amplifier off craig’s list for $80, and we found some cheap el-wire on the internets, so we were set for equipment. All that was left to do was to mount it all, cut holes for the speakers and so on.
Mounting the speakers
el-wire at dawn
We didn’t get pictures of the el-wire before leaving, so the above is the wire shining through a thick layer of dust, shot with a camera covered in a thick layer of dust. There was also another strip running round the front of the van that died.
One property of liquid nitrogen is that as it boils, it creates cold, dense clouds of condensed water to form and spill out of the container. We thought it would be cool to use this as a sort of fake smoke, and shoot smoke rings out of the speakers. We spent a few hours playing with the speakers to try and make that work, using cigarette smoke as a substitute. After some fiddling, we found that with a speaker cab full of smoke and really crisp techno music, we could get punchy vortices to shoot about 6 feet out of the air port. Very cool. However, with time against us, and limited LN2, we decided to scrap this part of the plan. We did invent quite a few cigarette smoking machines, however. Starting with your basic human bellows, then moving up to reverse pipes, compressed air tubes and Bernoulli effect auto-smokers.
Ice Cream!
All that was left was how we were going to mix together dried milk, water, sugar, flavourings and liquid nitrogen in a fun, safe way. We had lots of ideas about the way to get this done, and unfortunately had to spend a few evenings doing delicious tests. In the end, we found that metal bowls worked well as containers, a drill with a whisking head was good for mixing and insulated coffee jugs were perfect for pouring single servings of liquid nitrogen.
We ended up with an arrangement where our visitors could pick their own flavours out of pots at the back: oreos, whiskey, bacon, chocolate, coffee, cranberries, nuts, chilli flakes, loads of spices, wine, cake mix; we had a wide range to choose from. They then brought their bowls round to the side of Crystal, where they reached inside the van and poured in a small amount of liquid nitrogen (all protected by our super-safe plexiglass):
Pouring the liquid nitrogen
Then we mixed it all up and gave it back to them:
Christoff mixing
We did this for three days, before we ran out of liquid nitrogen – it drew quite a crowd!
Crystal in action
Actually four people in that picture are from our camp, and two are our neighbours. A nice touch was that we made people dance to our freaky ice cream music before they were allowed their dessert:
Hungry dude dancing for ice cream
Dramas
Crystal was a huge asset at Burning Man; she helped us meet lots of awesome people who would otherwise have wandered straight past our camp. However, we did have a few high maintenance moments.
First up, one of her tyres blew out near Sacramento on the way to the festival. At 6pm on a Sunday night. Thankfully, Sam had found a lucky penny at the start of the drive, so we knew it would be ok. Indeed, within 20 minutes, we’d found a Wal-Mart 8 miles away with a tyre shop that would stay open late for us. Overflowing with optimism, we used the hire car’s jack to lift up Crystal’s right rear, right where the 230L of liquid nitrogen were.
Things were going ok, we had all but one lug nut off when I happened to glance under the truck, and asked “is the jack supposed to buckle like that?”. My question was answered about half a second later when the jack gave out and Crystal smashed down onto her already-flat tyre.
Still, things were definitely getting better. Nick had a cousin nearby who was into cars and just happened to have an industrial jack – rated to 10 tons – we’d have had to camp next to the highway if it wasn’t for that stroke of luck. Also, if we’d got a little bit further and had taken the tyre off, Crystal would have landed on her axle and smashed it: trip over. On top of that, the jack had buckled in such a way that it magically missed rupturing the fuel tank by millimetres. Could definitely have been worse!
Pat, just after jack failed
The jack we broke, with the replacement in the background
Once we were at Burning Man, Crystal dealt with things quite well – we never had any problems with her starting – although the cobbled together stereo blew pretty much every fuse in her at one point or another.
The devil vomited in our kettle again on Friday night, when the keys went missing at some point. We were using Crystal as a sort of staging post for water and so on, and in all the confusion and craziness the van keys were probably lost on the playa somewhere. We spent a long time shuffling around the dance floor again the next afternoon, listening to some good minimal, in the middle of a dust storm, looking for a bunch of keys in the middle of a desert. In the end, we had to head over to the lockpicking camp (yes, there was a whole lockpicking camp – in fact there were a few), and they helped us hack out Crystal’s ignition:
Hacked ignition
So, now we have to start her with a pair of pliers, but she’s still got a special place in my memories of Burning Man. We’ve got far too many ideas of improvements we can make for next years burn – more lights, more speakers, more ice cream, more fun! I can’t wait.
