Progress Report

The last couple weeks have been in a progressive acceleration. Burning Man, new job, wedding prep all have begun ramping up the pace of life. Not a bad situation to be in, with all the moving and the shaking, and Full Charge! and Peregrinus is no exception.

Since last time I have gotten the skeleton and superstructure assembled. On advice from my woodworker friend, I have made the stays flush with the lip of the plywood, which will make the skinning a lot simpler. I used his airgun to tack the whole thing together. It looks like some strange hybrid of turtle-bird, with all the wonderful geometric curves that are part of the design. You can see the DLG battery strapped on the inside of it, and it's currently running through a Sonic Impact 10 Watt T-amp. It has an impressive sound for such a small amplifier, and I enjoyed its debut cruise from Oakland to Berkeley! The Pyle speakers have great mids and highs, but distort on the lows, so I haven't been able to crank it as high as I have wanted to yet. To correct this, I ordered a pair of 500 Hz high-pass Fmod crossovers for the amps. They should cut out the distoring (and damaging) low frequency sound to these little speakers.

Skinning the box is the process of closing up the box by adding the sides. It will be one of the last steps of Peregrinus' construction, one that I will leave to the very end because it makes the box only accessible through the one central hole, and there is much wiring, fiddling, rifling, installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling that will need to happen then. Closing up the sides acoustically isolates the front and the back of the speakers from each other, and it makes it so the sound wave produced at the front don't cancel out those behind. This makes the sound so much more loud and true. Unfortunately, I don't get to hear it in all it's glory until then. Paul Freedman offered several options for skinning it, including translucent fiberglass, which will allow for some lovely interior mood lighting that I hadn't even thought about.

Meanwhile, I talked to Paul Mckenzie, who rocks out at Rock the Bike building custom sound systems like the bumpin' Bilenky and sells his own T-amp circuit boards. He recommended his T-20 to run the larger 4x6's in front, and the smaller T-10 to run the 4x4's on the side. Here they are, next to the notebook dedicated to planning the ride. They're about 3x4 inches and a couple of ounces each, which is unbelievable compared to the size of many comparably powered amps. These will comprise the central nervous system of the sound bike: they will take in the signal, process it, amplify it, and send it back out into the world bigger and better.

Next up: building the stand to hold the T-amps.