First, thank you for helping get the ship to Burning Man. It was a great year on the Playa.
A quick recap of the ship’s history on the playa:
2010, first year out, the ship drove painfully slow due to a hydraulic miscalculation until Wednesday night when the gas engine died.
2011, hydraulic problem as soon as we got to the playa, I wrenched on the ship all week but wasn’t able to get it fixed, the ship stayed in camp all week.
2012, still in debt from the last two years and wasn’t able to bring the ship.
It was a rough few years so I was a little nervous going this year knowing that something could easily go wrong and the ship wouldn’t be functional again, but that wasn’t the case. This year the ship ran great, she ran at a good speed (could have been a touch faster but a good cruising pace). We were able to drive the ship 10 hours a day and 16 hours on Saturday, we put over a 100 miles on the ship throughout the week.
Here are some of my favorite photos (so far)
Photo By Kelli Rua Klein
Photo by Jessica Carpenter:
Photo by Scott London:
Photo by Andrew Miller:
We took the ship out and did four Art tours throughout the week and also did a wedding party tour. One of the best things is we were able to give a lot of people that we didn’t know a ride on the ship. This to me is radical inclusion on the playa.
The one mechanical problem we did have was when we sheared the drive axle off one of the rear wheels on our way to the Temple burn. It would be easy to get upset but it happened on the last trip, when it could have happened on the first day of the Burn, or we could have made it home without a problem and then broke the axle the first day next year on playa. Having the ship break WHEN it did was incredibly lucky, The hydraulic motors were probably rated for ~5000 pounds and my guess is we had about 8000 pounds on each of the rear wheels and about 3000 pounds of that weight was dancing Saturday night when Diablo from BMIR DJed from two iPods and kept us dancing the whole time. After 9 Burns this was the most fun I’ve ever had on Burn night.
Luckily I have friends with big equipment and it wasn’t too difficult to get the ship packed up and transported home (Thanks Chili).
I am also happy to say that all the Baby Tripods were mailed out today. If you were one of the people waiting you should be getting yours in the next few days. Sorry about the delay shipping them was a much bigger project than planned. Here is me holding the receipt.
Right now we’re working on plans to bring the ship to Howl to be used as the back stage. I hope to see you there.
https://www.facebook.com/events/482881991737043/
Also if you would still like a Baby Tripod we still have more. We maxed out a few credit cards getting the ship to the Playa and the sooner we pay those off the sooner we can get on to the next thing.
Thank you again.