BaDassumption Part 1

"Tacky", the Tachometer Pod

If anything on this rig is a small idea gone large, its got to be this. Tacky started life as an innocent, aftermarket aluminium tachometer housing for a Harley. Like so many other things here, it was found on eBay.

At first, it was going to hold the rig's power button and maybe a switch or two, but then Matt "Starbuck3733T" Sprinsky stepped into the fray and things started getting a little crazy. He took the idea of tracking hard drive activity around the power switch with a series of LEDs to a new level.

This is really outside of my understanding, but I'll try my best to explain. Matt designed and fabricated a special circuit board that powers chasing LEDs according to the activity of the system's hard drives, whether it be the drives in a small RAID 0 array or the storage drive. To build this pod, holes were drilled into a 3/8" thick hunk of aluminium to hold the power switch and LED's.

We're going to wait until the next instalment of this article to show you how it works, so stay tuned.

"Shifty", the Stick Shift

Anyone who remembers Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, can recall his crazy cartoons and how he airbrushed them onto t-shirts. They often had whacky characters like Rat Fink driving insane cars with exaggerated stick shifts rising out of the roof. So how better to activate the bubble top's lifting mechanism than with a crazy shifter?

Again, it started with a find on eBay, a billet aluminium short shifter for a Mustang. A few brackets were cut to shape and a switch was grabbed from the local Radio Shack. The assembly works like this, with the lower slot on the shifter triggering the switch:

Of course, it didn't start out that way - more like a hunk of pieces. Once assembled, the top of the brackets are fixed to the main pod with flathead screws:

Back to close, neutral in the centre, forward to lift …

Another eBay find, a cast resin beatnik skull, was machined and tapped to fit on the shifter.

And there we have it. "Shifty". He'll get a paintjob later down the road.

[h]"Footy", the Optical Pod[/h2]I wasn't happy with the size of the original optical pod. It was just too big and after some head scratching, I decided it would be fun to do something entirely different and didn't need to be a painted box at all.

It started with some aluminium plates, one left over from the original BaDass build that was ball milled with 1/4" grooves. These plates were assembled to make a very simple box around a CD burner. To square them up, they were made to shape on the belt sander.

A goofy foot was drawn out on piece of aluminium and cut to shape on the band saw. That was then fitted to an angled piece of 1/2" aluminium flat bar.

All the parts were polished and assembled, and there we have it… "Footy".