Carbon Garden is ready to hit the road and get planted in its intended desert soil on the playa at Burning Man. Here’s a quick vid showing our crew hard at work. No idle hands round these parts the past few weeks. It’s been late nights, lots of pizza and chinese, a huge effort to get our new 12′ tall flowers standing tall. The tall flowers are made purely from carbon fiber, including the bloom, stamen, Flame Element holder, flanges, and stem. Thanks to everyone who helped make the project a reality!

Carbon Garden will be placed in the center of the playa, 700 feet from the Burning Man along the 4:30 axis.  The Garden will be alight with fire and music each night from 9pm - 3am.  There will also be two dawn sessions on Thursday and Saturday, with an acoustic concert on Saturday morning with surprise players.

Our first 10′ tall carbon flower with a 42″ diameter bloom.  Here’s a video showing what the flowers look like before trimming and stem attaching.  This stem is also our first one made of pure carbon fiber.  We used a biaxial twill sleeve from Soller Composites and laid it up over foam pool noodles.  After applying epoxy the stretchy sleeve is folded to create a ribbing effect similar to bamboo.

Back in 2003 my maniac friends and I thought it would be fun to start blowing bubbles with oxygen and acetylene and exploding them with a tiki torch. Who knew those were the early days of The Hydrogen Economy!

As you may know our esteemed False Profit Labs colleagues aren’t just fire artists, they’re scientists too!  Well, that’s what they do during the day, and nights too when they’re at the Woods Hole Marine Biology Lab.  But when they aren’t busy curing cancer and dissecting DNA they also like to record explosions at 5000 frames per second.  Here’s a video made by and starring Dyche Mullins and Ethan Garner and other cool folks out in Massachusetts for the summer.  Come for the super slow-mo explosions.  Stay for the pressure waves of a slap across the face.

In case you didn’t catch Carbon Garden at Fire Arts Festival, check out our new teaser video for Burning Man.

Prefer HD?  Download here.

Check out the Hot Preview on KTVU.com about Fire Arts Festival. Some nice coverage of the event including Carbon Garden.

Video: http://www.ktvu.com/video/20046933/
Slideshow: http://www.ktvu.com/slideshow/entertainment/20046824/detail.html

Setup at Fire Arts Festival: KTVU Photo

Tina Yonas made a documentary about the Flame Tree Workshop and other art studios at Coachella.  Nice job to her, to our own Whit Bissell and the rest of the FPLabs crew who inspired their students to create some really cool copper sculptures.

http://web.me.com/sascheideman/The_Coachella_Art_Studios/Copper.html

We had The Hydrogen Economy and PyroCardium steel frames professionally powder coated, but I’ve always wanted try out this process since it produces beautiful, durable results. This holiday season I made some candleholders from iron pipe fittings then powder coated them at home with a kit I bought for $140 and an electric oven.  The shine and vibrant colors really brings the piece together, and they make good gifts for those who appreciate industrial sculptures.

About Powder Coating
Powder Coating is an electrostatic process where a charged pigment dust is sprayed into the air with a handheld gun. The pigment particles become positively charged in the gun and stick to the part which is connected to ground. You see powder coating all over the place: bicycles, motorcycles, park benches, cars. My initial impression was that it looks so good I figured the process would require expensive equipment or some hard-won skill. Turns out neither is really the case–you can powder coat at home with an inexpensive kit and an electric oven.

Powder Coating Video

Full details on Instructables

Powder Coated Iron Pipe Candleholder

After a minute of cleaning up the playa dust from Burning Man, and playing on the river at Priceless, we are now home, semi-rested and are happy to report that the desert was good. Setup took three days in the hot sun, cold nights, and ever-present dust. Everything broke, such as manifolds, flashback arrestors, needle valves, flow meters, flame effects, bubble machines, circuit boards. But Burning Man requires improvisation and we kept our projects up and running all week.

We took The Hydrogen Economy to new heights.

PyroCardium’s heartbeats of fire pulsed far across the playa.

People liked to explode hydrogen bubbles.

And everyone wanted to know how PyroCardium works.

Toxic Bloom, lit up with four colors of fire triggered by that old memory game “Simon”.