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.

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.

When exploring a new medium, my tendency is to compare it to known territory, maybe to have some ideas in mind about what’s possible, what would be interesting, to desire control over chaos. For Carbon Garden, our research took the form of visits to botanical gardens, conservatory of flowers, nature walks, science museums, and lots of google image searches for flowers of all varieties. Next came classes in carbon fiber layup, interviews of everyone and anyone who had worked with it before, and of course YouTube video searches like the one about making carbon fiber cellos.

As we started experimenting with the medium itself, a vast array of uncharted territory began to evidence itself: epoxy type, cure time and temperature, carbon fabric weave and weight, mold release whether peel ply, spray, wax or mylar.  Any different combination of these possibilities would lead to very different results, most of them very unflower-like.  Plus it’s difficult, time consuming and quite expensive to just play around with these materials.  You’d think, contact the experts, they’ll know what to do.  But even people who make many strong and beautiful structures from carbon fiber usually aren’t making things enough like ours to say exactly what we should do.

Little by little we’ve edged our way toward a satisfying petal building technique including compound curves, surface details, reasonable strength, and impressively, a smooth matte finish with that beautiful grain looking sharp on both sides.  So good, we have successfully gained control over a wily new medium.  The problem is we have not let it breathe.

What I mean is that in our desire to master our technique with this material, we forgot to ask the question, “What does the carbon fiber want?”  I mean this in no sappy anthropomorphic way, and no I haven’t been sniffing the epoxy (on purpose).  As I have come to play with this black fabric that wets out to a stretchy skin with its own qualities and behaviors, little intimations of its own nature have surfaced.

I now see that the frayed edges I had thoroughly taped and held together, when laid up with epoxy turn into delicate plantlike spines.  I now see that techniques more akin to clothing design work to build three dimensional self-wrapping structures, like black hole models of space-time.  The bizarre and quirky qualities of this medium are starting to express themselves, and tell us what kind of art to make.

A handheld carbon fiber black hole.

I don’t know where exactly this will lead, but I’m shedding my preconceived notions and allowing the medium to show me.  My failure will only be not to listen closely enough to what it’s saying.  And if I’m lucky when it’s quiet I hope to become close enough friends that it’s willing to share its deepest secrets.

We’re fully underway with carbon fiber flower petal production.  In addition we’ll start bending and hammering steel stems in the forge pretty soon, and we’ve got decent mechanical designs for the interfaces to hold petals, leaves and stems together.  On the flame effect side, our Flame Elements now have built in ultrasonic rangefinders that auto shutoff if people get too close.  The garden is laid out  to allow good participant flow but prevent cars from driving in there.

Here are some renderings by Andy Lee showing how a simple petal shape can be repeated and attached at different points to create a wide variety of flowers.

Any opinions or ideas you’d like to pass to us?  Also, if anyone knows people who are interested in learning how to lay up carbon fiber, we’re getting pretty good at it these days and always welcome visitors to the shop.  False Profit Labs workshop days are Wednesdays from 6-10pm and Saturdays from 1-5pm in San Francisco.  Early versions of Carbon Garden will appear at the American Steel opening party and Fire Arts Festival in July.  Email: brett at false dash profit dot com if you want to get involved.

Rendering of Carbon Garden at Burning Man by Erik Walker

…beats PyroCardium!

Come play with PyroCardium at the Coachella Festival this month - April 17, 18, 19 in Indio, CA.

Your heart stokes your body’s inner fire— watch it stoke a spiral fire that blasts into the sky!
Clip on the pulse monitor at this sculpture by False Profit Labs and feel forty fireballs bursting in a gorgeous spiral around you, pulsing to the rhythm of your heart for all to see.

And if you’re inspired to learn some basics about propane fire art (who wouldn’t be), we will be teaching Flame Tree Workshops! The workshops are free for on-site campers and take place Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10am-1pm.

Come make fire art for your own backyard!

Like the rovers hibernating on Mars, PyroCardium has quietly slumbered the winter on the side of the FPLabs workshop, nestled in its layers of tarp. We hadn’t heard a peep and could only wonder, was it dreaming of fiery heartbeats? What new algorithms might emerge in the spring? Was PyroCardium even alive under there?

PyroCardium in its winter tarp

Today we have our answer. 32 of 40 flame effects tested perfectly straight out the gate. And since 8 had broken at Burning Man, they were apparently unaffected by wind, rain and sleet. This is actually amazing since I hadn’t considered the downslope of its winter resting pad, and water was able to come in through an open end of the tarp. The flame effects actually sat in a pool of water for months. But our materials: aluminum, nichrome wire, ceramic block, stainless steel, copper and brass– none of them rust! And apparently Clippard solenoids are pretty well sealed.

Tested functional flame effects bundled in new hanging storage

In preparation for making carbon fiber flowers, I took a vacuum forming class at Tech Shop.  Everyone was asked to bring in a part to copy.  Then the vacuum former heats up a sheet of CAB (Celulose Acetate Butyrate).  This is the same plastic that all those 3d sign letters are made out of - same process too.  The plastic gets clamped into a frame, and when it starts to sag, swings over your part.  Then you hit the vacuum footswitch and the plastic is instantly sucked into the every nook and cranny.  In my case, a log.

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You have to stuff the undercuts of your part, otherwise the plastic gets pulled under and your part is impossible to get out.

The finished log has fine detail, just like a real Disney log.

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

We’re very happy to be installed in our new double-wide container in The Shipyard. In case you haven’t heard of The Shipyard, it’s really an incredible facility run by Jim Mason and Jess Hobbs. There are huge machine tools, mini “hardware stores”, ample common areas for building large-scale sculptures, and shipping containers where resident artists can store their wares.

One of the best things about being over there is everyone’s willingness to show us around, show us the quirks and conventions of using a gigantic lathe, or help install a capacitor to get the drill press working. And that’s even after we accidentally busted up a couple projects on move-in day! It seems it’s a constant shuffle moving huge items around. Luckily there’s a forklift that could literally lift a house to manage the work.

We’re in full production for Priceless this July 4 weekend and Fire Arts Festival coming up July 9-12. At Priceless, PyroCardium will be pulsing to heartbeats in its original spiral form. Ben is creating massive colored flame effects in the river for a new project called Toxic Bloom. We’re bringing along “Sputnik”, our custom heat exchanger to power a River Hot Tub. And I’ll be teaching a Flame Tree Workshop.

“Sputnik” heat exchanger on the Ocean Beach flower bloom heating our inflatable hot tub.

Ben tests an accumulator effect for Toxic Bloom.