Having a bike is almost a necessity at Burning Man. The festival spans over 5 sq miles, so having a set of wheels is a big help getting you from place to place. Its actually amazing to see just how many bicycles are there, literally ten’s of thousands of them scattered across the playa. Even more amazing is that most of the bikes are decorated in some form or fashion. Decorating my playa bike was probably the most fun projected I worked on this year for my first burn. I regret not documenting the entire process better with more photos.
After a little bit of brain storming and research on what others had done, I decided upon a purple furry bike, lit with blue EL wire. I began with a standard bike, and started with some simple modifications at my local bike shop:
- Switching the standard seat to a banana seat
- Adding a sissy bar to the back
- Adding a basket
- Swapping my standard black tires with purple tires
I wanted the banana seat and sissy bar so I could fit a second person on the back of the bike. I also liked the sissy bar because it made the bike appear bigger and gave it a fun look. Unfortunately the banana seat turned out to be horribly uncomfortable (even after I added 3 layers of egg crate padding to the top), in hindsight I would have gone without it. The basket I needed to carry things around, and also to house the batteries/drivers for the el wire. I didn’t even think/know about the purple tires until I saw them at the bike shop, but as soon as I saw them I knew I wanted them.
Once the bike had all the pieces in place I began covering it with this long purple fur that I bought on ebay. The process is fairly simple, and doesn’t require much more than the fur and a glue gun. I learned how to do it in this excellent video provided by Halcyon.
After furring the bike I added three Hokey Spokes to each wheel. Hokey Spokes are LED blades you attach to the spokes of your wheels. They blades wirelessly sync with each other to display different patterns that create POV images when the wheels are in motion. The effect is pretty cool, and can be seen in the video of my bike. There are a few different companies offering LED blades for your bicycle that create POV images. Each has their ups and downs. Having never seen any of the products in person I went with Hokey Spokes because of their low cost, and ability to sync. However, out on the playa I saw someone with Monkey Lights which were much much brighter, I might try them next year. For those interested, I’ve listed the different companies that provide LED blades at the bottom of this post.
The next step was adding the EL Wire. I ended up using quite a bit more than I expected, roughly 65 feet of wire on the main part of the bike, and 20 feet for the front forks and handle bars. To attach the wire I simply wrapped it around the bike, holding it into place in a few key places using zip ties. In hindsight I probably would have used purple duct tape instead of the zip ties, as the zip ties are a bit unsightly. I used separate strands of el wire for the handle bars and front forks so the wire wouldn’t tug while I was turning. This ended up working out well because the main driver I was using (even though rated for 100 ft) started to dim the wire a bit when powering more than 50-60 ft. So I ended up using 2 drivers paired with 2 battery packs each holding 8 AAs. I made a little compartment to hold the drivers/batteries using a tiny cooler that zipped open and close, and attached the compartment to the inside of the basket.
The last addition I made to the bike was the star laser head lights (I obviously had to get lasers involved here somewhere). I had originally planned on ripping out the modules and hooking them up to a battery pack, but after frying two modules, I realized I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t have time to figure it out, so I decided to just attach the entire pointer to the bike. I used two pointers which I attached to the inside of the bike using zip ties. I the cut holes in the front of the basket and allowed the tip of the lens to poke out. I then used a another zip tie around the pointers which would slide over/off the push button to turn the pointer on and off. This worked, and looked great, but made changing the batteries a hassle. If I do this again in the future I definitely plan to hook the lasers and all the wire to a single battery pack.
Altogether I was pretty pleased with how the bike turns out. My buddy made one as well which he designed to look like a giant grover doll. They were a lot of fun to ride around the playa, but didn’t really get too much attention, they just blended into the sea of other bikes that were decorated and lit up in countless different ways. Some of my favorite bikes used LED ribbon as apposed to the EL wire. The LED ribbon was much much brighter and stood out a whole lot more, if/when I make a new bike for next year, I’m pretty sure it will be LED lit.
As always if you have any questions about the bike, or anything you’d like to share, please leave a comment here, or shoot me an email, I’d love to hear from you.
