Burning Man Comes To Alameda Year 2

Over the past labor day weekend we had our 2nd annual 'Old Farts Burning Man Experience'. I don't think that was the official name.....maybe it was, the 'We're too old, tired, and grumpy to go to Burning Man so we're bringing it to us' party?

Anywho, unlike our regular BBQ parties this party started at 6pm so that the bulk of the party would happen after dark.

Here's Natasha doing her level best to sneak into the bar....she likes the wine bottles....You can see on top of the bar the large pitcher of Sangria Irene made. It was the 'drink of the night' and wow was it popular...I think we went thru like 5 bottles of two buck chuck!

Here's a shot early on of all the people who actually showed up on time!
Actually, I included this shot cause what's going on in the lower right corner. Tasha and her bestest pal Virginia are both trying to sneak into the bar!!
Yay!! Double martinis for everyone under 2 yrs old!

Here's a shot of Tasha and daddy, just because. I think that's her pensive look.

A Burning Man Cupcake uh, thingy even showed up! The melted sugar in the cupcakes was meant to look like fire! Best thing about it though, was if you tried to eat it, it would cut you! Safety Third!!!

Once it started to cool off we uncovered the fire pit and sparked it up. Turns out you can make pretty decent jiffy pop over the fire. Trick is, to keep it moving nonstop. I think Gimpy won the prize for best popped corn.

As it got dark we started to light up more and more of the fire art.

We lit up some of the bouquets.

Ummmmmmmm.......Arty!

Here's the traditional family fire portrait, this time in front of one of our Reuben's tubes.

Nice shot of the flaming wedding arch. Looks like Gimpy is looking for somebody to get married too....

This is right before Tasha went to bed. Shes in her super cute skull and crossbones pj's.

Just a shot of family, friends and neighbors enjoying the last BBQ of the summer season.

Here's a pretty decent shot of one of the tulips firing off.....Well we had both tulips going on their lowest possible settings for a while....Don't tell a couple of 3rd grade boys that if they press this button they can make 20' fire balls....cause they'll press that button non-stop!
Apparently even though we thought we told all our neighbors what was going on somebody still thought it was the end of the world and called 911....

Apparently every single fire engine from every single fire station was rolling to our house at the same time....The first guy who showed up was a captain and he took one look around and rushed to cancel all the other trucks. Still we ended up with a pumper truck, a ladder truck, AND the chiefs suburban!! All flashing lights and sirens!!!What fun!
I love this shot, the place is swarming with fire fighters and my friends are so blase about it they're not even stopping their conversations!
In this shot I'm explaining the works to the Chief, captain and some other fire fighters.

You can barely tell from this shot but the young fire fighter here has a big ear to ear grin on his face. Actually all the FF's thought it was pretty awesome and liked all the art.
Having the AFD show up was great. All the kids loved getting their pictures taken with them and the party had many single women of a certain age who just LOVE FF's. The ladies actually made the captain blush by woo'ing at him.

Here's a good shot with me in front of the Ruben's tubes with the Chief, captain.
I convinced them that what they were looking at was essentially propane tiki torches (yes a whole lot of them) which are legal so I didn't think there should be any problem with them.... They were cool about it and just wanted me to turn off the Ruben's tube on the right here cause it was near a tree and the neighbor was bitching....They also made us turn off half the wedding arch near the fence cause another neighbor was bitching....
It was funny the FF's kept coming back in little shifts of 2-3 to check out the fire art and for me to give them a little tour. I think they liked the Ruben's tubes the best. Its neat to watch the flames dance to the music.

I thought we where done but the Captain came back and said, 'Uh, do you have something that shoots 20' fireballs???'
'Why yes, a couple of the pieces have that ability you wanna see?'

'Uh, no, one of your neighbors is pitching a fit about it.'

'Oh, OK well, I've disabled that function and it will not be re-enabled tonight.'

'OK, that works for me.'

Okay neighbors, y'all got cards inviting you to the BBQ like 2 weeks before the party. On those cards it explained what exactly was going to be happening and some of you even watched as I set up the fire art. Why in the F did you just not ask me then about what ever you where uncomfortable about? I could of shown you that the fence and your tree where not in any danger! We could of talked about it and I could of set your mind at ease.....

Instead you call 911 and have the fire fighters do the talking for you? I'll never understand that....

Happy Labor Day to Everyone (belatedly)

OT: Fire Lounge'n on the Playa

Welcome to the playa, let's get to work!

Trucking everything out to the middle of nowhere and setting it in its spot is just the beginning.. we had to fabricate all the runs of hose to get propane around the circle of fire fun. Then the hoses had to be trenched, along with the electric wires, deep enough so no one could snag them and pull them out.

Sound-activated fire sculpture requires sound, so that all had to be setup as well. A new friend donated those giant speakers and the cabinet all the equipment was in is the one old tv cabinet that Leroy's evil grandkids didn't steal from us after they broke into our house.

This is a very harsh environment, so everything has to be able to handle whatever mother nature can throw at it (often all on the same day!)

Here's our wedding arch, serving up its role as an entryway pretty nicely (if I do say so myself)

This must've been early in the night, because there was always a crowd huddled around the fire tornado - and the bar, for that matter!

Here we are in full swing

You can see the Thunderdome in the backgound off on the left.

Here's a little video (sorry about the crappy sound.. we had some.. um.. issues with the sound early and consistently through the event. You remember those ginormous speakers? blown in less than 5 minutes!)

A little later in the night and the pipes on the fire tornado are burning cherry red! (not sure why that looks fuchsia in every picture I took) Happily, if somewhat surprisingly, not a single drunk hippy tried to touch it!

Here's the tulips in their calm state. You can see the vines reaching up to the pilot flames that ignite the ball of propane

And here's a shot of the tulips in action.. can you see why we didn't test these in our driveway in Alameda?!

The controls for these were on a bar table next to the controls for the fire tornado and it was a lot of fun to see the handful of people who realized how they were being controlled realize that they could walk up and push the buttons.

Here's a shot from a tower (yes, we have towers) that gives a pretty good view of the lounge

We parked Steve (the tricycle at the upper left with the two tiki torch looking flames coming up out of skulls.. yeah, they shoot fire too. cute rings of flame) at the edge of the fire lounge for ambiance.

And finally, a video from above that hopefully lets you see what we were trying to do

Fire, Fire, Fiiiiiirre!!!

Yea, Yea, Yea,.....

So we like fire, a lot.... We've been puzzling over our fire pit for a while because it just wasn't 'good enough'. The flames kinda shot up high and wild from it and it burned the propane way rich leading to a smelly, sooty fire that didn't produce enough heat for all the propane it went thru. What to do what to do....until we hit on an idea...


I found this wonderful turkey fryer on close-out at Sears for only $30! That's what the used ones were going for on Craig's List. And we got the huge pot to boil corn in for when we have our bbq's!

Outta that big box of stuff this is the only thing we wanted. The cast iron high-powered burner!!

Here's a closer look at that lovely 20,000 BTU burner. You see, correctly carburating the propane is kinda tricky but this handy dandy all in one unit does it all for us. Why re-invent the wheel we say.

Just like a Bunsen burner in high school chem lab this burner has an adjustable orifice so we can fine tune the flame to a nice blue.

Here's a shot showing how it adjusts the mixture. This feature should be really handy when we switch to nat-gas which has a different air-fuel ratio.

Our fire pit version 1.0
How ho-hum...

Here's what the guts of it look like. That coiled snake thing sitting in the bowl is our first attempt at making a burner. Its just 1/4" copper tubing with holes drilled into it.
The grate goes down over the tubing and then we pile the rocks on top of the grate.

Here's a closer view of the 'burner' We drilled holes in the bottom of the pan to help air enter in an attempt to get the fire to not burn so rich.

You see all the leaves and dust from the rocks falls down and plugs up the works leading to an overly rich flame.

We have to try to make the new burner fit the pan and work with the old burner.

The idea is, that the new burner will burn blue and heat the rocks up nice and hot while the old burner is going to be adapted to give flames and light but not do the bulk of the heating.

We wanted the burner to sit down below the grate and be spaced up off the rocks. We cut a hole for it and using plumbers tape and self tapping sheet metal screws made a 'mount' for it.

Here's the burner shown mounted. Right in the center of the pan and nice and low.

We skipped a couple of steps and forgot to show the connections under the pan..We added a valve just for the home made burner so we can fine tune the height of the flames in comparison to the heat produced by the new burner. We also cut some expanded metal as a secondary grate to keep the lava rocks up off the bottom of the pan. We mounted the old burner so the jets face downward also to keep them from getting filled with crud and to hopefully tame the flame height a bit.

And Wow fire pit version 2.0 is off and running. This picture doesn't do the flame color justice but its nice and blue-white at the rocks and going to light yellow out at the tips. The flame is burning much cleaner also with not really any sooty smelly black smoke being produced.

This shot shows the blue white flame at the base a bit better. The new burner really heats up the rocks around it and the entire pit radiates a lot more heat than it used to. That and the fire height is shorter so less chance of wind whipped fire singing someones toes.

Here's a shot of the pit in the dark just after I turned off the flame. This shows that the rocks are not being heated completely evenly...The camera makes it look like its white hot but its not really but those lava rocks were a glowing something fierce.

All in all a pretty darn good result for version 2.0. Its high-time for BBQ season and I'm not sure I'm going to have the time to re-jigger the home-made burner to even out the coal heating pattern....now wheres the marshmallows and chocolate and graham crackers???