So support Intel's America's Greatest Makers, I'm making some crazy guitar mods, to make even
the worst guitarists seem a little bit more rock and roll! Based on your suggestions you want to
see fire! Now this is Intel's America's Greatest Makers, so I'm gonna include some Intel Arduino
101 kiri programmable circuit boards. Try to teach myself a little bit of code! So let's get making!
Got my guitar, got a white one, not a colour I'd normally go for,
but I'm thinking by the time it's got all the chrome pipe and stuff on it; little switches,
it's going to look quite good and also a big yellow flame coming out a white guitar,
it's going to make quite a nice contrast on camera. So where to start? Well I'm going to
start and at the head end and we're going to make two pilot flames and then up the nozzle
sticking out somewhere in the middle, and to do that going to need to butcher two blow lamps.
So there we have got some modified blowtorch heads. I'm going to stick these on the end
of the guitar Mount them under there, which in itself is going to look pretty cool. So what
we need to do now, we need to get fuel to them and then we also need fuel to the main burner,
so we're going to make like a little manifold and support
thing to hold it all into position and make it all look nice and neat.
Right
that's our manifold sorted, and basically what that does,
is take two inlets, got a pilot and main flame,
and the pilot basically comes in up at right angles and then out of these two and that will
go out to the blowtorch heads and then the main flame is kind of skewift from
there to the center on the other side, with a little thread tap, and then that will have
a little pipe come out in between there pilot light flames of war and off it goes, lovely!
Right let's fix this to the top of the guitar, and urgh, it starting to look like something!
So that's all sorted on there, next thing we've got to do is get a
bit of gas to it. Now I was going to route the neck out, sink the pipes into it,
but there's a neat and easy way doing that and I kind of thought I'm going to make a mess of it,
and I'll probably weaken the guitar neck and then the whole thing will just constantly be
going in and out of tune, so we're going to stick them on top. Get them as snug as possible, so I
just need to bend some pipes, follow the contours of the guitar up and around and that to the base,
weld them in there and then that bit's pretty much done really. I think I've made a lovely job of it.
Oh yes! Anyone would think I used to be a plumber!
Look at that, Look, looks lovely! Still looks like a musical instrument, only just looks a little bit
more badass! So got the pilot flames sorted out, and all that on the head, neck bit done. Next
bit it's the body of the guitar. We need kind of a reservoir of gas, need some solenoid valves and of
course we need some switches and bits and bobs to fire it all off ! So need a gas reservoir so we've
got a nice sustained flame. To do this, nice bit of shiny stainless tube, cut the ends off, stick
the solenoid valve on the end and we're going to try and build that into the top of the guitar.
ok, what's just happened? Well we've got a nice gas reservoir, Now we've got a solenoid valve set,
the flick of a switch we can empty the whole lot of this all out to the head,
nice big flame! Round the back we've got the gas supply to the blow torches for the
pilot flame and then we've got the inlet pipe here and that will come in right next
to the audio leads, so you've got like a little gas pipe as well as the audio lead,
and there we are. So what's left to do now, take the tape off, give it a nice big polish,
and when I've done that it'll look like this! DahDahhh! Shiny,! Now then electrics! Now while
I was polishing it, I've cut these little grooves in the back it's easier to do then.
Basically we need to get a power supply in to the solenoid valve, a manual switch on the guitar,
so you can fire off manually, but also a switch live, because we're gonna have some Intel boards
that are programmed to fire the flames off at certain points in the song, or all sorts of other
fancy little things. So we've got a switch light from that and also I', going to have some ignitors
in the guitar to light the pilot flames! And then once it's done it's pretty much ready to rock!
More chopping!
Whooo... looks awesome! Look at that! lovely job! Now of course the guitar needs an amplifier
and the fire needs a fuel, so I've combined the two to make this... normal guitar amp,
it's got this nice mesh on it so it looks a bit more (whooo ha!) but got sound for the guitar,
the electrics to fire the solenoid off, and of course the gas for the flame thrower. If I turn
it around you can see all the magic ,oh yes ! So basically what I've done to the guitar amp,
is kind of tuck it around a bit, move the speaker across so you can fit the gas bottle in, there's
a regulator and everything to control the gas pressure and things like that, so you can control
how far the flame wants to come out. Now of course this is for Intel, we've got one of their
programmable circuit boards, this one's the Curie, now these are really tricked things, they like
Wi-Fi enabled Bluetooth enabled they will talk to each of a wirelessly and stuff but a new tool
is coding Marquis so what I've done is actually quite basic but very useful now we've stuck a
relay shield on the top of it and then we've done some simple code in, so when you press the other
button on the foot switch, it buys a solenoid on the guitar, in a funny or certain pattern,
you can put all the delay times in between each firing, so it'll be like (ba ba ba ba baaaa)
and things like that. are so when you're playing a guitar you have to worry about
doing a new trick with the flamethrower as well and there we are that's what we've done
now the code will be available online there is a link in the description but for now we just
want to see it in action don't we! Well once uploaded, video up here, click on that box,
it'll be all good, flame-throwing guitars fire and noise fire and noise!!!