Construction of the Choir

The Sashimi Tabernacle Choir was created by Richard Carter and John Schroeter with the aid of Team Sashimi. An idea like this draws volunteers like pirannas to a cornfed cow. Counting everyone who spent at least one evening or weekend helping, Team Sashimi has over 30 members. During the months of construction, my house looked like a scene from the 1960's Batman TV show. You know, where the lair of the villain is full of henchmen and diabolical contraptions, and is filmed on a slant. My bill for pizza, sandwiches, and beer during that period rivaled the cost of the fish.

My living room circa April 2001

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During construction my house was turned into a large construction zone, or sweatshop. Over the course of four months the tireless team members toiled relentlessly in grim silence, subsiding on cold gruel and an occasional crust of moldy bread. Discipline was strict, but fair.

When we started the design, my intent was to use my old red Mazda pickup truck as the platform for the fish. However the body style of a pickup was not well suited to the idea, and we had no time to do major fiberglass modifications to the shape of the truck, although such would have been fun. About that time a friend of mine, flush with loot from a new job with Arthur Anderson, bought a new car and offered to sell me his old 1984 grad-school-junker-Volvo for a song. I jumped at the deal. After all even a "junker" Volvo is more solid that most new cars.

As my buddy John later tells the story: "First Richard was talking about this improbable project, and we all had fun scribbling circuit diagrams on napkins. But then he's actually spending evenings taking apart fish. Next he's going around to every store within 5 miles and buying every singing fish they have. His house is beginning to fill up with boxes stacked EVERYWHERE. Ok, Richard's always been a bit - odd. But still this seems extreme. THEN he tells me one day he's gone and bought a CAR. What next - buy the house next door for workspace?" John quickly came around though and soon his house became the electronics factory for the project, while physical and mechanical construction was done at my place. And I never (quite) had to buy a larger house.

The Volvo 240 was in decent shape but was that putrid brownish-maroon color they favored in the 80s. Even the cheapest Maaco paint job seemed exhorbitantly expensive, so one early task for Team Sashimi was to sand, prime and repaint the car a nice ocean-blue. Little did I realize at the time that the cost of a commercial paint job would be unnoticable compared to other expenses. Still, our amateur job came out well.

By the way, Volvos make the best Art Cars because (A) they have nice thick metal to bolt things to, (B) they last forever, and (C) when bystanders start throwing stuff at you, you need a nice solid car around you.

Car after sanding and painting.

Entry forms for the Houston Art Car Parade are due several months before the event, and require a photograph. Fortunately they also allow an "Artist's Conception" drawing for works in progress. With a bit of work with a photo-editor I whipped out the following:

"Artist's Conception" I used in the entry form.

Next is a panorama of the full size plywood mockup of the Volvo that I kept in my living room for three months, experimenting with different fish attachment patterns. I eventually decided on an interlocking three-depth-level arrangement with the different fish species schooling with each other in an organic manner, while the schools weaved in and out with each other. Man, was I ever obsessive back then.

Here is a video clip of the Full Size Plywood Mockup of the car. I used it for testing fish arrangements in my living room, till the morning I awoke to find that my new dog had eaten 20 fish and scattered them around the house. Chewed their lips off. Something in his little doggie brain must like fish lips.

Here is another test rig we used to see how banks of fish would look when moving synchroneously.

Here are some (but not all) of the fish before deboxing. Most of these were purchased retail one shopping cart at a time. The clerks at Walgreen's were always impressed.

Next is a picture of our fish dissassembly line. While we were carefully dissassembling Billy Bass, somewhere in China there was a room full of people assembling them. If they could have seen us they would have hated us. After eviscerating all the fish I had a bag of roughly 5000 screws from the dissassembly process. My dog later scattered these all over my carpet.

Nothing got in the way of our obsession. Here we stoop to the use of child labor. Since the factory that constructs Billy Bass thoughtfully used randomly colored wiring on every fish, we had to test each dissassembled fish separately with a battery pack to determine which wires did what. Once the wires were mapped, we attached colored tape to the leads to designate their function. All this was complicated because there were two different major varieties of electromechanical controls in the different fish. The Billy Bass use 3 motors with common positive, while the rest of the fish were bipolar. And as we all know there is nothing more difficult than a bipolar fish.

The next photo shows my buddy Dave bending an aluminum mounting bracket. Roughly 200 brackets of 6 different designs were cut, sanded, drilled, bent, painted, and mounted to the car with sheet metal screws. Special jigs were constructed to get uniform bends and sufficiently accurate drilling. Some of the fish types could be mounted to the brackets with screws, but others required complex wrapping with steel wire and extensive use of epoxy putty.

Here is the start of the attachment process.

Later in the mounting process. Dave has just finished soldering some of the control wires to a fish and is using a heat shrink gun and tubing to secure and insulate the connection. Roughly a thousand such connections had to be made on the surface of the car alone.

Closer view of the mounting brackets.

At best estimate, at least 5 miles of wire has now been used in creating the control system. Most of it goes into the car body where it is twisted into bundles of increasing size as it makes it's way to the trunk. A Team Sashimi "Hero" award goes to Ed Yonter who rescued the wire-routing task from the naive nitwits Richard and John. We really had NO conception that the wire runs would be one of the hardest single technical challenges.

The trunk contains the driver circuitry, a 12 volt battery for the stereo, and two 6 volt deep discharge golf cart battery capable of delivering 150 amps for over 2 hours. If all motors on all fish were operated simultaneously the peak draw would be roughly 250 to 300 amps. The wiring is protected by partitioning and multiple in-line fuses, and a large circuit breaker panel in the driver's compartment allows instant shutdown. Isolation is maintained from the automotive electronics.

About the last thing we did before the 2001 Parade was to put an extra 12 volt battery in the trunk to run the parade audio system, which we put together with a Radio Shack audio amp and half a dozen speakers on the outside of the car hidden behind the fish. After all, the sound system is the simplest part of the car and nothing can go wrong, right? LOL . Both the amp and speakers were useless crap, and we were too dimwitted to discover this in advance. We actually left for the parade without ever testing the system at even moderate volume.

Of course the sound was a disaster due to inadequate design, and for other reasons. While lining up for the parade, the 12V battery died so John dashed off to buy a new one. Before he returned, the organizers started everyone rolling again to get us to the post positions a mile down the road. We let all the other cars go ahead, but finally had to move or be left behind. So we went by the judges with a barely audible squawk of song playing, and then slowly threaded our way through the other cars to find our position.

In the meantime John finally spotted us as we were paused waiting for room to move. He parked his truck and started to carry the new battery over to us. About then there was a gap and we were able to move, so we drove along oblivious to John running behind us yelling and carrying a car battery. Every time that he started to give up, we would slow down due to congestion, and he would decide to keep chasing us. But always before he could quite catch us, the line would speed up again. Thus the great battery race continued for several hundred yards. We are thinking of forming a yearly car battery race to commemorate the event.

So we never had audible sound during the first parade, but the crowd loved us anyway just because the fish and lobsters moved. The next year we cut holes in the thick metal of the Volvo and mounted four big high-volume marine speakers down near the road to play the chorus audio tracks. We also put four smaller mid-range speakers on the car roof for the soloist audio tracks. We have 2 honking big amplifiers under the front seat. So now the only audio problem we have is adjusting the volume to that fine spot where it is audible to a folks across a busy street, without deafening adjacent children and grandmothers. Oh well, nothing is simple.

Interested in the computers used, the orchestral conductor, rising soloists, choreography, and the nightmare of keeping in repair? Click here for more pictures and stories concerning the construction and design of the Choir.

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