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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.
Car after sanding and painting.
"Artist's Conception" I used in the entry form.
Full size plywood mockup of the car that I kept in my living room for three months, experimenting with different 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.
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. Chewed their lips off. Something in his little doggie brain must like fish lips.
Another test rig we used to see how banks of fish would look when moving synchroneously.
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.
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 lobsters on the hood are not made of the finest material. We had to skin them and perform preventative surgery to reinforce certain of the plastic parts with epoxy putty. Time will tell whether this will stem the alarming breakage rate.
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. My friend 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 19,000 feet of wire is in 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. The trunk contains the driver circuitry, a 12 volt battery for the stereo, and a 6 volt deep discharge golf cart battery capable of delivering 75 amps for over 3 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.
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