Dave Rat - Roadies in the Midst

So here we are and tomorrow is the last day of this year, bye bye. The fist few weeks of being home are pretty much 'catch up time' for me and fairly low on the thrill meter. To be honest, I don't have much for ya so how about we check out

Once upon a time in August of 2003, I realized that a Rat must weld. So, a few phone calls a bunch of consulting from Tim 'The Thumb' Shanahan and about 3 days later, look what shows up at the hotel! A225 amp Miller mig welder of course.

But what to weld became a quandary and then I remembered that at my house I had some electric scooters laying around so with a few more calls and a few days, a Fedex arrives with two. A pile of bits of metal and some engineering ponders later it began to take shape. The trickiest part was getting the steering together. Being that the cart was so short, I devised a push pull under the seat setup with the invaluable assistance of Scott and Nick the Fly.

Building something like this on tour requires considerable dedication. I carried full set of battery powered tools the red bag, and a box of parts and on days off, the workshop moved

from the gig to the hotel room.

And in the final blitz to get it running and dialed in before tour ended, I lucked out with this hotel room that had a balcony and sunshine perfectly fitting for the mess we made building it. This is the first start of the motors

 

And the maiden voyage

 

Dave Lee volunteers to be the first non-builder test subject

I was so excited by how well the cart worked, I decided to test it's capabilities. It turns out that the cart actually was fairly adept at soaring through the air for short periods of time but still needed to work on its landings. My attempt to clear these stairs

was met with a bit less than an optimum outcome and some repairs, adjustments and band aids were then required.

 

And once repaired and tuned, the cart was ready for all. This is my long time friend Hutch who does sound for Queens of the Stone Age

And Josh from Queens takes it for a cruise

 

Check out Louie doing the inter gig drive by

 

And after the tour ended I added a second battery pack and here are the little people driving it around

 

 

Cool cool, well hope you enjoyed the mini cart tour. It is a dual motor friction drive. Pushing the bar in the front causes cables to pull the motors down on the rear drive wheels. There is independent braking on both rear wheels that automatically kills the that motor when the break is applied as well as lights up a brake light over the wheel. The steering is controlled by a swivel rod below the seat that attaches to the front wheels.

And on that note, I am off to start my saturday.

The wanting to build something cool,

Dave Rat