Context
This piece is a graduation present for pin xiu for finishing her Masters in Mental Health Counselling. It’s a “bike wagon” from Monk & Robot that Sibling Dex, a tea monk, lives in as they travel across Panga serving tea.
With this bike wagon, pin xiu will have everything she needs to set off on her own journey as a tea monk (of sorts). She’ll have the freedom to cycle from town to town, or venture into the wilderness.
Design and Build
As an object, I have long had an interest in campers/micro-houses that you can pull with your bike and live out of, and while I did take inspiration from the descriptions of the wagon from the book (like making it have two floors, with the bed on the top floor and a work bench for tea experimentation on the first floor, and a sky light over the bed to look out at the stars through) , I also took some creative liberties to not reproduce the descriptions exactly (like I wasn’t confident in painting an exterior mural of “Allalae’s bear, well fed and at ease in a field of flowers” and having it look nice). I also felt that even if I could do it, an exact replica might be less meaningful than just capturing some of the essence and spirit of it.
The wagon’s lower deck quickly lost any semblance of organization, evolving rapid-fire into a hodgepodge laboratory. Planters and sunlamps filled every conceivable nook, their leaves and shoots constantly pushing the limits of how far their steward would let them creep. Stacks of used mugs containing the dregs of experiments both promising and pointless teetered on the table, awaiting the moment in which Dex had the brainspace to do the washing-up.
Where the lower deck was frantic, the upper deck was serene. Dex was adamant about not using it for storage, even as the shelves below groaned and Dex’s swearing grew louder each time they walked yet again into a faceful of hanging herbs. The upper deck was, for all intents and purposes, sacred ground. Every night, Dex let their god hear a sigh of thanks as they climbed the ladder and collapsed into the embracing bed. They rarely used the lights up there, preferring instead to slide open the rooftop shade. They fell asleep in starlight, breathing in the muddled snap of a hundred spices, listening to the gurgle of water pumps feeding happy roots in little pots.
Sketch of the silhouette on one of the side panels
I cut small pieces of glass with this wavy melty surface for the windows. The pieces/cuts weren’t all square but I thought that would add to the charm of the house.
I traced and cut out holes for the windows in the walls, and used hot glue to stick the windows in.
The hot glue was a little messy and I trimmed glue that flowed around the exterior side of the windows with an exacto knife. I maybe could have used super glue, but I was worried about the super glue frosting up the glass.
Installed the desk, set of drawers and second floor.
It was important to me to be able to open up the house and look into its interior. I decided that having the 3 sides that meet at the front bottom right corners be one piece and the three sides that meet at the back top left corners be one piece, would make each piece sufficiently strong and provide a nice interior view of the house when separated.
The order of operations was also a consideration. I wanted to cut the holes and add the windows before gluing the 3 pieces together because it would be easier to do those things while the pieces were flat.
After getting the coarse structure of the house complete I traced the silhouette onto a piece of paper and sketched out the bike around the house, using the scale of a small door to make the scale of the bike reasonable.
I found just the right amount of scrap steel rod to use for the bike. I thought the mix of materials, having the house be all wood and glass, and the bike and wheels be all steel would be a nice contrast, but not too jarring.
Welding the diamond frame of the bike.
Throughout the process I had considered making some pieces of the house/bike on the 3D printer/laser cutter, but I felt like that would make those parts too perfect and it wouldn’t go with the not straight windows, and more rough/handcrafted quality of the rest of the piece.
It was my first time using this ring rod roller bender thing, but it was straightforward enough to figure out. Unfortunately the tightest radius I could make wasn’t tight enough of a radius for the bike wheels so I went as far as I could on the roller and then used this double bar + hammering technique I’ve seen Jimmy Diresta use a couple of times to make rings.
Not perfectly circular but close enough, and with the right level of imperfections to go well with the rest of the piece.
Made the sweep of the handle bars by cutting notches into the rod, bending the ends over with a hammer and then welding the notches.
Completed bike frame!
Rough structure of the bike + house done
I thought quite a bit about how much detail to add to the house and the bike.
The bike is a kind of line drawing of a bike. It doesn’t have all the components of a bike, like the chain, the spokes of the wheels, gears or a derailleur, but it has enough to kind of give the impression of a bike. I do think there is a danger to adding too much detail, it brings it away from being a sculpture and more towards being a replica/model which I don’t really want for this piece. It was important to me to keep a kind of “painterly” level of abstraction.
For the house I also wanted to walk this line of having a bit of detail to make it pop, but not too much. In the end I went with adding trim to the windows (which also hid the gaps around the window), adding trim to the edges of the roof and side walls (which hid the plywood edges), some thin slats to the roof for a little bit of texture, and a tiny door knob :)
Adding trim to windows.
Adding trim to the roof.
After that I gave everything a light sanding and applied finish to the wood and bike and it was done!
Interior view: