Maker Interview: Carmadillo

Avi Hartman is the mechanical genius behind Carmadillo, a 100 pound, gas-powered art go-kart, which he’ll be showing off at Maker Faire this weekend. The thing, which took about 400 hours to build, really does look like an especially well-fed armadillo and, yes, that’s real fire shooting from its eyes. We had a little chat with Avi about his art.

Austinist: What you do when you aren't making stuff like the Carmadillo?"
Avi: I do anything creative that I can get my hands on. I pretty much never grew up, and it's an advantage in a way, because I have a kid's ability to fearlessly attempt new skills or projects without worrying about whether I'm good at them. Fun is my guiding philosophy. My time is spent mostly in my studio, where I focus on metalworking, but I also draw comic books and perform stand up comedy.

Austinist: How'd you come up with the idea for Carmadillo?"
Avi: C.J. Anderson and Kate Bower came up with the idea. They wanted to express their newly-Texan pride at Burning Man, and decided they wanted a fire-breathing Armadillo. So, over beers at Lovejoy's, they gave me the idea and I ran with it. Then, this March, we just got it started.

Austinist: Was it hard getting it from you imagination and into reality?
Avi: My technique involves sketching an object in 3-D with quarter-inch round steel bar until I get the basic shape, then playing with details. The shape of the body was really easy, and we knew that it would look great in aluminum. Originally, we thought we'd use a patchwork of found scrap metal, but it ended up being easier, and I think more pleasing to the eye, to have the unity of sheet metal. I outlined the whole piece in square steel tubing, then riveted the skin on. The contrast of colors between the rusty steel and shiny aluminum is really lovely. The biggest pain in the piece was hammering the texture in the body panels, which is why I pawned it off on C.J. I did the entire head, and the structural aspects, and C.J. made the body pretty. We also had a hell of a time with the chassis. The go-cart it's built on was really thrashed when we got it, and we didn't know anything, so we had to learn how to rebuild as we went, and we more or less restored the entire cart from the bottom up.