Week Eight : Wherein I Seek Help To Find A Somerset Graffiti Artist.

I have a couple of people-related schticks this week. The first regards a keen and talented young student who is seeking a work placement. He asked at a major car audio brand’s UK operation but they don’t do such things. He’s won some swag in the TA scene in the past by having the funniest comment in a thread to swag a bass generator and is an active member of Talk Audio’s forums. If you have any suggestions or can use a keen, intelligent extra (and due to the whole work placement thing, cheap) pair of hands, he’s not above sweeping up, as long as he’s at risk of learning stuff while he’s there. PM Brill-Edwards or myself.
I was at a fishing show at the weekend and there was a booth for a fishing alarm brand called ATT. The design is neat and cool and very ‘˜carpy’. The reason for it crossing over to be relevant here is that as well as the little items to go on a bank stick that you run your fishing line over the bite alarm itself, the transmitter has more channels than normal. For these days, it is common to use three rods and when one gets a bite, the alarm remote in your chest pocket goes mental. As you scramble out of your bivouac, you are supposed to know which rod it is by which LED goes off on the remote. However, this system has a super-long-range and one optional extra is a car alarm triggered transmitter on the same frequency as your carp alarms. Thus, you can be alerted that the buzzer going off, is on fact someone messing with your van/car. As lots of anglers leave kit in their vehicles, this has to be a good idea. However, there has been nil demand and I know the boss has got sick of me asking. So, any of you know any carpers? Ask ‘˜em, as I would love to prove them wrong by presenting a list of carpers and fitters I guess the simple question is whether ATT would supply car electronics suppliers. After all, the engine bay of a car is even nastier than a lake in terms of wet and temperature variations for electrical items’ health!
I finished off the Blaupunkt headphones group review and was pleasantly surprised by the smooth quality of the cheapest ones. For practically disposable pennies, they were sweet and volume-limited to 85dB, which is clever.
Cleverer yet is the African grey parrot but I have a Parrot Asteroid in my virtual dash (test bench) and shall be stuffing all kinds of ‘˜parakeet seed’ down its maw. An 8GB Verbatim ‘˜bean’ USB, other USB sticks, a Sony MP3 player, an iPod Touch 4th gen, a GPS antenna, a double microphone, a USB 3G dongle, a Genesis SM100 amplifier (driving Bowers & Wilkins Leisure Monitor speakers) Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, old Uncle Tom Cobbley and aaall! I have to get involved in more makee-learnee online first, as Parrot figure you will be computer equipped to be getting an Androidy App headunit, after all. So we’ll see how we do. First impressions are odd, pretty screen but scarcely any chassis real estate needed to house the Parrotty thing and all the other pugholery’s support. So it’s only a skinny box that doesn’t go back very far, mostly fascia. More later
And lastly and yet most cool of all is the Diablo Customz story and an opportunity for a graffiti artist to have his work grace a place that’s gonna be famous. Remarkably West Coast Flavoured for a Brit (well, he IS in the UK’s West Country) Matt Johns of Diablo Customz in Taunton, Somerset, started producing amazing car modification work, just on his driveway but has been set up in a pukka light industrial unit complete with spray booth for some months now. He has enlisted the technical input of some really cunning stunters when it comes to sounds and as well as being on naggy terms with Ian Pinder and incidentally my fat self (well it gottim into the news dinnit?) he has Liam ‘˜Bass’ Bradley as a spar. (Liam is going to hate me using the ‘˜Bass’ moniker as he’s all grown-up now)
Thing is, Liam really knows a thing or two about sturdy bass making and has the accolade of being the owner/installer one of just four or five vehicles ever that can go subsonic long-range transmission. The very few systems that you can hear coming for literally a mile or more, that drop with enough meat to make ultra-long wavelength sounds below 25Hz. Liam has been a big part of the walled install going into the company single-seat centre-drive Golf. Filled with JBL, as Diablo Customz are JBL dealers for that part of the world. (They are also putting sixteen JBL 1014 GTO subs into an armour plated Citroen C2, driven by SPL dynamics nutter-amps.) And in that new unit, there is an expanse of wall fit to make a Dangerous Vandal, sorry Graffiti Artist, drool. Matt hasn’t got owt but glory and respect to offer as yet but promises to include the art on his Facebook presence and if they can do the same stuff on car panels, then there could be work in future as things develop. Budding artists call 07983 732 467 or 01823 443 750 or e-mail [email protected] and tell them The Fat Man Sent You.
Adam Rayner Online Editor