BRC 2013

The Marauder was honored to be invited back to Burningman in 2013. After several weeks of repairs and improvements we loaded her onto a commercial trailer for the long trip cross country from DC. Some Reno friends kindly helped out with receiving and transport to and from the playa. Assembly took longer than expected due to a number of small electrical problems – but nothing an afternoon of tracing faults and re-wiring couldn’t fix. The Marauder was licensed day&night and operational on Saturday pre-event.

What worked great:

• Gifting 100+ ice chilled towels out near the temple
• Quizzing guests on naughtiest/nicest thing they’d done that day/week/year
• The new music playlists worked great – over 500 funk, classic rock, blues, x-mas tracks (and not much oontz oontz) brought a lot of smiles, thumbs up, and dancing wherever we went
• Gifted a lot of rides – sometimes where we were already heading, but surprisingly often wherever they wanted to go (except into the back streets on the 3 o’clock side – those roads were in terrible shape). Spent one night driving around a man on crutches who had blown out his knee and his wife. Took a lot of people on deep playa art tours in the mornings (before it got stupid hot). Lots of ice runs.
• The redesigned speaker mounts were rock solid
• The electric motor and batteries ran great. No problems.
• Projecting randomly onto the open playa and other camps worked well and was a lot of fun, but we need better footage

Thoughts for 2014:

• Even more gifting. We gifted a lot of santa hats to those cold at night, safety third and Santarchy patches, naughty and nice pins, etc – but I think we can do better. I’m going to challenge everyone in camp to come up with some new ideas.
• Upgrade the RGB LED strip lighting.
• Retrofit Rudolph’s 500w fire engine light nose with something LED based so we don’t have to run the generator as much – running silent/just music is much more pleasant for everyone.
• New horn. Our old one fell off and got run over – oops.
• There’s a list of minor repairs that will be needed, but overall the Marauder is in fantastic shape.

We decided to leave the Marauder in Reno over the off season. While it’s a shame to leave art unused for most of the year, the shipping costs are just too damn high. We’re hoping to find some Reno or Vegas events to bust her out for in 2014.