Finally, An STD To Prevent STDs! 

Playatech’s new Social Transmission Depot (STD) was born of Covid as a way to support socially transmitted goods, services, and connections without socially transmitted diseases (STDs). Because it never was about social distancing at all, just aerosol transfer reduction. 

Our STD turns 3 sheets of plywood into a sturdy 3’x6′ counter at convenient 36″ height, topped by a banner sign 9′ in the air to ensure visibility. That gives it a bit of wind load so consider staking in high-wind locations. 

With enough storage below the counter to camp there and sign posts strong enough to secure a plexi panel that takes peoples’ breath away, the STD is perfect for anything from advice booths to UN food programs. 

Playatech – The Best Treatment For Slotting Disease Is Make More Slots! 

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The Dopest Way To Delight Your DJ! 

Ok, we hear you! For years, the Black Rock Bar has been the most popular DJ booth around, and it caused a bar shortage. Now Plitchenette DJ booths are causing a kitchen shortage, and we’re fed up with plywood abuse! So here is a dope-ass table designed to stop DJs from mis-using our food & beverage products…

Playatech’s new “DJ Dope” was optimized with DJ inputs from CA to NZ, and every DJ who’s tried it said “that’s dope!” so we know it’ll move you! It spins out of your hatchback to provide a work space over 5′ wide and 25″ deep at 40.75″ height, complete with cable guides, high rails to hide your jack junk, a lower shelf for cases, and wide side wings to keep drinks & dope away from the decks at 5AM. You can even modify the table height, or cut the top edge into a flame shape – all from exactly 2 sheets of plywood with no MOOP and no part larger than the 69″x28″ tabletop! 

If you really wanna get cool, add a cut-out design to the front panels and backlight it. Or tell us how to improve the design until there is nothing else a DJ could ask for. Except treats in the green room of course…

www.Playatech.com – Slots That Rock. And Rap. And Thump!

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Our New Playavator Will Really Get You High…

It can be hard to get a rise out of anyone at Burning Man. We know; we’ve tried for 15 years and finally figured out how! We want you all to get a rise out of everyone, so we’re sharing. With a story of course. 

Prepping for Burning Man 2019, our friends at Crossroads asked if we could design ship-flat steps for performers to get up onto their 4’ high stage, and then from the stage up to elevated platforms. Having once enjoyed the thrill of performing live on the Crossroads stage as well as the scarier thrills of getting on and off alive, Sunshine said “of course we can do that”! 

So, he sat down with his sketchpad and the Playavator was born. Made from just one sheet of 3/4” plywood with no MOOP, it is the best way to get a rise out of anyone. Just slide it together anywhere, and get taller in 60 seconds.

The last time we tried to get people high on the Playa was a decade ago, when we designed Leave No Bleachers so you and 12 friends could get upwardly mobile and watch burns from premium seats. But it took six whole sheets of ply to get it up. Now, you can get yourself up and take a friend, for just one sheet! Who would have thought Playatech follows Moore’s Law?! 

Download the Playavator and make one today; it’s easy. Just be warned that we have never tested it for weight (nor even built one at all) so its capacity rating is “radically self-sufficient”. That means if you fall or get a splinter, it’s all on you – just like it is for the other 50 designs we’ve shared to get your camp up, down, moved, stored, and rockin’ it. 

Playatech – Helping You Get It Up For 15 Summers

Download PDF Here: https://playatech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/PLAYAVATOR-REV.A.pdf

Enabling Pop-Up Museums Everywhere

In 2017, Burning Man asked us for a museum-style pedestal design to display small models of big art at Everywhere. We like big art everywhere and the thought of shrinking big art to sit on top of our little art seemed kinda cute. So of course we came up with something kinda clever! A three-per. 

One sheet, three pledestals, hardly any moop. Just in case you plan a renegade pop-up museum, or need the simplest possible water bottle stand, or want six legs for a 3-foot tall robot bug from just 2 sheets of ply…many thanks to Spicey for the cool full-color CAD! 

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A Potting Bench, Kitchen, Workbench, Standing Desk, Or…?

You know you’re a Burner when: your wife wants a potting bench for Mother’s Day, and after seeing the long parts lists of online DIY options you design one from exactly 2 sheets of plywood cut into 8 parts – then as you make it, you realize it will be a great playa kitchen! Or workbench. Or standing desk.

Whatever it is, we think it will make your day! And, like every design we share, building one for BRC leaves invisible extra parts inside you: Larry’s 10 Principles, that will always live on.

The Plitchenette offers a 60″ x 30″ work surface at convenient counter height, plus two lower shelves and an upper one. Also included in the plans is a suggested sink cut-out location, enabling you to add all the features of our iSink or Dish Delight designs to provide a fully-equipped camp kitchen – see those pages for links to water gear. Then, just add a camp stove on the counter, ice chest under its shade, and coffeemaker up top to become a playa master chef! We tried to make those from wood too, but not everything we try works.

For potting bench use, you can make the sink hole without installing a sink basin, place several open bins on the shelf below the counter, and slide any bin into place below the sink hole to collect soil, gravel, sand, or other materials spilled on the counter.

Whatever you do with it, please send a picture. Whoever sends a pic of the most ridiculous application will receive their choice of plans for any 3 designs you like. With thanks to Wristy for endlessly turning Sunshine’s chaotic graph paper sketches into plans you can use…and to Larry for turning us all into artists…

Playatech – Don’t Leave For Home Without It

 

 

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The Ultimate Dishwashing System For Large Camps and Gatherings

While designing our breakthrough iSink Water Ritual System, we faced a conundrum: it would be perfect for washing hands, but rather small for washing dishes! And if there is one thing we don’t need at festivals besides skanky hands, it is skanky dishes. So we designed a different water system specifically for dishes – LOTS of dishes! As in your camp of 100+. Here’s how we did it…

Besides needing a larger sink basin that can fit big platters and cookware, we also considered process design for cleaning dishes versus hands – water is scarce in the desert, so anyone with a lot of dishes can use water efficiently through a 4-step cleaning process using four bins (thanks to Jazzi for pioneering this approach at Red Lightning): 

1) Scrape all food wastes off plates/cookware into a waste bin. Perhaps wipe eatery items down with a recycled napkin and throw that in the waste bin too, to enable the water used in remaining steps to go MUCH farther. The waste can go to compost…

2) Scrub the eatery item in a basin filled with soapy water.

3) Rinse the eatery item in a basin filled with clean fresh water. 

4) Sanitize the eatery item in a basin containing a weak diluted bleach solution. 

So, we began with the notion of 3 iSinks in a row, with larger sink basins for #2-4 and an extra bucket at the start to handle #1. How much larger? A 5 gallon sink basin is not much larger than a 2 or 3 gallon basin as used in the iSink, so we settled on 10-gallon Roughneck bins because they are strong enough to pick up and move to a gray water disposal area, even half filled. 

Holding up 3 ten-gallon bins filled with liquid & dishes plus another 3 five-gallon supply bottles above them turned into a giant contraption weighing hundreds of pounds and requiring at least 2 sheets of plywood. So, we copped out and and designed a 1-sheet table-top solution intended to sit on a typical 6’ long folding table. The food waste bin even has its own cute floor stand! 

The key to Dish Delight is that for dishes, we do not need water faucets with a constant flow function like hand washing requires, so you can buy the lowest-cost faucet valves for screw-top or crown-top 5-gallon bottles, and we can hold the bottles at an appropriate angle using a slotted plywood device designed like a wine rack for big fat 5-gallon bottles. 

Logistically, you might only use 2.5 gallons in each 10-gallon sink basin, so each 5-gallon supply bottle may fill its wash basin twice if that. Therefore, you’ll want a way to quickly refill water bottles from your camp water supply and then load them onto the Dish Delight, such as a small transfer pump at the supply side. Similarly, each Homer Bucket drain capacity is only one 5-gallon water supply bottle and only half the max capacity of its sink basin, so you’ll want an efficient way to dump the sink basins before refilling – the 10-gallon basins we chose come with covers, so we think you can carry them to a gray water disposal tank and use a sump pump there, skipping the Homer Buckets entirely (sorry Homer). We do recommend you label your water supplies and roughneck bins “soap”, “rinse”, and “bleach” to avoid mixing them up. 

Now you know how we designed Playatech’s new Dish Delight – the ultimate dishwashing system for larger camps and temporary kitchens. Just put one near your iSink Water Ritual System for hand washing, and your playa soup line is ready for action. We think. Like everything Playatech and indeed everything about Burning Man itself, this is an experiment…

Playatech – Testing Half-Baked Products On Unsuspecting Burners Since A Decade Before That Musk Guy

To Keep The Health Cops Away, Build an iSink Today!

Ever wondered why everyone you meet at Burning Man hugs you instead of shaking hands? You THOUGHT it was our ecstatically friendly culture, but it is subconscious survival instinct: your hands are SKANKY! And the health department knows it – their rules even show a hand-washing station as the most important element in any temporary public food or drink establishment. 

Playatech eliminated skanky playa couches way back in the year of The Psyche, and to celebrate Radical Ritual we will eliminate skanky hands in all of yours, by finally making humanity’s most ancient water ritual “easy anywhere”!

Behold – the iSink hand washing station, featuring the three key components of civilized plumbing with all their chakras in proper vertical alignment: controllable water source, sink basin, and drainage. Crude looking, but functionally elegant in true Playatech style, and guaranteed to keep the health department away when used as directed (or return the parts for a full refund:) 

The iSink is a modular system that functions with any type of 5-gallon water dispenser – to achieve health-cop hand-wash nirvana, make sure yours includes a “constant flow” valve that stays on while both hands are in the water stream, like this or this. And use soap! 

For the sink basin, a typical 12 quart dishpan will do, or an 16 quart for splashy folk, or get fancy using a camping sink with working drain – whichever way you go, you can remove our sink basin for remote water rituals from foot washes to hair tinting – just try THAT with your fancy RV sink! And of course for drainage, we used the classic “Homer Bucket” – let’s do this! Figuring out where to pour THAT is up to you (hints: be self sufficient, and leave no trace!). Links to order various water gadgets are highlighted above, or find/make your own. 

But wait, there’s more! Connecting with people to make Playatech and share it at Burning Man is a process meticulously designed to engage you in all 10 Burning Man Principles – yes, we are a Burner factory, not a furniture company! To celebrate that, the wizards of Playatech squeezed two iSinks onto one sheet of 3/4” plywood, so you can make 2 and gift 1 – please pay forward the gift of good health to the planet. Or at least the next camp over. 

Ok, hurry up and build the iSinks today, so I won’t catch something nasty from your skanky hands tomorrow! But please don’t stop hugging your favorite Playatech Hottie just because your hands are clean…Sunshine’s favorite Playatech hottie today is newbie Tyler Baumgardner for putting the iSink in CAD. Maybe his playa name is destined to become “Water”; we’ll see…

Also available NOW: the radically novel Dish Delight, a crack 4-step dishwashing system for larger camps – integrating scrape, soap, rinse, and bleach stations the size of the deep playa….only from: 

Playatech – BRC’s Fake Corporate Monster Relentlessly Eating Playa Problems

The Man Asked For A Confessional, and Got A Home For Radical Ritual

In the Dark Ages (Burning Man 2005), we instigated a Renaissance in seating that eliminated skanky couches from festivals. Then our ultra-secret ZaVinci Labs alchemized bars, bike racks, and stages into radically efficient art. Now, we take our slotted structural Renaissance to the next level by sharing the secrets of the Burning Booth – a modular construction system for rapidly deploying small structures used in radical rituals or habitation.

In true Renaissance form, we first built a church for Burning Man 2016. Well, it looks like a little church, in the Mission Style that will not be re-invented for 300 years. Commissioned by the information dissemination office of the high government of Black Rock City, all of the high priests and priestesses of the Burning World were commanded to perform a radical ritual: confess in this little church to a video camera at the 2016 Global Leadership Conference.

To fairly honor this high purpose, the “Burning Booth” is the first Playatech design that has ever contained the highly guarded and globally feared word “Burning” (with a capital B); a word that has crushed the titans of industry. You can see how easy this church is to assemble here, and we share its construction plans with the world for a mere donation of $20 to the art gods that will enable little churches everywhere. It integrates a bench on one side and an altar on the other, but you can change either or both easily into whatever your ritual requires.

Yet the Burning Booth is but a Trojan Horse, destined to unleash full structural enlightenment upon the masses. It heralds a new era in construction techniques that can enable even the poorest peasants of the land to build a structure for radical ritual or own a home. A strong, safe, solid home that muskets cannot penetrate.  A home constructed in the magical time of one hour, at the magical cost of just one silver dollar per square foot (about $20 US).

Until then, the Burning Booth is:

• – 18 cubic feet of wood, alchemized into this 3D puzzle in minutes with nary a fastener
• – A magic box that can change to a photo booth, DJ booth, projection booth, or chapel in moments
• – A modular system enabling furnishings, fixtures, windows with counters, or anything you need
• – A fun playa-scale construction kit for grown-up kids: design your own parts to dial in your details
• – Proof of concept for a 110 sq ft Playatech nano-home built in one hour for $1k – furnished
• – A creation of Playanardo ZaVinci, sculpted by Sunshine & Wristy of ZaVinci Labs

We hope the masses will come in from the cold and dust, and make a memorable ritual in this box…

To preview the assembly instructions before ordering, click here.

Playatech – The Only Brand The Man Can Stand, And No One Else Crazy Enough To Try

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Even Cheaper Than China!

It’s time for us all to simplify, cut costs, get spiritual, and focus on the important things: like a soft place to land right now that doesn’t cost a pretty penny. So for these depressed times, we’ve cut the fat to the bone, and gone way beyond the shirts off our backs – we’ve taken the backs off our stacks! Of plywood that is.

That’s it – all you really need to sit in style is back support, and maybe something soft between your bones and the dirt. So, the economy broke our asses but not our backs! In our new BlackJack floor seating series, you sit on a tarp clipped to the BlackJack (or fluffy fur if you prefer) and your weight prevents the back support from moving – or skip the tarp for high-friction surfaces like lawns. And you have two design choices for each sheet of ply!

• With our VIP Model, one sheet can make two 4′ wide Blackjacks that seat up to 4 people each (6 if you snuggle), including integrated side tables for eating and drinking.
• Or, skip the side tables for our Economy version – one sheet of ply makes a giant 8′ Blackjack that seats at least 8, AND two 4′ Blackjacks that seat at least 4 each. That’s 16 purrfect parking spaces for your purty parts, with room to fit another 8 close friends.

The VIP is cush enough for movers and shakers. The Economy brings the state of the art in slicing and slotting efficiency, and a new generation of price/performance: a one sheet Playatech party lounge that seats 2 per slot and doesn’t leave a trace! Just perfect for spiritual workshops, dusty picnics, raver parking, and reclaiming that dumb space around the perimeter of your dome.

Make some now while there is still time! Because in the metropolis of the future, Playatech can’t save your ass, but we can sure prop up your spirit. Even if we can’t afford pretty CAD drawings these days…

Playatech – Bringing Any Metropolis Down To Earth

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To Build a City, We Need a Place To Work!

In Black Rock City, we’ve seen people soldering, welding, gluing, emailing, and doing otherwise normal work in the strangest places and positions. That’s because no one has a desk or a workbench! Why not? Because no one ever figured out how to build their own from a single sheet of plywood until 1972! And news travels slow sometimes. Read more

What Could Be Simpler??!!

This one just made us go “Duh”! Two years after starting Playatech and thinking we invented slotted plywood seating, we find a 1972 book called Nomadic Furniture that includes this chair design – and it assembles from just four pieces, two less than our Playa Love Seat!

Of course, it only seats one instead of three, needs 3/4″ plywood, and doesn’t use exactly one sheet, but it does the job and looks pretty classic.

When we figure out how to lay out three Simple Seats on two sheets of ply, we’ll let you know – and we might call that one Ultra Seat. Until then, it is just a simple bare necessity you can build from the original circa 1970 plans.

Playatech – So Advanced, It’s Simple

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Furr All Your Fancy Fashions

Our friends spend their entire year making amazing playawear and lug it hundreds of miles just to wear it for a week. Within minutes of arriving Home it’s all in a dusty pile on the floor of their tents – that’s just not right!!!

So we fixed it. Our unique new Ploset playa closet organizer ends that mess forever!

Just 5’ tall to fit inside most tents, the Ploset holds enough hanging clothes for a week of playa nights, and we know you don’t wear diddly in the daytime. It features not one but two built in shelves for folded and piled stuff, and a special area to hang belts, fluffies, camelbacks and other accessories! Your playa boots stash underneath the lower shelf, and best of all, it matches perfectly with the Larry Boy Lounger you’ll be sleeping in.

Professional closet organizing consultants might charge hundreds of dollars to custom design a closet organizer this functional for your tent. But not Playatech – in return for saving you precious hours of playa time digging for that lost lingerie, we just want the price of a burrito sent to the arts. Pay it forward, and art we can’t imagine yet will always fill the closet of your psyche with wonder.

You can make a Ploset yourself in 30 minutes from one sheet of cheap ½” ply, one 4’-6’ closet bar or pipe, and some nails (or screw hooks if you’re fancy) – plans are posted on our order page. The Ploset collapses instantly to ship in 1.2 cubic feet not counting the pipe, burns when you’re sick of it, and of course, you absolutely should turn it into an art project any way you like. Plosets also make perfect coat racks for your camp’s dome or bar.

Playatech staff reserves the right to detect Plosets using infrared sensors stolen from BLM, to enter tents for purposes of Ploset quality inspection, and to request personal favors from Ploset owners whose art royalties are in arrears.

Playatech – Raising the Bar On Black Rock Lifestyles

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Just A Couple Little Tables

We threw a couple of these together to go between a pair of Desert Daze Beds, and then thought “what the heck, since it is so easy to add products to the web site now, let’s call this a product”.

You can get three out of one sheet of ply, and we’ll get pix up soon. But we need to bang on html bugs to go live, so this is all we have for the page right now 🙂

Playatech – Fastest Furniture of the Future

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A Coffee Table For Fine Dining?

We hardly ever use our formal dining rooms, so why not turn them into dens when we’re not using the fine china??!! With Turning The Tables and its companion Flip Your Seat you can do just that, and have a Denette!

Turning The Tables provides a large table with a unique base that instantly changes between 18″ height and 26″ height – the low height is perfect for lounging around in Playa Love Seats and other chill seating, while the high height is ideal for dining and task work.

We wish we invented this, but we didn’t – we found it in a 35 year old book. Go figure, and you’ll be one step ahead of IKEA since they still haven’t figured it out.

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Playatech – So Advanced, It’s Simple

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A Pantry On The Playa

Our VP of Technology and CADmeister Wristy wanted to raise his cooler off the ground and stash some chips, so he took our 2005 Ploset design and converted it from closet to kitchen!

The Plantry keeps your cooler cooler, with a built in hole for dumping water (into a pan; he’d never dump grey water on the playa). It also contains not one, but TWO shelves for your canned goods and other non-perishable food. That’s enough space for a whole week on the playa, assuming you stash the booze somewhere else. All from exactly one sheet of ply, as is the Playatech way.

Good going Wristy! We’re all coming over for dinner…

Playatech – Eat Your Heart Out IKEA

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Stop Sleeping in the Dirt!

Are you still attracting dirt and bugs into your bed instead of dates by camping on the cold, hard ground? Stop living like a scorpion and start sleeping like whoever owns this town! With the Bedevator, it’s as easy as slicing wood.

he queen size Bedevator lifts your bed 10” off the ground and contains insulating air compartments underneath it for a warm sleep. It’s easy to store shoes or gear bins under each edge. And it even includes built in Nightstands! All for the price of 2 sheets of ply.

To truly live like royalty, the Bedevator King lifts your bed 12” off the ground, also includes Nightstands, and even includes the world’s first Playa Safe! The Playa Safe securely holds nearly 2 cubic feet of worldly possessions under lock and key so you can leave your tent in peace. The entire Bedevator King requires just three sheets of ply, and securing the safe requires an additional six “L” brackets, a hinge, a hasp and a lock.

Desert sleeping doesn’t get any better than this. Well, not unless you build a Desert Daze Bed or a Larry Boy Lounger! Air mattress or foam pad not included. Playatech will not be responsible for loss or theft of your stuff or your safe key.

A little reminiscing: when Sunshine graduated college in the early 80s, he couldn’t afford a bed. So his boss helped him build one like the Bedevator, sans Nightstands. It is still well used in his guest room, and its slotted design served as the inspiration for the Playa Love Seat in 2005. Wonder if his boss read “Nomadic Furniture”? What goes around…

Playatech – We Do It the Old Fashioned Way

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Impress Her When You Undress Her!

We know guys just throw their clothes all over the place, but girls like to keep their clothes neat and clean and wrinkle-free. So do your honey a favor, and put her clothes away for her! She’ll love it, and you’ll love the thank you.

The Presser is made from two sheets of ply, and designed to hold plastic bins as drawers – feel free to adjust the shelf heights to fit your drawers. If you have a problem pulling drawers out too far, add a peg at the bottom front of each shelf as a drawer stop. Of course why anyone would want to stop pulling drawers off is beyond us…

Playatech – Undressing Is Art Too

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Where To Put All That Swag

The Gear Gizmo offers a simple shelving system for storing and organizing all the stuff littering your camp. The first person to send us a picture of one covered with playa swag wins a prize! We don’t know what the prize is yet though, and if you have that much swag we might just donate the prize to Goodwill since you don’t need it.

Playatech – Simple Solutions For All Your Playa Problems

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The Bitchin Bench That Started It All

The Playa Love Seat was our first product and it made Playatech the leading brand in the Black Rock. Our cute and cuddly Playa Love Seat is still the easiest, most useful playa art project your psyche can imagine. Each 4-foot wide Playa Love Seat offers comfortable snuggling to the person building it and one or two friends, with the following unique capabilities: – The six required rectangular parts line up like a puzzle on a single 4×8 ½” plywood sheet, and can be cut in under one hour pre-playa using any kind of straight saw, leaving zero moop – ask Home Depot to make the cuts for you! – The parts ship flat in a small car, and are easily assembled by one person in less than a minute using slots cut into the parts – no tools, fasteners or glue! Each Playa Love Seat is a canvas for art, and may be enhanced with paint, scrollwork, routing, wood burning, or whatever you can imagine. Making cushions is easy, and body pillows fit perfectly. – The design is easily modified for different seating angles or unique features – a really tall woman even built an Amazon Love Seat from one sheet. Underseat storage may be accessed by sliding out the seat, or by hinging it. And if you can’t stand those smelly porta-potties, you can even cut a hole in the seat, put a bucket below it, and voila, you have a Playa Privy! – Playa Love Seats may be burned by their creators at conclusion of the event if suitable paints are used, or shipped flat back to default for reuse should they survive the playa. Burnable paint ideas are on our Support page – do not burn it if you put acrylic paint or other toxic materials on it. You may not want to breathe burning plywood fumes either. Cost is around $20 for the plywood, at your local lumber yard. At this insanely low price, Playatech requests a $5 royalty for each seat produced, remitted to Black Rock Arts Foundation (www.blackrockarts.org) or your own favorite radical non-profit arts organization. We’re making wooden shareware, dig? Put your love for art where your butt is, and folks will hug you in thanks when we sit with you. But if you don’t put your wallet where your ass is we’ll put termites under them.

Playatech – We Really Know How To Cook With Wood

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Evolution Makes A Good Thing Better!

5 years after introducing the Playa Love Seat that made Playatech as indispensable in the desert as Kleenex, we never imagined we could design a better one. But we had to. So we did! And Burners Without Borders was kind enough to announce it for us worldwide.

The Anniversaire Chair celebrates 5 years of putting splinters in thousands of playa princesses and proud princes. It takes the ubiquitous Playa Love Seat and adds arm rests, side tables with drink holders (two per person for you lushes), and even adds a shaded area underneath for your cooler and fire toys. And you can still make the entire thing from exactly one sheet of ply! These days, you can get that for the price of a fast food lunch, and it will grow back before you wear out our product. We guarantee it, or your money back!

Designer furniture doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to keep them both happy. Not anymore. All it takes is some legwork and an arm holding power tools. So get to work! Don’t buy American, build American. Or Iranian if that’s where you’re reading this.

Playatech – The Ultimate Art Class For Unemployed Construction Workers

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The purrfect place to plant some parts, indoors or out

You know you want to dump that bulky smelly playa couch, so here’s how to build an 8-foot wide version of the Playa Love Seat using exactly two sheets of plywood. It ships in under 2.4 cubic feet when broken down into 8 parts – how’s that for an inflatable couch that won’t go pop till you cook it! It will not fit in most cars due to 8-foot long planks, but WTF, call IKEA.

The new Playa Pew uses exactly the same design as the Playa Love Seat with the addition of two center supports. Each center support is exactly like one of the side supports, only the slots for the seat and seatback get continued all the way until they meet, which cuts the front top of the support away (so you can sit there; duh). The center supports push down onto slots in the front/rear supports just as the side supports do to help stabilize the whole base as a trussed box structure, and they help support the seatback from bowing along its long length.

To make a Playa Pew, cut the front support, rear support, and seatback out of one sheet of ply down the long way instead of the short way like the love seats. On the second sheet, cut the seat the long way, and then cut the large remainder into four identical 24″ wide rectangles. Clamp the four together to cut your slots just like the Playa Love Seat and voila. For all the long boards, do the end slots just like the love seat, and add an extra pair of slots to the front and rear supports 1/3 and 2/3 along their lengths to hold the center supports.

Once you have it all assembled, you might find that you can cut a slot in each of the pieces you removed from the center supports, and then shove one onto each side of the Playa Pew as a drink tray. Voila, exactly two sheets of ply, just like we promised! No moopage here but some sawdust. Please do not forget your $5/sheet royalty to the art gods, or your Playa Pew will give your ass splinters! That’s $10 per pew for those who can’t add.

Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it collapse…

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The Black Rock’s Leading Soft Place To Land!

Playatech is ploud to plesent the plemiere ploduct in its Radical Seating line, the Larry-Boy Lounger!

The Larry-Boy seats 6, snuggles 4, and sleeps 2, making it the ultimate piece of desert camp furniture. With ample shaded space underneath for small ice chests and slippers, it even includes a night table on each side!

Made from exactly 2 sheets of ½” plywood, the Larry-Boy ships as 10 pieces taking up just over 2.5 cubic feet of space (padding sold separately). It can be assembled by one person in two minutes with no fasteners, tools or glue. Compare to the best inflatable couch or bed you can find, and after a couple days on the playa, you’ll know why we claim the Larry-Boy as the world’s first inflatable convertible bed that won’t go pop till you cook it!

Plans for the Larry-Boy are now available for download, and price is only about $35 of plywood and a $10 royalty to the arts. So go build yourself the ultimate playa entertainment center today! Only from Playatech.

Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it collapse…

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The Bed That Lasts Longer Than You Do

On the playa we know you sleep all day and party all night, so we thought “what could be better than a day bed you can party on at night??!!” So here it is, the Desert Daze Bed.

A full 4×8 foot sleeping surface easily sleeps 2 when covered with a foam pad. Add some body pillows around the back, and invite some friends to snuggle! In a pinch, you can even remove the foam and use your day bed as a stage. Why not build two, and shove them together to make a Playa Playpen??!!

The Desert Daze Bed sucks up three full sheets of ply with no MOOP, and is worth it. Six feet of ¾” dowel will help support the back. Where else can you get a day bed this versatile, with a frame that ships just 1.5” thick, for the price of ply? Eat you heart out IKEA!

Playatech – The Brand More Hotties Hang On

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It’s a Sofa! No, a Giant Lounger! No, a Queen Sized Bed!

Just look what we made from 3 sheets of half-inch ply that cost $30 – a convertible couch you’d spend ten times that much to buy! If you ask nicely, Home Depot will probably do nearly all the cutting for you for free, or maybe $3.

Think of the Pluton Flame as the ultimate futon frame, a cross between our Playa Pew and Larry Boy Lounger. The back slides onto the sides three ways, including horizontally for sleeping. Just perfect for that den you use as a guest room.

To support the back’s eight foot lengths in the sofa and lounger positions, two little support pieces slide into notches in the base. To change between sofa and lounger positions, flip the support pieces and insert their other ends in the other base notches, move the back from one set of slots to another, and voila! Converticouch.

Playatech – Eat Your Heart Out IKEA

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A Task Chair and a Lounging Chair In One!

We found a really cool idea for a two-way chair in the book “Nomadic Furniture 2” and we just had to Playatech it!

Of course we like ours better. They used pipe, canvas, and other stuff, but we just use good old wood, and ours have little knick-knack shelves to boot! Just don’t sit on the back shelf or we’ll have to call them “Flip Your Face”.

Try them with our Turning The Tables dual-height table to create a “denette” – a dinette set that turns into a den in one minute flat! We hardly ever use our formal dining room, do you?

Playatech – Furniture That Will Flip Your Lid

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Will the real playa bench please stand up?

People insist on calling the Playa Love Seat a playa bench, so we had no choice but to create a real playa bench!

The Plench was actually the closest thing to a bar stool we could come up with for the 5 Elements Pavilion. They worked pretty well at first if seeming a little rickety. Then over the course of a week at BM05, they became kindling in a manner reminiscent of classic bar brawls in old Western movies.

We think they would last much longer if made from ¾” ply instead of ½”, so go build better ones – plans are on our Orders page, and each 4×8 sheet of ply nets exactly two Plenches. Just don’t cut the slots that hold the seat support too long – we did, and the seats had little support. Of course the sight of large drunk people crashing down through their Plenches can be quite amusing!

We have a real bar stool design concept now, but we’re saving it for our 2008 line…

Playatech – Shareware You Can Sit On

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This One Will Rock You!

The Black Rocker is one part hammock, one part rocking lounger, one part see-saw, and one part insane fun!

The Black Rocker even contains integrated attachment points for tethered recreation.

The Black Rocker is also the first Playatech product guaranteed to be dangerous when used as directed.

We hope you’ll like it, and we fear what will happen when you do…

Plans for this ploduct coming soon to a Playatech factory near you, so don’t bother clicking…

Playatech – Get Met

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A precarious place to sit still

We love interactive art and recycling, so we just had to recycle this interactive chair design from the 1973 book Nomadic Furniture. You just raise and lower your arms to rock it, or keep them up to meditate! How cool is that. And much simpler to make than our own Black Rocker.

When we build them, we’ll make the “part B’s” a few inches longer and slot them to reduce the use of screws & glue and increase portability. And we’ll make them with recycled wood!

Playatech – This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Desert Furniture

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A Little Something For Those Long Legs We Love

We don’t think our new Stilter Seat will be a big seller, but we do think those of you with six-foot legs are gonna love it! The Stilter Seat is a preview of our 2008 line now in development to support Burning Man’s planned “Tall” theme.

We haven’t built one, but it should work, and if not, you’ve fallen from that height before. And look, there’s even a place for your short friends to sit!

Try it today, and send us a picture of someone sitting on it, ok?

Playatech – The Jolly Green Giant of Playa Lifestyles

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The Baddest Bar In the Black Rock, Bar None!

In 2005 we built the Glimmer Bar. It worked great in the 5 Elements Pavilion except for one problem: you can’t dance on it! For 2007, we’ve created the ultimate Black Rock Bar to solve that.

Made from about two sheets of 3/4″ ply, each Black Rock Bar module is four feet wide by two and a half deep, with a shelf inside. Just perfect for one bartender and one dancer! For large bars, they instantly connect to make your bar as long as you want. And of course, they instantly assemble or collapse on command so you can tend bar anywhere on the planet.

Check out Silicon Village’s Hair of the Dog camp at happy hour during BM07, and you’ll see eight Black Rock Bar modules, with Coyote Ugly Dancers on four of them. They’ll be far from ugly! But they will kick your drinks into the deep playa.

Playatech – Raising the Bar on the Black Rock Lifestyle

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The perfect place to mix your fix

Desert survival guides stress liquids but largely ignore food, so we suspect half the drinking establishments in Black Rock City will use these as back-bars. But it’s a kitchen, honest, at least on the playa. At home, it’s an 8′ wide credenza for your dining room, entertainment center, office, or … well, just build two!!

Playatech is especially excited about this ploduct because it was designed by Sawdust, who built a bunch of Sunshine’s stuff and then decided to come up with his own awesome kitchen solution. It rocked the Burning Silicon 5 Elements Pavilion at BM05 so hard we destroyed it before getting good pix. As a result, we strongly recommend sealing the horizontal surfaces to protect against spilled liquids.

Just compare the Pledenza to a conventional camp kitchen, and you’ll run from IKEA.

Plans are available NOW on our orders page, so what are you waiting for? The plans fully utilize 3 sheets of ply – but add/subtract some to put shelves wherever you want! If you decorate one nicely, it will look great in your home. And will someone please make a narrow version from two sheets and send in the plans? Maybe we’ll declare you a Playatech Master Creator like Sawdust, and hotties will stick to you like sawdust.

The Pledenza – something tells us this will be our ticket to free drinks at every bar on the playa…

Playatech – We Really Know How To Cook With Wood

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A Really Cute Table & Seating For 2-4!

Our friend Wristy made this table and a pair of these benches from a total of two sheets of 1/2″ plywood – that’s about twenty bucks! It is cozy and solid, and demonstrates that even a flat tabletop surface can be achieved without fasteners by using Playatech methods.

Nice work Wristy!

Playatech – Shareware You Can Sit On

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All You Can Eat From Just One Sheet

Here’s another cool design from the early 70s book “Nomadic Furniture” – a complete kitchen table and four stools, all from just one sheet of ply! And you get two choices of base style.

If you make the table and stools square instead of round, you’ll save some work and leave no moop – how’s that for Playatech before its time?!

Playatech – Rewriting The Book On Slotted Plywood Design

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A most basic storage solution

Generally we prefer form over function, and to be perfectly honest, you can probably buy stronger shelves at IKEA or OSH for less than you’ll pay to build these yourself. So, why would any sane burner build Plykea shelves?

1) Because there are no sane burners.

2) Because any dollar to IKEA supports commodification instead of art.

3) Because plywood is way more earth-friendly than plastic!

4) Because we don’t pay our workers slave wages.

5) Because we eliminate all packaging MOOP so you don’t have to.

6) Because our stuff assembles and disassembles without tools.

7) Because no other shelving system will match the rest of your playa furniture so perfectly!

Each 8 foot tall, 4 foot wide, 2 foot deep shelf unit containing 4 shelves can be made in a few minutes from 2 sheets of ½” ply. It will hold a lot of gear but not a ton. We’re almost embarrassed at how obvious they are, so we offer them at just ½ the usual royalty – that’s right, you can build a Plykea Shelf for $5. Only $2.50/sheet, even less than the cost of BM’s porta-potties.

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Playatech – supporting asses and the arts since a few weeks ago

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You Know We Just Had To Do It!

Massage tables are expensive. You could spend $200 on a half-decent one at Costco – or just $20 for the Playatech version! They both ship in the same amount of space – theirs folds, but ours collapses – only when you tell it to of course.

This one was created by Wristy, who used it at Mystic Massage last year. Girls, you might want to check out Mystic Massage this year. As you can see from his work, he is really good with his hands.

Playatech – Where Asses Meet Art

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The first and only desk designed to save burners fuel

Believe it or not, a lot of burners hold desk jobs on playa. And many of these white collar workers still use those antique metal government desks!

How many old boat anchors will we see on freecycle when everyone finds out that our new Miss Direct Desk provides 30% more desk area, and you can ship 24 of them in the volume required by just one rusty metal clunker? For a large playa enterprise, a desk that ships in 2.4 cubic feet can mean the difference between driving a pick-up truck and a semi.

Each Miss Direct Desk can be made from exactly two sheets of ½” ply, and we suggest the desktop sheet be sanded to minimize splinters. The desk is a full 8’ wide x 3’ deep, and includes some shelves to one side that can hold two plastic bins for hanging file folders. It also features an optional keyboard tray, pencil shelf, or ergonomic foot rest the full width of the desk, and could be used for two people or on both sides. The desk design is easily modified to add additional shelves, privacy panel, cup holders, or pretty much whatever you want. Our famous Playa Love Seat is easily converted to the best desk chair you’ll ever have by cutting the arms down to fit below the desk.

The Miss Direct Desk is coming soon, but due to capacity constraints in our drafting and prototyping departments, Playatech can only discuss volume orders at this time – contact our major accounts sales department today at sunshine@playatech.com if you need to build a lot of desks.

Just another way to reduce/reuse/recycle in unique Playatech style…

Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it collapse.

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A 21st Century modular bar system for Black Rock proprietors

Black Rock City only really needs three kinds of furniture: seats, beds and bars. We’ve got the best seating and convertible beds this side of Reno, so before IKEA can challenge our dominance in Playa furnishings by exploiting a hole in our product line, we decided we’d better design a collapsible, burnable bar!

Here it is – it will collapse only when requested to unless it is subject to forces beyond our control. It should work with most any bar top your artistic staff might create or scrounge (you can use plywood for the bar top as shown in the plans, but that would be so damn boring).

Cut the rectangles first like you do for all our other fine furnishings. Clamp several pieces together to cut the curves quicker, and assemble. The cutting drawings here yield four bar supports with one shelf and an 8′ bar top from three sheets of ½” plywood, but this is the kind of project that invites you to lay out the modules however you like!

The top and front views in the plans illustrate one of many ways a corner can be made using interlocking shelves to increase structural support. Some configurations may benefit from additional modifications to the standard parts, such as extra slots, shortening shelves, making 8 foot long shelves by cutting your ply the long way, or adding foot rests. Do it pre-playa to avoid sawdust moop. Secure the bartop to the assembled supports and shelves using angle brackets or whatever else you like. We recommend you seal the bar top and shelves, or they may delaminate and warp with that heavy spillage we know goes on in the wee hours.

Like all our innovative products, we request a $5 royalty for each sheet of plywood used, paid to www.blackrockarts.org. We also request a mail to sunshine@playatech.com illustrating your design and indicating the planned location of the bar at Burning Man. This will enable our expert staff to make an inspection visit and ensure your bar passes our stringent engineering requirements and stress tests, which will be memorialized with a burned Logo logo. Unregistered Glimmer Bars found at Burning Man constitute a Playamark violation and may be stress tested without notice. Note that it is a violation of Burning Man event policy to burn your bar in place if doing so will create a danger, and forms are required just to try.

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Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it collapse…

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It’s a Plane… No, it’s a Flop!

We admit it: every once in a while we create something really useful, but it just doesn’t come out well enough to properly represent the vaunted Playatech brand. This is one of those times.

In 2005 we wanted a great little coffee table to go with all those love seats and pews, so we thought we came up with the perfect design from exactly ½ sheet of ply. It even looks cool enough to fly!

The problem is that the little wing is only stable if the slots that hold it are sized really really accurate. More accurate than we ever bother with. So, we cheated! Yes, we prostituted ourselves at the church of screws and attached some 1×1/2 stock under the wing to keep it steady. And it still isn’t steady!

When we have time, we’ll lower the wing, cut large circles in it, and make it a drink holder. That’ll fix it, yeah. In the meantime, try the plans and fix it any way you want…

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Playatech – Someday, Everything Will Be Plywood

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Billboards For Burners

Finding camps in blinding dustorms can be a challenge, but it would be easy if every camp had a Plaprietor Sign! In Old Europe, every shopkeeper did, and cities felt like villages. Go on, build one. It takes a few minutes, and will help you strut your stuff…

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Playatech – We Do It The Old-Fashioned Way

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We Saw a See-Saw and We Wanted to Make More!

When we were young, we loved see-saws, but we see them no more. It seems they are as bad for kids as climbing trees and jumping in lakes and other scary things kids do with their bodies, so all the kids were told to play TV games instead and shrivel up. We don’t like that!

So, we made a see-saw for our kids, and we called it the Wee-Saw because it is smaller than that giant thing at Burning Man. And because we saw a see-saw once a long time ago, but we can hardly remember what it looks like, and we were wee ones then.

The Wee-Saw represents a difficult departure from our usual technology, because we tried and tried but we couldn’t make a pivoting hinge out of slotted plywood that lasted more than ten minutes. So, we caved and used hardware to make the Wee-Saw work. Then we figured what the heck, and we used hardware all over the place just to get the job done faster.

It worked really well a couple places like Golden Gate Park, but then Kidsville accidentally burned it at Burning Man and we haven’t had time to make another. So, we’ll get the plans posted someday.

Maybe now that you’ve seen a Wee-Saw, you can make a better see-saw. Maybe even with less hardware. Go on, we dare you. Ours even adjusts for your child’s risk tolerance…

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Playatech – Someday, everything will be plywood

Wee Ones Wanna Rock Too!

A year after we built the Black Rocker and the Wee-Saw, we saw these two rockers for wee ones in “Nomadic Furniture 2”. At first we ignored them because you have to glue them together. But then we realized the Black Rocker and the Wee-Saw actually use fasteners – horrors! So we decided to tell everyone about these two – which together we call the Wee Rock Two for obvious reasons.

Playatech – Not Just For Grown-Ups Anymore

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It’s Not All Fun and Games

Sometimes we need to get spiritual even in the midst of the greatest party on earth. Usually that means hands and knees on the playa, but not anymore! Now you can stand up to crystals, buddha, or whatever your crown chakra desires, because Playatech has created an altar.

Not just any altar – a two-level wedding cake style altar table in the round, so everyone can worship in a different direction. Just our style, something for every religion and then some.

We’ll get around to posting plans for it sometime, but until then, visit Silicon Village and pray you find the Altar so you can learn the secrets of Mt. Olympus.

To preview plans, click on the plan images. To donate and download full plans, use “add to cart” for the full Playatech experience.

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Playatech – Someday Everything Will Be Plywood

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Introducing Our New Division, Coffintech

Yes, the friendly Goth vampires at the Blood Vessel project asked us to create a coffin. They plan to collect notes to the departed that get folded up into origami cranes, and burned in the coffin at the Temple on Sunday at BM07. We almost died laughing, and then we said “why not?!”

Think about it – when you get buried, everything rots but the screws holding the coffin together. How eco-unconcious can you get! You messed up the planet by living here, so the least you can do is leave no trace when you’re dead. Now it’s easy, with the Goffin!

We think coffins that don’t screw you are so cool we might start a new division to mass produce them. We don’t mind if our customers are dead, since no one pays us anyway! So why not build one today, just in case? It will make a great conversation piece for now, and once you need it, you won’t have time to play with power tools.

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Playatech Has Something For Every Body: Even Yours

As Ordained By Her Excellency: The Rack that Saves Your Back

Our friend Dragi originally built this cool Playatech style bike rack for his BM05 camp, and all we got was a picture featuring our very own VP of Branding and Chief Hottie, Glimmer.

We figured you could make one without plans, and even if not, Glimmer’s worth her own web page.

But then for the American Dream in 2008, the Honorable Harley K. Dubois, Commissioner of the Kingdom, sent word to Playatech that the Kingdom had need of a bike rack design to be ordained for use by all of the Noblepersons’s palaces. And thus, Playatech endeavored to improve upon the initial design, resulting in a set of plans formally delivered to Her Excellency, and contained upon this site. In service of the King, Her Excellency’s bike jack is the best rack in the Kingdom, and consumes exactly one sheet of precious wood.

The plywood revolution has begun – what has your palace done to obsolete IKEA lately?

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Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it collapse.

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Playatech Turns Another Camp Headache Into Art!

Our lovely friend and supporter Dilicious created this really cool can crusher for our camp using Playatech assembly methods. We’re hoping she’ll see this and send us the plans, but in the meantime, here are some pix and figure it out yourself.

Just another Playatech way to leave no trace of your camp…for everything else, have you seen our lighters??!!

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Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it disappear…

The World’s Most Puzzling Shade Structure

Playatech’s secret labs have combined our radical slotted plywood technology with the age-old Lincoln Log construction approach. No kidding!

We’re now offering a real purty peaked roof Plazebo made from 100% plywood and assembled like a giant 3D puzzle, using no fasteners. You might have seen a couple at a major playa installation in The Future. Destructive testing was spectacularly completed 9/3/06 on the biggest burn platform in Black Rock City…

If we can make them large enough, we’re taking on the portable garage industry! Until then, they make great homeless shelters.

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Playatech – We Have A Way With Slots

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The World’s first bleachers that seat no spectators, and leave no trace

Playatech’s secret R&D labs have developed a collapsible plywood bleacher module that lifts 12 or more burners above the crowd. This unique system lifts burners more compactly than an art car with less obtrusive crap blocking others, it can’t run you over, it is made from sustainable resources, and it only costs about $10 per user!

Before the burn, place it in front of your camp with a “Spectators” sign and watch as they gather to jeer at participants. Then set it up on the playa to watch the big burns!

After Man fall, each Leave No Bleachers module may be placed in front of the fire and flipped into the embers to feed the flames. This ensures those in the bleachers are the only members of the audience that AREN’T spectators. How cool is that?!! Alternatively, Leave No Bleachers may be reused by installing them post-event at the Gerlach baseball stadium.

Just another radical peek into the future, from Playatech. Someday, everything will be plywood…

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Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it collapse.

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The World’s Only Wooden Playawear!

Playatech is proud to offer the world’s first wooden trashion for playa hotties.

At BMO5, our Playakini debut stopped traffic all over Black Rock City, and the resulting chorus of “nice coconuts” could be heard all the way in Gerlach. But these aren’t coconuts; they are wood knockers! Now you know where they got the old saw about knocking on wood for a happy future…

The Playakini and our other wooden trashion products are available in any size from DD to FU, by special order only. That means we ain’t got no plans to share. Ever heard of a French clothing designer sharing its plans? We didn’t think so!

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Playatech – Someday Everything Will Be Plywood

The Ultimate Connector

Are you kidding??!!! If you want a screw, look under your RV! Playatech is known worldwide for its innovative approach to furniture design that requires no screws or other fasteners. But we love software! So here are some images of Playa Screws – the ultimate connector. If you’d like to know how to make a Playa Screw yourself, ask someone real nicely:)

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Get Met On Playatech…

The Magic Lies In What Children Make Of It

Playatech is pleased to share its Magic Play House, in honor of our favorite right of passage: raising children. We realize many of you have not been there (yet) but we want you as ready as Mary Poppins when they arrive. Or at least as ready to support magic.

The Magic Play House is a complete play structure for young children that can be arranged as a play house, fort, theatre stage, puppet show gallery, or countless other uses. It compares to petrochemical toys like Burning Man does to TV, by enabling a natural, minimalist canvas inviting inspiration and imagination to instigate magical play. In true Playatech style, it is made from exactly one sheet of plywood with virtually no scrap. And you really can fit two in the trunk of a 3 Series BMW. Just add some silks or other fabric and play clips for a complete virtual structure experience

For the cost of a commercial plastic playhouse, any parent can now provide their kids a more creative and sustainable solution made from $30 of wood – and still afford the power tools for making it. That’s financial magic. So build a Playatech Magic Playhouse for your kids right now with a whoosh of your wand, before they get too old to believe in dragons and fairies.

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Playatech – Putting The Playa To Play In Parenting

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Having Your Hundred Closest Friends Over For Dinner?

In 2010, Feed The Artists asked to come over for dinner. With 100 artists. And they wanted tables for floor seating. So we designed a commemorative table just for them, made from just (go figure) one sheet of 3/4″ plywood! Then we built a dozen, added 100 pillows, and burned our logo into the table-tops – voila, table service for 100 radical creatives! A dozen can fit in the under-storage of a modern RV, and they work at 15″ or 27″ height – try that IKEA!

Get the ply that’s sanded on both sides for this easy project. And don’t try to cook dinner for this many artists yourself. That took more work than furnishing the whole dining hall…

Playatech – When Art Calls Home, We Answer The Phone

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Dust Off And Get Your Act Together!

After years of building seating, beds, storage, bars, and lots of strange things to burn, we decided to put on a show. For kids, which precluded dancing on our bars. So we needed a stage! Here is an easy peasy one…

The Simple Stage is a 4’x8′ stage surface made from one sheet of 3/4″ plywood painted flat black (or stage black if you’re rich). The support structure is made from exactly one more sheet of 4×8 ply for a 1′ high Simple Stage, or use our bonus Easy Riser design to make your Simple Stage 2′ high using two sheets for the support structure.

Either way, each Simple Stage may be used by itself, or as a modular part of a larger stage – just make some little connectors with two slots, and make slots in the outboard support risers to connect Simple Stages any way you want.

Simple Stages and Easy Risers ship flat & palletized as a 4×8 stack. At just 4 cubic feet and ~100lbs per module (for 1′ tall), they offer a perfect solution for any rapidly deployable performance situation.

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Playatech – When You Hear Us Knockin’, It’s Time For Rockin’

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Special Order For The Almighty’s Empathy Oasis!

In 2012 we got a special order for a very special purpose: to raise up the throne in God’s Empathy Oasis – where God answers calls from a Talk To God Phone in a remote phone booth, to anonymously provide mere mortals with purpose and direction.

We had to create something special of course!

So we made this 12′ diameter octagonal stage, from 7.5 sheets of ply. On this we raised the throne, and God held court there with some angels, and God said, “let there be Burning Man”. And so it was…

The plans aren’t too polished for this one, but you ought to get the idea if you’ve made Playatech before. Just use some simple hardware to secure the stage surface to the support structure, or you might fall from God’s graces …

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Playatech – Yes, There Really Is A Stairway To Heaven

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Whatever Happens On Playa, Stays On Playa…

Way back in about 2006, our friend Soundman modified a Black Rock Bar to add a raised sign panel, mounted a couple whiteboards, and called it the Whatever Booth.

Brilliant! Anyone who wanted to radically participate or express can define the booth’s purpose with markers, get behind it, and light up some silly magic. Oh what fun it is…

We found a couple pictures, and figured it is worth its own page. We don’t have any formal plans for it, but if you can build a Black Rock Bar, you can probably figure out how to make this yourself. You will need to slightly modify the bar top with two slots, and relieve the rear support to accept the risers. Also make two ~6”x4’ risers with slots near their bottoms that slot into the bar top and fit against the side supports. Then add a 4’x1’ board on top slotted to the risers. Mount the whiteboards however you want – we can’t think of everything! 

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Playatech – The Playa’s #1 Way To Make Whatever

For our UniFire extravaganza at BM13, we needed a 24’x12’ fire performance stage. We could have made a bunch of Simple Stage modules and slotted them together, but we wanted to make an enlarged OctoStage with angled corners instead. Why? Cause it seemed cooler!

The OctoStage design appeared too complex to extend, so Sunshine radically simplified things into a modular repeating pattern that could extend to any size stage. Then complicated things again by adding a rear step for performers and a space under the front for a subwoofer.

The result became the MegaStage. It can easily be made 1’, 2’, or 4’ high – we chose 2’ to limit wood costs. It took a bunch of folks a day to fabricate but on-playa, it slid together in about 1.5 hours with 3 people – numbering every part helped. Except for a few warped areas, we skipped installing the planned “L” brackets at the ends of the support boards because they weren’t needed. We screwed the stage surface to the supports in a few places, and voila! A MegaStage that can take hard wear, using hardly any hardware – for less money than renting a conventional stage.

The fire performers rocked it BTW…

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Playatech – Turning Industrial Art Into Performance Art One Fire At A Time

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