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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

 
Disclaimer: “iSink” is NOT a trademark of a fruit company that sells phones. At least we don’t think so. So “TM Playatech”; it is ours now the minute someone outside CA downloads these plans. If the digital fruit company ever gets into plumbing after self-driving cars, we look forward to having a meeting. At Playatech’s annual users conference and showcase in Black Rock City. On Tutu Tuesday…why not, we met the Defense Department that way once!  
 

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, fluffiescamelbacks 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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