The Jiggernaut was a project I recently completed for local design think-tank Mixed Media Engineering. They first came to my attention when I read a story about the 2011 Red Bull Creation Contest, or “buildathon”, or whatever it’s called. They competed as “1.2 Jigawatts”, and built this thing:

It’s sort of a big hamster wheel that receives text messages and prints them out on the pavement while somebody is walking inside it. It stole the show and won first prize. Needless to say, when I found out these guys were from Minneapolis I had to look them up, congratulate them on their win.

Then last spring I noticed they had an interesting Kickstarter project going called the  Jiggernaut, a bicycle frame building tool which looks like this:

They needed 100 sets of parts, so I ordered up a unit of “door grade” 3/4″ MDF. Door grade is a premium quality MDF which is stronger, cuts cleaner, and causes less wear on the tools used to cut it. A unit is a big stack (in this case 35 sheets) which looks like this:

Since Each Jiggernaut requires 26 parts, those sheets of MDF quickly turned into a lot of pieces:

And a lot of dust and chips. The six bags in the above photo represent 2 days of cutting. It’s great to have a serious industrial grade dust collector!

The tall guy on the right with “torit & day” in white letters is my hero on jobs like this.

This was a fun job. It’s great to think about all those folks who contributed to the project on Kickstarter brazing up their own custom bike frames!