Hack yer Skyaak

Dylan holding his chrome-decalled Skyaak. See the G-Force Pods?








I visited my friends Jesse and Dylan Cooke in Saskatoon last week and Dylan mentioned that he had a really cool idea to retrofit his Skyaak. ( ie: hack) He had previously painted a bit of glow-in-the dark paint on a wooden box and after some time the paint had lost its luminescence. He discovered that he could restore the glowing property at least temporarily by shining a black light on the area. This lead him to want to try out a black light on his Skyaak. So he removed the back end-cap and shone the light up the Skyaak's butt. We went into a pitch black bathroom and were delighted to see that the rear ring-wing lit up like crazy. The particular plastic that we're using for the wings has a sort of opalescent ( pearly) finish to it and this tends to capture and evenly disperse the light when its inside the rear of the central shaft. The three inner struts of the ring-wing act as light conductors when the light is at the center. Not only that, but we also saw that when the ' g-force pods' travel along their path inside the shaft, they carry the light with them, so that the rear pod appears to be internally lit. The succeeding balls also carry the light but to a lesser degree. The effect fades out as the light migrates from ball to ball.

The effect is quite visually amazing. Each time the balls travel ahead in the shaft, as they do every time it is thrown ( can't deny the gravitational force), they pass quickly through the inside of the foam hand-grip. This action shows where the hand grip is in the dark. Next we will be placing strips of glow-in-the-dark paint at each side of the hand-grip to make it show up even better.

Now Dylan tells me he has trawled around on EBay and found a whole whack of LED lights of various colors as well as wee little batteries and switches so we can offer a hack-in option for all those happy Skyaak-ers out there who might wanna pimp their ride.

We're having way too much fun!



























Dylan poses with his Skyaak pimped out with a ' VIP'
hand-grip and chrome wing decals. Cool!


Dylan gets a lot of credit in my books for maintaining his enthusiasm for this fledgling enterprise. He was one of the very first people to really turn on to the possibilities.

Later, Michael.