The Stamp Mobile: A Crazy Money Marking Contraption

(machine noise)

Well, the purpose of the StampMobile is to draw attention

to the overall Stamp Stampede Campaign.

(upbeat music)

I think that political change needs to be fun,

you know, we need to do hard, important, serious work

in a way that's enjoyable.

What we're doing here is a service to the nation,

we're adorning dollars, we're beautifying people's bucks,

we're making money talk.

The design was by a gentleman called Allen Rory,

who also did a lot of the fabrication.

In terms of the fabrication, I think one of the key

challenges was all the modules were tested separately,

but when they were all finally put together,

nothing quit worked, you know, everything worked separately,

together, everything had problems, so I think the key

overriding challenge was this idea that as a system,

it wasn't quite there, so we spent a lot of time

figuring out the interactions between the parts,

making sure that everything does work.

Fire it up.

[Gian] What is it made of?

The tracks are plastic, they're kind of a very slippery

plastic that's made for plumbing and have been repurposed.

A lot of hand painted wooden parts, laser cut parts,

there're even parts in there made on a Makerbot,

pulleys, motors, levers, yeah, you name it.

The first thing that you do is that you load a dollar bill

into these platens, those slide along a little plastic

track onto a part of the machine called the spiral lift

that spins them around and raises them up at the same time.

At the top, it releases it, and then it goes down a track,

bumping into the strike plates that trigger

a couple of signs.

The first one says, you know, corporations are not people,

the next moves aside the silhouette of a person to reveal

that it's actually a corporation, then it hits another

striker that opens what we call Mr. Money Mouth,

the platen swings around the curve, and lands under

the stamping mechanism, where it's held in place

while a stamp comes down and prints on the bill,

and then when that's done, it ejects it from the

stamping mechanism and the person who put the bill in

can then get their newly stamped bill back out.

This is monetary jiu jitsu, it's using money to get

money out of politics.

(upbeat music)