As he worked, someone banged at his door. Walking over, he discovered it was two friends in a truck with an unannounced obtainium delivery — a dozen castoff wooden palettes.

Distracted from his distraction, Mr. Hackett hauled the palettes through his shop and into the backyard, where he tossed them in a pile for future use. He has no heat in his apartment (he lives upstairs), and burns palettes in his wood-burning stove.

Naturally, he made the stove himself.

TALL, hulking, dreadlocked, perpetually dressed in a black shirt, black pants, black boots and a black jacket, Mr. Hackett has a distinctive physical presence. His nose is scarred (a spring-loaded automobile shock once ripped off one of his nostrils), and so is his jaw. (A “confetti gun” he made exploded in his face eight years ago, the start of an ordeal that ultimately involved the emergency room, the Police Department’s bomb squad and 65 days on Rikers Island.)

Never far from a pack of Marlboro Reds (he no longer drinks or snorts cocaine, but remains “binge-y,” he says, on nicotine and coffee), Mr. Hackett looks a little like a Marxist guerrilla on leave from military operations working as a roadie in a reggae band. In fact, he is the product of a quintessentially New York marriage: his mother, Raymonde, came from an educated Haitian family and emigrated during the reign of Francois Duvalier, while his father, James, came from an Irish family of long standing in Manhattan. (“Famine Irish,” Mr. Hackett says, “not Troubles Irish.”)

Both his parents were schoolteachers, which may begin to account for his autodidactic nature. Raised in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, and then in Westchester County, Mr. Hackett once brewed his own batch of napalm as a boy and later applied himself to the study of what he called “Reagan administration hardcore,” picking up his D.I.Y. ethic and one of his favorite maxims, “Don’t rage against the machine; build a better machine,” from punk bands like the Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front.

In December 1998, his parents died when a kerosene heater caught fire in their home in Jefferson Valley, N.Y. Mr. Hackett was living at the time on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, working in the city’s then-thriving, but soon-to-wilt, technology sector, at a well-paying job he didn’t care for. “It was the dot-com boom,” he said. “All I could think was, ‘You’re going to pay me how much to go to meetings?’ ”

With his share of his parents’ estate — he has two sisters: one lives on Long Island, the other in Manhattan — Mr. Hackett bought the building he now lives and works in. A few years earlier, he had gone to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, and is still astonished by the gunplay he had seen, the bacchanalian fireworks and the flame-spewing robots manufactured by groups like Survival Research Laboratories, a machine art collective based in San Francisco.