Things With Strings

My banjo building plans got delayed over the past few weeks, because I've been making a bird-table for my parents as a Christmas present. We were not to happy with what we could find for the money commercially, so my wife suggested I build one for them. I saw it as an opportunity to learn a bit about using my new table saw and also get rid of some scrap wood that was littering the place. It's made from an old fence post, bit's of my old shed etc. Although I did purchase a sheet of plywood to use for the table itself. It can be separated into three parts for easy transportation: legs, pole, top. I think it looks OK. I hope they will like it when they see it later today. The bird table

I know you are probably thinking that this topic has no connection to what this blog is about, and you would be correct. However, it was such a trial finding any information for me that I decided I needed to document it somewhere. Here is the problem. I have a Sony Bravia TV (Model KDL-42W829B), and I also have a First Generation Apple TV. Both of there used to provide the ability to show YouTube content, but earlier this year Google changed the YouTube API and consequently both of the aforementioned devices could not longer play the videos (now appears to work again on the TV, see update below). update 26-Dec-15: although I swear blind that when I tried the YouTube app on my Bravia TV did not work yesterday, and brief research on the net informed me that it was no longer supported, when I came to try it again today it worked!!! When I looked at the settings for the Bravia TV, I noticed that it supported Screen Mirroring over WiFi with Miracast  and it also seemed that the Moto

I need to get some wood flattened and squared, and I don't have access to a planer or jointer, so what do I do? Answer: YouTube! I searched around, and found this great idea for a flattening jig from the ingenious Izzy Swan. I really like his no-nonsense approach, and he has some great ideas. So I made a SketchUp model of my interpretation of Izzy's jig. I'm a novice with SketchUp, so creating the model was a learning exercise in itself,  but here its is in all it's glory. SketchUp model of flattening jig The dimensions are my own, and are a bit of guesswork loosely constrained by what pieces of 3/4" plywood I had available. Let's see how it turns out in reality. Edit: I made it as pictured, but it didn't turn out too good (my fault), so I scrapped it, and made a better one, which is still not perfect, but is OK for now. I have some ideas how I can improve what I made further.

Since I made the DIY table saw a few weeks back from my old circular saw, I realised two things:- What a useful tool a table saw is What severe limitations my home built one had. The man issues I discovered were as follows:- The blade was too small. The blade in a circular saw is usually of a smaller diameter than that of a true table saw, and as such not as much protrudes above the table. This seriously limited the depth of cut I could make. Raising and lowering the blade was a major pain in the ass. The accuracy of cut was not great So, I bit the bullet and bought a real one. The DIY table saw is now officially retired!

I'm moving things forward very slowly on the banjo making front, but as long as I'm doing something that will contribute to the overall goal, that's OK. So I've been re-sawing some wood (with mixed success) and stuff, and I also made a planer jig for my router (didn't work out too good). Today I thought I'd have a go at cutting some circles in MDF with my router. At some point, I'm going to need these when getting the pot/rim circular, so I made a simple jig for my router. Basically, it's piece of plywood, to which the router is screwed, and there are holes drilled for pivot points into which I insert a nail. There are loads of videos of how to make much more professional versions of this type of jig on youtube, so there's not much point me going into further details.  The first problem I noticed was that on my el-cheapo router, you have to keep the trigger pressed with your finger whilst operating it, this meant some hand switching when turning

Yes, I know I'm not the first person to make one of these, and I certainly won't be the last. When I started making the banjo block rim the other week, I quickly realised that it would have been a whole lot easier if the wood was at least a little bit square to start with, so I figured that before I made any more it would be nice to have a table saw to square up the source material. Naturally I didn't really want to go out and buy one if I was only going to use it every blue moon so I decided to put my old circular saw and some scrap wood to good use and build my own. The picture below show the finished article, complete with fence. The stand is from a broken old workmate-a-like I had lying around, the top is from some kitchen cabinet material as is the fence. I added a safety NVR switch, because it's dangerous enough as it is, and I didn't want to add further risks. Anyway, enough of that, here are the pictures DIY table saw circular saw mounting

Following on from yesterdays woodpile , I thought I'd have a go at cutting some sections that can eventually be formed in to a banjo pot. The idea is to build the rim in circular layers with each layer initially being formed from sections of an octagon. To do this, in theory, you just set the mitre saw to 22.5 degrees and cut out sections of the desired length. In practice, it's never quite as easy as it sounds and it was not a complete success, mainly because my source material was not square, so getting a tight fit between segments was difficult, however, it was my first time, and I learned a few things in the process, and I've still got all ten digits remaining on my hands, so I'll just put it down to experience. Anyway, my plan is to build two banjos at the same time, or more precisely, a 5-string banjo for me, and a banjo ukulele (or banjo uke, ukulele banjo, banjolele or whatever) for my son. And since he's getting it for nothing, I figured I'd experimen

A couple of years ago we had some paving done at home and the crates/pallets that the flags were delivered in looked to be made of some sort of hardwood, which one of the builders said he'd been told was mango wood. That sounded interesting, so I spent a few hours (many hours actually) disassembling the pallets and removing the nails, then I stacked the wood up in my garage and it's been there ever since. Well, today the weather was fine, and I decided to start planing some of it up to see if any of it could be of use to start building a banjo. So far it's been a bit hit and miss (mostly miss) and it's pretty poor stuff, but there is a lot of it, and I think I'll be able to find decent stuff in there. The planing came to an abrupt halt though when the drive belt on my electric planer bust, so I didn't get much done, although I did create a ton of wood shavings and a fair bit of firewood. A new drive belt has been ordered, so watch this space!

Buoyed by the success of last month's " Chafer Drive ", I've been busy drawing up layouts for a few more small effects that I want to build, and first up is a tribute to the " Shin Ei Companion Fuzz FY-2 ". This was a Japanese fuzz pedal made in the 1970's and is generally well-regarded in the DIY effects community for it's classic fuzz tones. The original came in a large wedge shaped box, but my plan was to squeeze it into a Hammond 1590A  just as I did with the " Chafer Drive ". This was undoubtedly going to be more challenging, since (a) the circuit is larger, and (b) it has two control knobs as opposed to one. I had some standard 25 x 9 stripboard  which I thought would be ideal for this purpose, so I challenged myself to layout the circuit with that in mind. The original circuit use some obscure  2SC536 transistors (Hfe 160-560) that were no longer manufactured,  but I had a whole bunch of 2SC1685  (Hfe 160-460) transistors that I

Still on holiday from work, but my back is on the mend thankfully. I've been tinkering with another pedal (more to come) and it's a bit of a strange one. It has an unusual switching mechanism which means that it's not bypassed in the usual way. I'd heard others report that this effect suffered volume loss when engaged, but my breadboarded circuit suffers from volume loss when in the signal path, engaged or otherwise. In fact, the volume difference between on/off states is negligible in my case. I wanted to try a few things, and one was whether buffering the effect would make any difference. So I conjured up an idea to make a plug-able buffer that I could use for this purpose now and in the future when breadboarding circuits. The circuit I used was the bi-polar transistor buffer circuit  described in the link, and here is what my finished item looked like. plug-in buffer In the end, this particular circuit didn't benefit from the addition of a buffer, but

Today I was on holiday from work, but I'd also done some thing to my back that meant once I sat down, I was in danger of not being able to stand up again, and my intentions to go out on my bike and put some miles in were well and truly scuppered. So to keep myself active, and in a standing position, I decided to prepare a couple of boxes in advance. These were  1590A  size boxes and I was preparing them for some effect that will have a single control. First I printed out templates which I downloaded from madbeanpedals.com  and taped these to the boxes. Then I used a centre-punch to mark the location of each hole I wanted to drill in order to guide the drill. enclosures with drill templates and tools In the picture above, you can see the two enclosures with drilling templates attached, together with a centre-punch, a couple of step drill-bits and a 3mm drill-bit for the LED. And here is what a box looks like once it's been centre-punched. enclosure with ce

Background I was talking to my brother-in-law last December and mentioned that I was hoping to re-ignite my electronics hobby, mainly with the intention of building myself some guitar effect pedals. A month later, my brother and sister-in-law kindly gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday (always appreciated), so I had the idea that come his birthday, I would repay the gift with a boutique, hand-made effect pedal. And so the story of the "Chafer Drive" begins. I thought a simple overdrive (mild distortion) with a single control knob fitted into the smallest possible enclosure would be appropriate, and it would be named the "Chafer Drive" because that, coincidentally, is his surname. The name has a triple meaning though, since a Chafer is a variety of beetle, and there is a party-game called a Beetle Drive , so we have Chafer - Beetle - Over - Drive, get it? Never mind! I though I'd also document the whole build process too, so he (any anyone else who

OK, what's this got to do with guitars and stuff? Well I've made a couple of DIY effect pedals in the past, and it's something I've been intending to do again once I'd got a bit more free time. This time I've decided I won't be inhaling those nasty fumes from my soldering activities! I was looking at my ever increasing scrap heap of old parts when I had an idea to convert an old computer power supply into a solder fume extractor. The idea being to remove all the internals (salvaging useful parts of course) leaving just the fan, then hook up a DC power source add a switch and pack the space inside with filter material. Pretty easy project really. One thing to note was I had to reverse the fan because it was blowing air out initially and I wanted the reverse. It's  amazing what stuff you find inside. Here are just a few of the salvaged parts some of the salvaged parts I added a DC jack where the power cord used to be. DC jack for wallwart