There's a banjo in the woodpile

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!

Comments

Vox Pathfinder 10 and Pathfinder 15 Simulation

I've got a Vox Pathfinder 10 amplifier that I bought a couple of years ago, and I love it. It's a great little amplifier, but I don't care for the distortion channel, it just sounds harsh to my ears. There are quite simple modifications that can be done to this amplifier to remove the clipping LED's and increase the boost of the clean channel (check out Ben Craven's mods for details). I'd been considering doing some of these, but whilst researching the subject, I discovered that the currently out of production (as at Nov '18) Pathfinder 15/15R generally receives a lot more love than the Pathfinder 10. I found schematics for both the PF15 and the PF15R online, and saw that there were a lot of similarities between the PF10 and the PF15, particularly the earlier non-reverb PF15. The PF15R (with reverb) is quite a bit different after the first two opamp stages. I thought I'd model both the PF10 and PF15 pre-amp stages in LTspice to see how they compar

Vox Pathfinder 15 Tremolo Repair

Last year, I snapped up a Vox Pathfinder 15 (non-reverb) combo amplifier from ebay. The seller was a charity shop, and the amplifier was listed as "untested", so I was taking a bit of a gamble, but figured I'd have a good chance of being able to fix it it it wasn't working, and cosmetically, it looked almost mint. When it arrived, I plugged it in, and as you guessed, it was not working. Barely any sound, and what sound there was was horribly distorted. One thin I did notice was the the power on LED was not aligned correctly with the hole in the back panel, so I did quickly took it apart, and realigned the potentiometers and LED indicator, but didn't have a look in detail at the circuit. I put it back together, but the problem remained. My guess was that the problem was the famous "cambridgitis" (just google that term and you'll find all about it). Basically, a problem where the optocoupler that controls the tremolo circuit fails. A common failure

Pete's Bazz Fuss

It's been ages since I built an effects pedal, so to get my soldering chops back up to speed, I decided I'd build a simple fuzz pedal for my long-time friend Pete as a surprise present for his impending birthday. The circuit I chose was the Bazz Fuss (yes that's the correct name) which you can read about here if you care to. I went for the basic v1.0 of the circuit and used a 2N3904 for the transistor, and boxed everything in a 1590A sized enclosure. Despite a number of stupid mistakes that I had to rectify, I got it all done and boxed within a day, complete with lo-fi graphics. Here's a gut-shot. gut-shot And here is the finished item. lo-fi graphic It sounded OK when I played it although it needed the volume knob maxxed out to get the best out of it. Maybe a higher gain transistor would have been better still. I'm pretty sure Pete will like it though.

Things With Strings

Search This Blog