Skip to main content

The banjo neck part #2 - the mistake revealed

Before I get onto anything banjo related, I have to say how sad it was to hear of the death of David Bowie this morning. One of life's true originals, the world has lost one of it's most colourful characters.

In part 1 I said I'd made a big mistake that would be revealed when I took the clamps off. When I cut the scarf joint, I somehow (goodness knows how) made a mis-calculation on where to start the cut. I think it's because I was trying to build in a margin for error, so didn't follow my drawing, and instead of a margin for error I just got an error. Pretty embarrassing for a guy with a degree in mathematics eh?

Anyway, here is the unclamped piece, prior to clean-up.

clamps removed
Did you spot it? The headstock is too short (aaarrrggghhhh). Here is a close-up.

the stubby headstock
However, I realised after a few minutes of cursing, that it's actually not too bad at all, because correspondingly, the neck part is too long, and the headstock needs to be reduced in depth anyway, so I can fix both of these with a cut like this...

slice to be removed
First it will need cleaning up, which will have to wait until the weekend.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

Things went all fuzzy

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...