Things With Strings

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...

After the success of Pete's Bazz Fuss  I figured it was my own turn. I've only ever used stripboard in the past, but wanted to have a go at building a circuit on perfboard instead, so wanted to choose something relatively simple for a first go. The circuit I chose was the EHX™Muff Fuzz™ which despite it's name os more of an overdrive than a fuzz type effect. I drew up my own perfboard layout as below, taking care to make sure the components could be connected easily when soldering. Soldering up was relatively painless, and I was quite please with the neatness. You can see from the pic below that it is a mirror image of the layout above. I used 2N5088's for the transistors and 1N60P for the diodes. The picture below shows the component side of the board prior to shortening the transistor legs.  It worked pretty much straight away to my relief, and sounded OK, so I boxed it up in a 1590A sized box (always a painful process) and here is the f...

Delayed first by bird table, and then by the flu (not bird flu), I wanted to get back to some building. I took some measurements from one of my son's ukulele's and drew up some sketches for the banjolele in order to get the dimensions for the neck, and got to work on the build. First off, I cut off and cleaned up a piece of mahogany that I had. It's probably not real mahogany, just something in the same family. The piece I cut off was about 19" x 2.5" x 1.5" cleaned up neck blank Next, I made a jig for the table saw that would allow me to cut a scarf joint at a 15 degree angle for the headstock. I wanted this cut to be clean, so I put a decent Freud blade in the table saw. It actually turned out pretty good. 15 degree scarf joint jig Then it was time for the glue-up. This was a bit tricker than it looked, as it really wanted to move around when it was clamped, but I managed it in the end. neck and head clamped together Another 24 ...

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 ...