Things With Strings

When ripping thin slices of wood, it's a lot safer to have a zero-clearance insert in the table saw as it prevents the thin slices from getting sucked down inside the saw an possibly jamming the blade. Whilst out running around Christmas time, I spotted a piece of UPVC cladding that had obviously blown of the back of a truck and was littering the countryside. I thought at the time that it might be useful for making a table saw insert and made a mental note to go back for it which I did a few days later. Clean up the countryside and do a bit of recycling, how's that for a bit of good citizenship? It had suffered a bit of damage as it had bounced off the road, and it was pretty filthy, but it still had the protective plastic on it in places, and it was a fair sized chunk. UPVC cladding Here is the insert I made (white) by tracing around the original one (yellow). You can see the difference in the width of the slot that the saw blade comes through. UPVC zero-clearance...

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 ...

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 ...