ELECTRIC GUITAR PROJECT part 17

This guitar is gonna get finished even if it kills me! In the last episode I finally got the electronics figured out. Now I'm going to start cutting notches in the body to hold the electronics.

I traced out the size of the pickup where I wanted it in the body, and then I stepped it out a little bigger to give the pickup some wiggle room.

The screw shank is just under 7/8" long, so a 1" deep notch should work fine and give me comfortable room for wires too.

Since the body is 1 1/2" thick I have 1/2" to spare. That's good!

I put tape on my drill bits at the 1" mark so I wouldn't drill too deep. I measured from where the 1" diameter started, not the center points that extended out.

Oh oh! The center points are 1/2" long. That's bad. That means the tips of these bits will just penetrate through the back side of the body. This means I need to stop drilling a smidgen before I get to the 1" tape mark.

I tried hog-drilling this notch out in my shop on the drill press, but my tiny drill press didn't have a long enough reach. Instead I just used a hand drill back in the house, right there in the living room. I had to hurry and get all this drilling done while Mei was at work.

Here's what it looked like after I drilled out as much as I could.

The rest was cut out by hand with a flat chisel.

Tada! It ain't the most beautiful notch in the world, but none of it will be seen once the pickup's plate covers all the edges.

When I drop the pickup into the notch I have good depth, and breathing room on the sides. Even though I couldn't go the full 1" depth with this notch, the plate which holds the pickup will also have some thickness which will raise the pickup a little more. At the pickup's lowest setting I should have roughly 1/4" of space underneath for wiring. That's plenty.

Now to get rid of the evidence before Mei gets home. Trust me, you do NOT want to experience the wrath of a mad Chinese woman.

We're babysitting on the weekends. This is MeiMei. She's 2 1/2 years old. I call her Hurricane MeiMei. After a couple hours I didn't even recognize my house. She got into EEEEEVERYTHING. Every room, every door, every drawer, every toothpaste tube, every glass ornament, every button on every appliance. Every. Tiny. Little. Thing.

Days later I'm still finding evidence of her being here. My clocks were set to new individual times and my guitars were all tuned to new experimental half-half tone chords. I noticed I was getting very warm today and I looked at the thermostat and found MeiMei had fiddled with the dial until it was 10 or 15 degrees higher.
In this picture you see her playing with a potato chip bag clip. At one point I saw it clipped to my dog Lucy's ear, and Lucy was having a fit trying to get it off. When I looked back at MeiMei she was sitting watching cartoons as if nothing had happened. She's adorable though, so even when she's doing the most evil thing in the world it's difficult to say NO to her. It's like her super power.

PICTURE FOR THE KIDS

Print it and color it. See what Your kids can do with it. If it's anything particularly odd or frightening send me a scan of the handiwork.

OLD LOST DRAWING

I found these while digging through some old folders. That's supposed to be Donald Trump in the middle.

ELECTRIC GUITAR PROJECT part 16

Presenting Part 16 of my ongoing guitar-building saga. In the last episode we saw things actually happening again after a long hiatus. Here's a pickup wiring diagram I found on the Seymour Duncan website. I really like his easy diagrams. As you can see from this picture, most of the work is going to be soldering all the wires to the the Volume knob.

It's easiest for me to think of this as 3 separate components rather than a whole chunk of spiderwebby wires going everywhere.

First I soldered 22 gage wires to the Volume knob exactly like the diagram showed me. It's messy but.... well, it's messy. The key to soldering is to heat the component rather than the solder. Once the component is hot enough the solder will flow onto it. That makes a better bond.

It's dangerous when soldering electronics because you don't want to fry the component with too much heat. Some guys use a heat-sink, like an alligator clip attached to the wire to suck off some of the heat. In this case, I had to solder directly to the Volume knob's metal housing and there was no way around heating it up. I just had to hope I didn't cook it too much at this point.

Then I soldered wires to the 2 leads on the jack, and since the pickup wires were too short I lengthened those. All of these wires are extra long for now because I really don't know how long they need to be yet. I skinned to opposite tips of all these wires so I could temporarily hand-twist them together and test everything. Later they'll have to come back apart since I need to thread all the individual pieces through the body of the guitar, into their respective places. I'll be able to shorten the wires as well at that point.

Here I've hand-twisted everything together the way it showed in the above diagram, and I plugged it into the amp.

Here's what no signal looks like in the Audacity recording software.

Then when I turned the volume knob and tapped on the Pickup with a metal object I got a good strong signal. It worked! I didn't fry anything internally with that soldering iron! Yay!

The next step will be routing slots in the body to hold these components. That's gonna have to wait a few more weeks until I can go back to work, since I don't have the right tools here at home. I guess I could drill and chisel out the slots. Maybe I'll do that. I'm thinking out loud.

Here's a picture of my dog Lucy standing next to my house for size comparison. Next year I'm gonna have to do something about that porch carpeting. I don't think it's gonna be very fun.

This is a picture Bob took from back when he babysat her for a while. She doesn't look pleased.

Here's Lucy looking at the mail man.

ELECTRIC GUITAR PROJECT part 15

It seems like it's been quite a while since I worked on this guitar, but actually I never stopped. The last post was back in July.

I decided a while back I only wanted 1 pickup and 1 volume knob. I didn't want a tone because I never mess with that anyway. I always set the tone with the amp, or through the EQs when I record something.

I've been reading books and searching the internet for months, and I couldn't find a wiring diagram for one pickup/one volume anywhere. I was starting to think I'd have to just start touching wires to different contacts until I got a signal. In the past I made a guitar with one pickup and no volume or tone knobs. That was very simple. There were 2 wires coming out of the pickup, and there were 2 contacts on the jack. There was no way to mess it up.

Adding in a volume knob confused me because instead of it having just 2 contacts there were 3. That increased the possibilities to all kinds of chances of getting it wrong. 2 contacts on the jack, 2 on the pickup and then 3 on the volume knob add up to 1 worrisome headache. One thing I do know about wiring a guitar pickup: if you don't get it right, even if you do get a sound, if it isn't wired properly there will be lots of annoying buzzy white noise which will come and go as you touch the strings.

After about giving up I found Seymour Duncan's website, and he has wiring diagrams for pretty much any guitar pickup situation you'd ever wanna try. (I realize some guys are gonna take that as a challenge. He doesn't have wiring diagrams for use with roadkill or vegetables or exotic things like that.)

The thing I really like about his diagrams is he doesn't mess with those mysterious electronic symbols; he just draws a picture of the actual component. When you see his diagrams you can't do anything but get it right the 1st time.

Here is a Halloween picture from yesterday. That's my niece and nephew Mimi and Moe. Recently they helped me record a song and they did it perfectly. I needed them to say 3 different lines, and they had to be on beat and clear.
I'm off work for 6 weeks and I've been seeing how long and grubby I can grow my beard before I have to go back. So far it's about this grubby. This is 3 weeks worth.

DUNE BUGGY

About 4 or 5 years ago I bought a dune buggy. I didn't know what I was getting in to. It had a few problems (I thought) and I figured I'd have it up and running by turning a couple screws. Boy, was I wrong. I found out to make it street legal in Indiana it needed a 2 page list of things, like bumpers, seat belts, emergency brakes, speedometer, roll bar, horn, turn signals, mirrors, etc....

I don't know anything about cars or motors or metal work. It made me sick to my stomach to think about it all. Fortunately my wife Mei knew Lee, a custom car guy who came to eat at her restaurant all the time.

Lee says these are called ghost flames. They show up and then disappear depending how the light hits them. The photos make this paint look purplish, but the color is more of a blood red in real life. First it got painted silver, and then it got a transparent red sprayed over the silver. Lee says that's called a candy color, and it changes tones as you move your head to view it. It's pretty danged cool.

The dash is tiny and there wasn't enough room to put the speedometer in there without it bumping your knees when you try to drive, so Lee put a scoop in the hood and mounted the speedometer outside on the hood. It's all waterproofed too.

There's a little cap just behind the speedometer to get to the fluids. Before, if you wanted to get to the fluids you'd just have to take off the car's entire shell. That would have been a nightmare.

It's not all that visible in this picture, but Lee put diamond plate on the running boards. Before they were just fiberglass, and people stepped on them so much they had cracked and were flapping loose. Now they have that on top and a metal skeleton underneath.

He also put a trunk lid on it. That way the engine is accessible without having to remove the entire shell. He made metal gallery walls too, but they aren't attached yet. When they're put on it, this will be like a little truck and I'll be able to haul small things back here.



This is a 1968 VW bug engine. Besides all the body work, Lee also had to get the motor working again. There were missing plugs and shorts and other strange problems.

Still a mess, but it's getting there.

That red thing in the center is an "AHH-OOO-Ga!" horn, and it's loud. He set it off and both Mei and I about peed in our pants.

This is the shifter knob. There's Mei in the background.

Behind the passenger's seat there's a lid.

You can open it to get to the battery. Again, it's nice knowing I won't have to remove the entire shell to get to something.
This is Lee holding up the grill he cut out to show me what it'll look like. Before it was just a solid closed in fiberglass panel. The air needs to be able to blow through to cool the oil or something. I can't remember what it cools. It wasn't the radiator since VWs don't have radiators. I believe it's the oil. You can see what it cools if you look back up 4 pictures. Whatever that is, that's what needs air.
Lee says there's still a lot more work to do on it, but it's shaping up very well. He said after this job he's retiring. It's killing me to wait for it to be finished. It was a big ol' mess when he started. He's worked miracles on it.

JOHNSON-SMITH NOVELTY CO. HORROR RECORD WITH ANIMATION

"BLOOD BROOD" FAKE MOVIE POSTER

Here's a poster for an imaginary movie. It's based on a nightmare I had so I actually have a germ of a plot for this movie too. I wrote out what happened in the nightmare, so if I fill it out a bit I'll have a script to go along with this poster.


Originally I just drew one ghost face, like this.


Then I copied it to make a set of 3, and mirrored it for a reflection. A long time ago I jotted down in a note book how BLOOD spells BrOOD upside down in a mirror, if you use a lower case "r." That seemed like it went well with this idea, so I stuck that in there.


I liked the black and white version above, but I was curious to see how it looked in a bloodier color.


It was difficult for me to decide whether I liked the B&W or bloody version best, so I elected to use a mixture of both colors. I used red for the water they are rising from. That satisfied me because it explained why the word was being reflected. Then I added all the silly text and it was done. This is a clean version of the 1st picture, without all the chips and folds and browning on the edges.

Sometimes I wonder if the fake aging process is a bad thing to do. It's popular nowadays to make things look like they're 50 years old with all the fake computer trickery. I wonder if that's gonna be odd in another 100 years.

People will see a bunch of fake antique images people created from this decade, and they'll look old, but they'll really be old, but they'll look older than they are. Will that be confusing? At that point it'll already look old naturally, but no one will trust it. I wonder if they're create a new word for this phenomena, like "genuine pre-antique" or something like that.