Category: General

Hard Shop Lesson

I got a hard les­son deliv­ered today while start­ing a project in the garage this after­noon. I’ll lead in with say­ing that I’m ok (and will heal up fine in a week or so); only a bit rat­tled. Let me start with where my head was (and should­n’t have been) that got me here. 

I’ve had on my “To Do” list for 2019 to learn how to make box joints. Well, here we are into Decem­ber and I’ve not even tried it. I had want­ed to spend last Sat­ur­day work­ing on it, but I let the week­end get away with me with Thanks­giv­ing and Christ­mas dec­o­ra­tions (which are fine and I was glad to get the time I had with all my fam­i­ly). This evening, I had a Cub Scout event with my son in which I was respon­si­ble for bring some audio and video equip­ment (i.e., our home AV receiv­er, speak­ers, and disc play­er). That end­ed up tak­ing a lot longer than I had antic­i­pat­ed. But I had an hour to spare so I fig­ured I’d at least get a jump start on my box joint jig, know­ing all day Sun­day (tomor­row) is going to be busy with oth­er things.

And it’s entire­ly worth under­scor­ing here: this is all arbi­trary pres­sure I’ve put on myself. Absolute­ly no one else cares if I fig­ure out how to make box joints ever, let alone today or even this year. But I had con­vinced myself that I need­ed to rush through the hour to get the table saw jig set up.

I picked out my back­ing board and was look­ing for a piece of scrap that approx­i­mate­ly the same thick­ness as my table saw blade kerf (sim­ply put, that’s the width of the cut that the table saw makes and is frac­tion­al­ly wider than the blade itself). My ini­tial plas­tic piece for the jig end­ed up a big loose the back­ing board, so I want­ed to quick­ly try a dif­fer­ent approach. Mind you, the piece I’m try­ing to cut is less than a 1/4″ thick. So I fig­ured, why not start with a thin off cut and just sand it down to the nec­es­sary thickness? 

My pow­er sander is a com­bi­na­tion of a belt sander and 6″ disc sander. The disc of course will put a twist on any object pushed into it, so a firm grip and just being mind­ful of one side lift­ing and the oth­er push­ing down is impor­tant. I grabbed a long thing piece of scrap and tried sand­ing it on the disc, not think­ing about where my hands would go if (when) it slipped out of my grip. I also failed to put on gloves. You cer­tain­ly do not wear gloves with some pow­er tools (any­thing with a cir­cu­lar spin­ning blade), but they are a good idea with a sander.

The same pow­er sander I have. The disc spins counter-clock­wise. I don’t even have any pho­tos of my own of this pow­er tool!

With­in less than a sec­ond of me push­ing the wood into the disc, it knocked it right out of my hand and left me push­ing my fin­gers into the sand­ing disc. Now, in all the pow­er tools I have, if I had to pick one that I was going to injure myself on, it would prob­a­bly be the pow­er sander. Blades, as you can imag­ine, can quick­ly cut into flesh and cause seri­ous injury or death. I can­not imag­ine sus­tain­ing a life-threat­ing injury on a small pow­er sander like mine (though I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble). But at 3600 rpm, 120 grit sand­pa­per can remove skin and nails quite rapid­ly. Cer­tain­ly faster than my reac­tion time. Before I knew it, my unnec­es­sary rush and lack of think­ing about what I was doing caused me to injure my index and mid­dle fin­gers on my left hand. My mid­dle fin­ger got the skin scraped bad­ly but my index nail is about 1/4″ too short now. And boy howdy is that sen­si­tive skin under there!

Again, it’s noth­ing seri­ous. I was able to turn off the machine and imme­di­ate­ly go treat it myself. My fin­gers are sore but the nail should grow back. Hon­est­ly, it’s the les­son I need­ed to learn. Pow­er tools are not any­thing to be in a rush around. Every action with one requires com­plete focus and atten­tion. I need to always think about how the tool could injure me based on the action the tool makes. Giv­en that I was also using my band saw and table saw today (which, I do take less for grant­ed, to be fair to myself), I’m for­tu­nate that this is the injury I end­ed up with. 

As my kids join me in the shop more, I’ve had to teach them lessons about safe­ty. I’ve even had to warn my son about touch­ing that very sand­ing disc until it comes to a com­plete stop (he thought he should stop it spin­ning one day after I’d killed the pow­er). I even recent­ly watched James Hamil­ton’s (aka, Stumpy Nubs) video on injur­ing him­self with an angle grinder and remarked on the need to pay atten­tion when I’m work­ing. I firm­ly believe that the num­ber one most impor­tant piece of safe­ty equip­ment is your brain. Too bad I failed to put that and my gloves on this after­noon. I’ll do my best to take that les­son to heart from now on.

Family Game Night

We try to have a week­ly fam­i­ly game night. Usu­al­ly, this is a board game or sim­i­lar. The kids know that I have a bunch of old D&D books and are gen­er­al­ly famil­iar with the game. A cou­ple of weeks ago, a new D&D Essen­tials box set was released. This incor­po­rates a new mech­a­nism so that it’s eas­i­er for just 2 or 3 peo­ple to play (the game is typ­i­cal­ly best for 4–6 peo­ple and I don’t have that many kids). So I just off-hand­ed­ly checked that our Tar­get had the box set and asked if the kids want­ed to go with me to get it. I was sur­prised that my daugh­ter and my son were excit­ed to go out after 8pm to pick it up.

Yep, they’re def­i­nite­ly my kids.

They asked to play when we got home, so we stayed up until about 11pm rolling up some char­ac­ters and start­ing out on a first adven­ture (the one includ­ed in this boxed set). They did­n’t get a chance to fight any mon­sters but still seemed to have a good time. They’ve already asked to play again this weekend!

Recycled Tool Stand

Ten years ago — not long after we moved into this house — my younger broth­er and I built a pair of work­bench­es. I designed a “tall” work bench for stand­ing and a “short” work bench that I could sit at (aka, a desk). The idea was that I’d do elec­tron­ics or oth­er work at the desk. How­ev­er, “near wood­work­ing tools” is a pret­ty lousy place to do sol­der­ing , etc. and this end­ed up just being a place to pile scraps and store my drill press, band saw, and pow­er sander. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, to use any of those then, I had to haul it out of the cor­ner and put it on anoth­er space. They’re not ter­ri­bly heavy but none of this was ide­al. So I had decid­ed I’d tear out the “low” bench and put rolling tool stands in that space. If I’m going to move these tools out to use them, it should at least be eas­i­er to do!

  • Dave and I began work on a work­bench in the garage.
  • Stand­ing bench complete
  • Fram­ing to hold a peg­board. I had to squeeze this in under the stairs.
  • Fram­ing out the cor­ner of the low desk. I was hop­ing to max­i­mize the space below the stairs and have a place to sit to do some work.
  • High and low sur­faces are in place; along with the peg­board. I put some scrap MDF in for a low shelf. I still want to put in some more shelv­ing below the low desk for elec­tron­ics & DIY books. I also have to attach the pow­er strip, hang lights, and run some shop vac hose.

Thurs­day morn­ing, I just so hap­pened on Face­book to catch that my neigh­bor post­ed he was giv­ing away an old rolling stand. It looked per­fect so I drove over (two blocks away) to grab it. Pret­ty quick­ly though I real­ized this was for far larg­er tools than I own.1 I could­n’t even shut the door on the Pilot! For­tu­nate­ly, Angela was out of town so she did­n’t need to park in the garage. Yes­ter­day, I tore out most of that “low” bench in order to be able to park the stand in place. You can see that it took up almost the entire 4′ x 3′ space! Those slant­ed legs were fine for a very heavy piece of equip­ment, but my Ryobi band saw and Wen pow­er sander weigh maybe 80 lbs com­bined. I did need to bend one of the cast­er mounts such that it was lev­el with the oth­ers. This would­n’t be the last time I got to bend some met­al on this thing.

He must be very tall to have tak­en the pic­ture at that angle!
  • Cleaned off for the first time in a decade
  • Desk gone; fram­ing still come down
  • That’s one big tool stand!

So I knew I want­ed to re-tool the stand such that the legs are ver­ti­cal. I gave it some thought and real­ized that I could piv­ot the legs about one out of the three bolts that con­nect each side of each leg (i.e., two bolts on each leg — one for each con­nect­ing side). I had mea­sured out and cut a bot­tom shelf from the “low” desk’s MDF sur­face so I had some­thing to align the legs to. Then I could just use my lev­el and speed square to get the leg align­ment. I used a white paint mark­er to mark the four new holes and num­ber each of the points so I could re-attach them (nom­i­nal­ly it would­n’t mat­ter, but it just helps to reduce error when things oth­er­wise don’t align because noth­ing’s “nom­i­nal”).

After remov­ing 2/3 of the leg bolts, I could rotate the legs to vertical

I used the drill press and my step bit to drill the holes. Drilling steel is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more dif­fi­cult than drilling alu­minum (which can be gen­er­al­ly cut with wood­work­ing blades or bits). I recent­ly read Adam Sav­age’s book “Every Tool’s a Ham­mer” in which he has a chap­ter titled “Use More Cool­ing Flu­id” and, man, is that every sound advice for cut­ting steel. I typ­i­cal­ly call it cut­ting flu­id, but giv­en the amount of smoke I was gen­er­at­ing, it was def­i­nite­ly get­ting hot. Also, unlike alu­minum, steel is going to have burs that need to be filed off, even when cut­ting with a step bit. So I had to clean up each of the six­teen holes drilled.

Always use lots of cut­ting flu­id when drilling steel

I got the legs re-assem­bled and cut a top sur­face (also cut from the old bench’s MDF sur­face). I did have to replace a few of the bolts with spoiled threads but I hap­pened to have some spare 1/4″ bolts & nuts. It was at that point that I real­ized that the sur­faces of bent steel that were for­mer­ly par­al­lel to the floor were now about 10° out of flat. Enter the 5 lbs sledge. I basi­cal­ly whacked the hell out of the top lip all around until the to sur­face lay near­ly flat. Using some screws through the mount holes then got it nice and level. 

It may be only 5 lbs, but I wore myself out swing that ham­mer today

The cast­ers are the thread­ed bolt post type. If you’ve nev­er seen these before, please know that they are the worst. The end of the thread­ed rod is some weird star thing (no, not a Torx bit) which you can­not hold and just spins with the bolt. So, there’s no real good way to loosen a stuck nut — of which I had two. My design required that these cast­ers come off so that I could use them to also mount the bot­tom shelf. So, some Liq­uid Wrench and some vice grips to hold the thread­ed rod (which mess­es up the threads some, but was­n’t impor­tant as that’s where the shelf now sits), I prevailed. 

I absolute­ly love Vice Grips. I used those a lot on tak­ing all these bent pieces of steel, too.

I final­ly drilled some holes in the cor­ner of the low­er shelf so I could sand­wich that shelf with the leg bot­tom and the cast­er nut & wash­er. I had to use the sledge to some­what flat­ten out the base of each leg. Oth­er­wise the cast­ers would all be at a tilt towards the cen­ter of the cart and it would be mis­er­able to move around. This ham­mer­ing allowed me to get the nut start­ed on the cast­er thread­ed rod. I could then tight­en it enough to make the entire thing stur­dy again.

Hard to believe that’s the same cart! It fits per­fect­ly and is exact­ly what I needed.

So, this was a sim­ple adjust­ment that took me about five hours of work. I could­n’t be hap­pi­er with the results, though. It rolls smooth­ly, is plumb and lev­el, and fits per­fect­ly into a tight area. I may put anoth­er shelf into this (I still have plen­ty of left­over MDF!) so that I can store sander belts, band saw blades, fence, etc. But for a project that I did­n’t have to buy a sin­gle item for, this is exact­ly what I need­ed for this space.

  1. He has con­vert­ed on bay of a 3‑car garage to a very nice wood shop with nice pow­er tools. [↩]

Battery Charging Station

This is a small project I came up with an evening last week after clean­ing up my shop bench some. I’ve always just sat my bat­tery charg­ers on top of the bench area, but they take up pre­cious space there. After get­ting anoth­er Ryobi quick charg­er recent­ly, I fig­ured it was time to make a ded­i­cat­ed space for these. 

Small set of shelves for bat­tery charg­ers and batteries

There’s no short­age of shop projects for this same pur­pose, but it seems that most folks are ok with putting their charg­ers on a shelf semi-per­ma­nent­ly. I fig­ured I would need to occa­sion­al­ly get the charg­ers off the shelf as well. So I built in a small chase such that the cords won’t inter­fere with the French cleat sys­tem and can eas­i­ly come out.

The dimen­sions of this project are very spe­cif­ic to the set of charg­ers I have (two dif­fer­ent Ryobi and a Bosch), as you can see here. How­ev­er, I’ve post­ed my set of plans below and it should be easy to change the dimen­sions for dif­fer­ent charg­ers. Just make sure to account for the pow­er cords!

My three charg­ers squeezed per­fect­ly into 1′-5 1/2″ by 5″

I used pock­et holes to assem­ble the entire project (edit — which was made entire­ly from 3/4″ maple veneer ply­wood I already had on hand from repair­ing my kid’s bed). 28 pock­et holes is a lot for some­thing this small. But with the back split as in this design, I want­ed to makes sure it was plen­ty rigid. I could have glued it up as well, but by the time got it all dry fit, I fig­ured that would be overkill. I can always dis­as­sem­ble it and glue it lat­er. The real trick with this was get­ting to all those pock­et holes. Basi­cal­ly, but the shelf fronts on first and then put the back/sides onto the shelves.

Yes, I put eleven pock­et holes in a 5″ by 17 1/2″ shelf

Anoth­er small thing that made this lit­tle project fun: my table saw sled. I had real­ly been dis­ap­point­ed in using it. I put a decent amount of work into get­ting it right but it just was­n’t slid­ing well. I’d sand­ed the run­ners down as much as could (more and I fig­ured there be too much slop). I just hap­pened to buy some paste wax today as I’d seen it men­tioned in some videos. It real­ly should be stressed more: put paste wax on your table saw sled run­ners! The sled glides along with very lit­tle force now and cross-cuts are a breeze!

My mas­sive table saw sled on my lit­tle Ryobi table saw works great after adding some paste wax!

So this was a good lit­tle project and went off with (almost) no mis­takes thanks to putting in some decent plan­ning and tak­ing plen­ty of mea­sure­ments of what I want­ed to store. I say almost, as the cut-out above the bot­tom shelf to accom­mo­date the AC adapter was ini­tial­ly cut with­out account­ing for the bot­tom shelf depth. Anoth­er quick pass on the band saw and it fit fine.

The after­noon sun creep­ing into my workspace

In case you can’t quite read those sheets on my rolling work­bench, here are my plans for any­one so inclined to build some­thing like this. One poten­tial mod­i­fi­ca­tion would be to put some han­dles (either hard­ware attached to the top of the sides or hand­holds cut into the sides) and a bungie cord across the front of the low­er shelf. That way, with just unplug­ging one cord, I could take all my charg­ers with me.

Bat­tery Charg­ing Sta­tion PlansDown­load

The Bazz Fuss

You know a pro­jec­t’s been lin­ger­ing too long when your son — who could­n’t care less about gui­tar or effects ped­als — won­ders into your office one day, points to a jum­ble of wires and com­po­nents, and asks “are you ever going to fin­ish this thing?” 

That “thing” is the bazz fuss cir­cuit I sol­dered onto a perf­board sev­er­al months ago. I had watched Paul of DIY Gui­tar Ped­als put togeth­er his “5 minute fuzz” effect and had read an arti­cle on Sey­mour Dun­can’s site about build­ing the effect with some nice mods to the orig­i­nal cir­cuit. Some more details about the orig­i­nal effect are avail­able here, but essen­tial­ly it seems Chris­t­ian Hem­mo devel­oped a fuzz effect for the bass that used the fewest com­po­nents pos­si­ble (and still gen­er­ate a decent effect, any­way). The design is extreme­ly ele­gant and pro­duces a nice “dirt” fuzz effect (prob­a­bly per­fect for bass gui­tar). Hem­mo’s orig­i­nal site is long lost on the inter­net (ah, Angelfire.com! — still avail­able via Archive.org, though, of course) but his cir­cuit lives on.

The bazz fuss effect on a bread­board with labeled controls

I built my first attempt at a Bazz Fuss effect by wiring the com­po­nents in my bread­board, fol­low­ing along with the Sey­mour Dun­can arti­cle (seri­ous­ly can­not rec­om­mend that arti­cle enough). I went through the var­i­ous iter­a­tions on the bread­board in the arti­cle and end­ed up with the “mod­ded” ver­sion there-in. I even tried adding a bat­tery sag con­trol as well, to emu­late a bat­tery los­ing its charge which sounds good on some effects. This par­tic­u­lar effect is one in which it basi­cal­ly just no longer has enough volt­age to make any noise, so it just kills the sound below that thresh­old. This is the bread­board­ed effect that I used to demon­strate my test rig, in fact.

Inspired by this Make video on cir­cuit skills on using perf­board to quick­ly build a cir­cuit, I fig­ured I’d try sol­der­ing the com­po­nents down. I just bent over some longer leads and sol­dered them to make more-or-less a ground rail and a pow­er rail, and then built the cir­cuit from there. I sketched it all out on graph paper before hand, but the cir­cuit is so sim­ple I had near­ly half of the perf­board free after sol­der­ing everything.

My ini­tial perf­board circuit

And so this sat on my shelf for months until my son asked about it. I fig­ured I real­ly did need to wrap this thing up before mov­ing on to any oth­er projects. I had pur­chased a blue pow­der-coat­ed enclo­sure for my treme­lo kit ped­al and had already trans­ferred the guts of that effect to its new home. So I had an enclo­sure that only need­ed a cou­ple of holes made larger.

I should note here that I use exter­nal nut AC jacks on all my builds. Yes, they stick out fur­ther and are less attrac­tive. But, here’s my reasoning:

  • all the oth­er exter­nal com­po­nents (except LEDs) already have exter­nal nuts
  • I found that the extra 1/4″ of depth pro­vid­ed using an exter­nal nut AC jack real­ly helped in a 1590A enclo­sure, such as my Micro Amp clone
  • most impor­tant­ly: I can pull the guts of a ped­al out with­out hav­ing to cut a sin­gle wire; noth­ing is actu­al­ly even nec­es­sar­i­ly wired after going into the enclo­sure at all this way!

In the spir­it of recy­cling old parts, one of the resis­tors I had pulled from my Cry­Ba­by Wah mod was the right val­ue for the LED resis­tor! I don’t even know why I both­ered sav­ing it, but I was glad I did. I use some of the spare space on the perf­board to mount the LED and the resis­tor. I used a bit of hot glue to hold the LED in place (in fact, that’s the only thing hold­ing the entire board in place!).

The LED hot glued into the enclo­sure — note the old tan, 5% tol­er­ance resistor

I did use sock­ets for both the diode and the tran­sis­tor. I don’t know that I’ll ever swap them out, but I have that option. In fact, Paul of DIY Gui­tar Ped­als has an entire video just com­par­ing dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions. Though my ped­al does­n’t have a ton of gain, it sounds pret­ty good using the BAT41 diode and MPSA13 tran­sis­tor. You can see where I used a sharpie to mark the ori­en­ta­tion for both, as well, because I won’t remem­ber should I ever want to swap them out. On the sub­ject of trou­bleshoot­ing, I spent a lot of time trou­bleshoot­ing this build only to ulti­mate­ly deter­mine the A100k put for the vol­ume was just a bad pot! So I def­i­nite­ly don’t want any more headaches try­ing to fig­ure out the cor­rect ori­en­ta­tion for a diode or tran­sis­tor. I even got so para­noid, I lined the back of the pots and the back of the perf­boad with elec­tri­cal tape to ensure noth­ing shorts!

Over­all, it’s not the pret­ti­est build I’ve done but it is com­plete, works, and sounds pret­ty good. I’m proud that I was able to lay­out the com­po­nents in an effi­cient way (which is of course impor­tant to print­ed cir­cuit board lay­outs, which I hope to try out at some point). 

The fin­ished wiring. What a rat’s nest!

Game of Thrones Has Ended

…but A Song of Fire & Ice has not. I’m actu­al­ly sev­er­al sea­sons behind on the show so I did­n’t even watch the finale last night. While I’m some­what avoid­ing spoil­ers, I’m not too con­cerned about it. Because it became very clear to fans of the books series from about sea­son 2 or 3 that HBO would fin­ish the show long before George R.R. Mar­tin ever fin­ished his nov­els. So how­ev­er the show end­ed; if it is any­thing like the books ulti­mate­ly end it will be more of a coin­ci­dence than any­thing. Frankly, I doubt they’ll be sim­i­lar at all but time will (hope­ful­ly) tell.

My then girl­friend (now wife), Angela, bought me a paper­back copy of A Game of Thrones from the uni­ver­si­ty book­store in Blacks­burg, VA for a birth­day present after I’d fin­ished the orig­i­nal Dune nov­els. I was start­ing to read for fun again (five years of work­ing towards an engi­neer­ing degree means you don’t read for “fun” much). That book was rec­om­mend­ed to her when she told the book­store clerk I liked Dune. Basi­cal­ly, it was all about pol­i­tics and fam­i­ly intrigue, but only in medieval times. And I real­ly did enjoy it. The third book in the series, A Storm of Swords, had just been released and these books were start­ing to gain pop­u­lar­i­ty. Also, that time, GRRM was crank­ing out these nov­els about every oth­er year!

I did­n’t read the sub­se­quent nov­els for a while as I stopped read­ing much genre fic­tion for a few years (out­side of Dune pre­quels). When I did get back to them, I had dis­cov­ered the joy of audio books. Par­tic­u­lar­ly, get­ting to lis­ten to audio­books to pass the time rock­ing our baby daugh­ter to sleep. That’s when I also dis­cov­ered Roy Dotrice. As much as I enjoyed the first book, hear­ing his nar­ra­tion brought the series to life in a way that’s still hard to describe. I’ve been a fan of Peter Din­klage since “The Sta­tion Agent” but I will always hear the phrase “A Lan­nis­ter always pays his debts.” in a Welsh accent thanks to Dotrice. Don’t get me wrong, the HBO series is fan­tas­tic and the act­ing is won­der­ful. But there’s a rea­son that GRRM want­ed no one by Dotrice to nar­rate the audio­books and it’s clear why. 

“Roy gave his all in the stu­dio,” said Dan Mus­sel­man, a pro­duc­er who worked with Dotrice on the series, by email. “George R.R. Mar­tin want­ed Roy to nar­rate his books, and he was absolute­ly right. Roy was the per­fect nar­ra­tor for the series and no one else could pos­si­bly have done what Roy did with the nar­ra­tive, the sto­ry lines, and espe­cial­ly the char­ac­ters. It was an enor­mous under­tak­ing and worth every minute.”

And he was metic­u­lous in his work and research. The night before record­ing, he would go over pages of notes on the next day’s char­ac­ters. By the end of record­ing all five books, he had every char­ac­ter name list­ed in alpha­bet­i­cal order on more than a dozen pieces of paper. 

The Man Who Spoke ‘Game of Thrones’ Into Existence

And it’s not just that they’re the books and books are always bet­ter than the movie (nay, tele­vi­sion series). When Dotrice was­n’t avail­able to nar­rate the fourth book the pro­duc­ers got John Lee, one of the finest nar­ra­tors alive today. I have lis­tened to a dozen books he’s read (most­ly Alis­tair Reynolds or Peter F. Hamil­ton), but it just was­n’t the same for A Feast for Crows.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Dotrice passed away in 2017 and he won’t get to fin­ish the series. No one knows when those books will be done and who’ll nar­rate the audio­books. I’m sure to read and lis­ten to them once they come out, regard­less of who nar­rates them — or who the HBO show run­ners put on the iron throne. But I’ll still have Roy Dotrice’s voic­es in my head as I read the words.

I.M. Pei

Four­teen years ago, when Angela and I vis­it­ed Paris, I took this pho­to inside the Lou­vre pyra­mid. I post­ed it to Flickr with the attached caption.

The glass pyra­mid at the Lou­vre, designed by I.M. Pei. Usu­al­ly referred to as the “con­tro­ver­sial” pyra­mid. I was in awe, if you can’t tell by this photo.

Pei passed away yes­ter­day at the age of 102 after hav­ing for­ev­er changed archi­tec­ture around the world.

Miter Saw Fix

One of my ear­li­est “nice” tools was a com­pound miter saw. I bought a “new“1 Ridgid 10″ miter saw about 15 years ago. It’s been pret­ty handy over the years, but I noticed last year (on my fin­ish­ing stor­age rack project) that the fence was bowed. As the blade would cut through he piece, the piece would then pinch into the blade. At best, that just ends up mess­ing up an oth­er­wise clean cut. But worse, it can be a bit dan­ger­ous any time a piece is pinched like that (at least with a miter saw, the blade is gen­er­al­ly pulling it down­ward into the sup­port). I searched for a replace­ment part, but those are no longer avail­able for this model.

Thus it was time to just try to fix it. The fence is a very odd­ly shaped piece of alu­minum. I had to unthread the four hex bolts hold­ing it in place. They were pret­ty tight, to say the least.

I near­ly broke my Allen key set get­ting these bolts loose

It’s impor­tant to have a ref­er­ences for “straight” and for “square” and so any mak­er should know what the flat­test and most square things in their shop are for a true ref­er­ence. I don’t have any machin­ist’s squares or a heavy, cast-iron table saw, so I just make do with some alu­minum tools that are pret­ty good. I grabbed the large dry-wall square to use a flat ref­er­ence. Sure enough, there was about an 1/16″ bow in the fence.

Tough to cap­ture with a cell phone cam­era, but both points in the mid­dle are off the straight edge

I placed some scrap pieces on the garage floor and used a 4lb sledge to ham­mer the cen­ter of the fence. Alu­minum is a brit­tle met­al, so I had to go slow. This usu­al­ly mean 1–2 firm whacks and then check to see if it was lev­el. I actu­al­ly went a bit too far, and the fence start­ed rock­ing side-to-side on my straight edge. A cou­ple of whacks on the oth­er side got it right on. I did have to shore up one side as the points near­est the blade weren’t in line any more (or maybe they nev­er were?). 

Pre­ci­sion sledge work

This was the most tedious part, but I got it so I could just slide a piece of paper under it. That’s going to be about as accu­rate as I can get using this method I think.

A lot of effort to close a very small gap

The fence is attached with round (or fixed) holes on one side and slot­ted (or adjust­ment) holes on the oth­er. I got the fence placed on one side and then used my alu­minum speed square on the oth­er. This is where a good machin­ist’s square would be used if I owned one, but again — this whole fix is a bit rough any­way, so the speed square is good enough.

Not the ide­al square device

I also noticed that in addi­tion to the “fixed” fence hav­ing been warped, which would have just result­ed in the same issues. So I quick­ly adjust­ed that one too (no sledge ham­mer required). 

While tight­en­ing the main fence, I noticed the bolt-on wing was­n’t in line

A quick test cut and I imme­di­ate­ly could tell the piece did­n’t move a bit as soon as the blade cut through. And, just as impor­tant, it was square! (well as sure of square as I can be with my tools!)

  1. Though as it turns out, it had been used to cut some stuff and returned (prob­a­bly by some 2nd rate con­trac­tor), only to be sold as “new” by Home Depot. But it worked fine and I need­ed it for some­thing at the time, so I just lived with it. [↩]

Soccer Goals

Wyatt & I went to the Nashville SC match with Mem­phis 901 FC tonight. We attend­ed with his Cub Scout Pack and got to sit in one of the field lev­el suites. The game was rain delayed an hour and there was rain on-and-off dur­ing the game, but we stuck it out. Most­ly because, as part of the suite pack­age the group got, we got to go out on the field and shoot a few goals after the game. Most of the fam­i­lies & kids had left due to how late it had got­ten, but we stuck it out. Wyatt got 2/3 shots and I missed my one shot (try­ing to shoot for the cor­ner). Still, was a real­ly fun expe­ri­ence and glad he & I got to do it.

Wyatt 1, Jason 0

Also, Nashville SC won 2–0.

Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Mods

This project has been “in the works” for a while. I’ve had the ped­al work­ing for some­time but final­ly got around mak­ing the mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make it a mod­ern pedal.

EH Small Stone with work­ing LED indicator

Let’s start with a bit of back­sto­ry: Last sum­mer, my wife and I were help­ing to clean out my late father-in-laws tool shed. He had a lot of stuff and a lot of that stuff was entire­ly ran­dom. One such item was a late 70’s Elec­to-Har­monix Small Stone phase shifter. It was in decent shape, but upon open­ing it, the 9v bat­tery cor­rod­ed and ruined the bat­tery snap. So it was unus­able as-is. There’s not a defin­i­tive way to date it, but the pot is labeled 1377825, which means it was man­u­fac­tured the week of June 19th (25th week) of 1978 by CTS (man­u­fac­tur­er’s code 137). So the ped­al was like­ly build and sold in late 1978 or 1979.

EH Issue J board: the red (9v for LED), gray (ground), green (sig­nal in) and yel­low (sig­nal out) wires were ones added as part of this mod

The Small Stone is the oth­er phas­er sound from the late 70’s, where as the MXR Phase 90 is the one that Eddie Van Halen made famous (I have some the­o­ries on why that might have been, too.). That being said, it’s a great sound­ing phas­er. I’m not a fan of the col­or switch on, per­son­al­ly1. But with the switch off, the effect has got a rich, space‑y sound. This par­tic­u­lar ped­al just need­ed a bit of love.

The first thing was to put in a new bat­tery snap to pow­er the ped­al. This ped­al had a 1/8″ audio jack-style pow­er jack. There are adapters for using this with a mod­ern, Boss-style (2.1 mm bar­rel) DC pow­er plug. How­ev­er, it was a pret­ty sim­ple oper­a­tion to just drill out the case a bit larg­er and install a mod­ern pow­er jack. That got the ped­al work­ing again and how it stayed for about a year. And it sound­ed great. 

Well, except for one issue and it’s why I think this ped­al was nev­er near­ly as pop­u­lar as the MXR or, for that mat­ter, many of EH’s oth­er ped­als such as the Big Muff π. That is there is a seri­ous vol­ume drop when the effect is on. Imag­ine Eddie Van Halen turn­ing the effect on for the drop‑C# chug in “Unchained” and then back off for the chord pro­gres­sion. The riff would be ruined! 2. So I real­ly want­ed to fix that. For­tu­nate­ly, 40+ years of his­to­ry with this design and folks have fig­ured out ways to address the issue. There are two resis­tor val­ues that can be changed that dra­mat­i­cal­ly improve the vol­ume drop. I swapped out R11 and R42 and a quick test (out­side of the case) saw the issue improve dramatically.

Mods com­plet­ed: 1) Boss-style AC jack, 2) LED indi­ca­tor, 3) resis­tors swapped for vol­ume drop (blue resis­tors), and 4) true-bypass switch wiring

The bypass­ing mech­a­nism on this ped­al was fair­ly trans­par­ent. I per­son­al­ly can’t tell much of a dif­fer­ence when it’s in my sig­nal chain or not. How­ev­er, I did decide to make it a true bypass ped­al along with the oth­er mod, main­ly just to add an indi­ca­tor LED. Though I’m not a seri­ous gui­tar play­er and nev­er actu­al­ly play live (or record), I do like hav­ing indi­ca­tor lights on effects. If noth­ing else, it just reminds me to turn them all off when I’m done play­ing for a bit as a break dur­ing work hours! The updat­ed switch, even just a cheap­er “Tai­wan blue” is still a lot less of a “ka-chunk!” than the old switch, too.

The last step was to drill out the hole for the LED bezel. Drilling steel is a bit hard­er than alu­minum. I used a step bit as usu­al, but cut­ting flu­id is a must in this case. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a cou­ple of steel shav­ings scratched rings around the open­ing as I was drilling. I can prob­a­bly buff them out, but a sim­ple piece of painters tape would have pro­tect­ed the sur­face when drilling (and I usu­al­ly think of that when it’s a pow­der-coat­ed enclo­sure!). I boxed up the effect, plugged it in, and SQUEAL-EEE-OOO-EEAAA! Turns out, the out­put jack can rotate just a bit and short out on the col­or switch con­nec­tors. A small piece of black elec­tri­cal tape fixed that, though.

Black elec­tri­cal tape over the col­or switch con­nec­tors to pre­vent it from short­ing on the out­put jack

Reverb has these vin­tage v7 Small Stone ped­als going from between about $150 to $200, depend­ing on their con­di­tion (they retailed for around $80 back in the 70’s). Even non-func­tion­ing, this one could have sold for $75-$100 (which would have eas­i­ly cov­ered the cost of a mod­ern “Nano” re-issue mod­el). So did I reduce its val­ue? Maybe. Maybe not. There are some mod­ded Small Stones also sold on Reverb going for even more. Many of those have addi­tion­al con­trols added or the abil­i­ty to attach expres­sion ped­als or oth­er more sig­nif­i­cant modifications.

How­ev­er, none of that is real­ly the point for me. I think it’s real­ly cool that this par­tic­u­lar one belonged to some­one in Ange­la’s fam­i­ly (most like­ly her late uncle, John, who played gui­tar some). I think of all the effects in my col­lec­tion, this would be one I’d nev­er real­ly want to part with any­way. It’s got some real his­to­ry; used by peo­ple I knew. And it’s been fun to take it and make it hope­ful­ly even bet­ter than before. It sounds great and though it may not have been the phas­er I would have bought oth­er­wise, it’s even bet­ter to me.

With all apolo­gies to EVH, my incred­i­bly rough take on the intro riff to “Unchained”

Some notes on that demo: first of all, it’s just record­ed from my iPhone X on a tri­pod (as if the leg was­n’t the give­away). The iPhone attempts to lev­el out sound, so try­ing to show that the vol­ume does­n’t drop when the ped­al is engaged in this record­ing isn’t too use­ful. Next, even though you can clear­ly hear the switch click­ing, it’s tru­ly just because the amp vol­ume is rel­a­tive­ly low. There’s no pop through the amp. Last­ly, I’m bare­ly pass­able at play­ing this riff and try­ing to coor­di­nate the ped­al on-and-off with it was a par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­lenge for me. 

  1. The col­or switch seems to add sec­ond lay­er of phas­ing at a slow­er rate than the first so there’s a weird­er change ampli­tude. I think this was more pop­u­lar with organ and elec­tric piano play­ers than gui­tarists. I cer­tain­ly can’t think of any record­ings where I may have heard that col­or switch effect. [↩]
  2. I’m not say­ing EVH ever actu­al­ly even used one of these… In fact, after about 5 min of research, EVH actu­al­ly used a flanger rather than a phas­er for that par­tic­u­lar song; but he did and does famous­ly use a phas­er for oth­er songs such as Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love), but for any­one who did they sure­ly would have noticed the vol­ume drop. [↩]