steve's ramblings

2.20.2007

critter vs. golf ball

Critter wins it would seem. Found this today on the floor in the office:

2.18.2007

After the arrival of the new Lakland, the ole Tobias Growler 4 was in need of a little love. I have been wanting to play fretless more, and the 35" unlined 6-string that I have is just a little too far of a stretch from a fretted 34" 4-string for me to make the jump back and forth. With that thought, the Tobias Defretting project was born!

After reading quite a bit about defretting from the fine folks at talkbass.com and a great tutorial by CharlesArms (http://www.geocities.com/charlesarms/), I decided to take the plunge. Here is a step by step of how it went!

The first step was taking the frets out of the Tobias. Now these frets had a good 10+ years of grime on them, and I had no illusion that this would be easy. I heated each fret individually, and then pulled them out slowly with a flat-headed nail clipper. This is one of those techniques that you get better with over time; after 5 frets or so I had a better feel for how long to heat it, etc. I actually found that if I heated the fret around 20 seconds, I would start to see some of the oil from the wood start to show small bubbles around the fret. Once I got to this point, removing the fret was cake!

Here is a nice picture of the fretboard after fret removal. You can see that the frets definitely "left their mark". The area of the board that was underneith the fret where it overhangs onto the fretboard the most nicked/splintered up.

And here we have the removed frets, 24 strong!

After the initial fret removal, I gave it a nice sanding to smooth out the protusions where the frets came out. I used a medium to high grit sandpaper (320) at this stage. Notice the pacifier in the background... this is not a required tool for the job.

After the fretboard was smoothed to my satisfaction, I used some 1/64 birch to fill the fret holes. I actually had some 1/32 at first, but it was just too big. The 1/64 actually fit perfect with no gap; nice & snug. I had to radius the bottom of the birch to match the contour of the bottom of the grooves in the fretboard. This took a lot of trial and error; I just kept making minor adjustments and hand-fit each piece until I could see that both ends of the filler were flush in the fret gap.

I used some fast-setting epoxy gel to seat the birch into the holes, but I made sure and dry-fit each of them first. After an hour to let the epoxy set, I started shaving them down with a box cutter very carefully. I didnt get it flush, but just worked it down until it was close enough to sand.

More to come in Part II!

Defretting the Tobias, Part II

Here is a picture of the neck after I have nearly sanded the fillers down to match the profile of the fretboard. There is still a little bit of hangover on the ends of the fret at this point. Once again I used a 320 grit at this stage.

Here is another shot from the side of the fretboard after sanding. After the 320 I finished it off with a bit of 400, and a final go-round with some extremely high-grit (1000-ish).

And now we are ready for the first coat of oil. I used a tung oil to finish the neck (and some worn spots on the body that have been there for years).

Here are more shots of the fretboard during the oiling process.

And finally, here are some shots of the finished product:

2.14.2007

Lakland! (pictures updated 2/25)

Well, it looks like I am officially a Lakland owner/fan now. I was the happy recipient of an incredible deal on a Lakland 44-01. I couldnt be happier with the sound and quality at this point.. here it is:

1.28.2007

January Bathroom Project

First are the obligatory pre-project pictures. We have a light purple, sort of lavender colored paint on the walls and ceiling, along with some impressive 1980 movie star light fixtures. Why would anyone want to try and improve this?

Now here we are in the middle of the project. I have painted the ceiling at this point, and removed the lovely light fixtures. Notice exposed wires, the universal sign that work is underway. (are those wires hot?). You will also notice the spread of tools all over the counters, as well as the laptop w/speakers for listening pleasure.

Now we are seeing some progress. This is after the painting is done, the fixtures are in, and th e mirrors are framed. Notice the tape holding the framing in place while the adhesive dries, very attractive.

And here we are with the finished product.. first a shot of the trim that I put in (the floors were already done), followed by two shots similar to the pre-project pictures.

1.26.2007

no myspace love

I know I will be offending about 5 out of 6 people who use pewters in this country, but geez I can't stand myspace. Here is a list of reasons why, in no particular order

1) Ads. Yes, yes I know that is how they pay for the site, etc etc everyone has to make money blah bleh blih. That doesnt stop it from being horrendously ugly. Not only ugly, but there are some highly innappropriate ads on myspace also, especially with the volume of younguns that are out there.

2) Uh-gly -ness. On a scale of 1-10, myspace gets a 12.3. Besides the aforementioned ads that blare out at the viewer, they could at least create templates that look somewhere near aesthetically pleasing. You can't even read the text on half of the sites out there because the background is so busy. Let's be realistic, 99% or more of these folks arent familiar in any way with web design, and nor should they have to be. Look at what blogger did (shameless plug), they make it easy, and even look decent (novel idea). myspace could learn a lot from the folks at google. If the internet were American Idol, Simon would have a field day with myspace, and to take it further, even Paula would give them the boot.

3) lack of layout (see #2). There is nothing I like better than a site that scrolls for about 10 pages with a random layout of media plugins, pictures, and the like. It looks as if someone spilled a box of browser plugins and left them where they fell. ick.

Ok, done with my rant. I guess I am officially a myspace hater (not the people who use it mind you, I have many friends who do). I am sure myspace will be around for many many painful years to come, and we are stuck with it, but I honestly feel better to have gotten that off my chest.

1.10.2007

Tie Wednesday

Today is tie Wednesday, and I must say we had a bit of a disappointing turnout. I attribute this turnout to a number of things, but I believe that it can be improved upon. As mentioned by the immortal Jorge, perhaps a little more pre-event "love" is needed. Before the next event, I plan on making a few more cordial visits to potential participants to stir up a little more excitement about the event. This could potentially encourage more word of mouth marketing and increase participation dramatically. In addition, perhaps posters or other forms of communication would help build momentum. I have always said,

"failure is but one of the steps on the path to success",

so I am not going to let this get me down.

I have also said

"If you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips",

but that doesnt really apply here. Actually, that is a quote one of my favorite book series, but now I am really off topic aren't I?

12.18.2006

Christmas Festivities

Christmas tasties, oh my! Various folks brought in cookies, cake, and misc trans fat goodness. I made the peanut butter cookies with hershey's kisses in the middle, quite good.

12.15.2006

Tie Friday

11.22.2006

Incredible Sand Art

Well.. I havent made any posts for a little while because nothing spectacular has happened (other than the TransSiberian Orchestra concert of which I have no pictures). So with that in mind, here is some incredible sand art from work that I created today.

11.02.2006

Steve Mocha (version 2.1)

After many experiments, failures, and a near-death choking accident, I have come up with a halfway decent mocha recipe (for those of you who didnt know I was a Starbucks Mocha addict). This doesnt necessarily taste just like a 7-pump Venti Mocha from Starbucks, but it tastes good nonetheless for a chocolate lover.

Ingredientes:
1/8 cup sugar
1/8 cup cocoa (I used Nestle's, I didn't like the Girdelli cocoa)
1/4 cup cream (or half/half, milk, etc).. I like to use Hazelnut flavored International Delight Creamer
1 1/2 cup coffee (already made)

Instrucciones:
Put sugar, cocoa, and cream/milk in a microwavable cup and heat until it gets hot and the cocoa/sugar is dissolved (about 20-30 seconds for me). Stir well and then add coffee. Stir well once more and voila! You can change the qty of sugar/cocoa to taste. Makes around 2 cups of coffee.

10.25.2006

Now you don't see that every day..

10.24.2006

The floor...is get...ting slip....pery

Quitting my day job... now

Starbucks & Dale

Does it get any better than this? Seriously.

10.06.2006

What? Another VAX Update?

After stealing some parts from a 4300 and r400x we found upstairs, we have managed to get a full functional 4200 up and running! Now we just need the quorum/vaxcluster running and we are back in bidness.

The VAX be with you...

Well, after a myriad of hardware swaps/replacements, we now have one working 4000-200, one bad 4000-200 and one bad R215F. This is not quite at square 1 where we started, but actually a little worse (since the R215F worked fine when we started). As such, I will refer to our current position as square 0. A special thanks to Jorge who visited the top secret VAX room for moral support while we got VAX #2 back up (it was down until about 30 mins ago). More parts coming in Monday, and the saga will continue....