current DIY projects you are working on .. or planning on.

[Dr Tony Balls]

Does it go all the way through or coincide with the truss rod channel in any way?

[Tommy]

Does it go all the way through or coincide with the truss rod channel in any way?

Either way, I bet if you take tension off of the truss rods it'll go right back together...

[Dr Tony Balls]

Does it go all the way through or coincide with the truss rod channel in any way?

Either way, I bet if you take tension off of the truss rods it'll go right back together...

Yeah, what i'm thinking about is when you glue it back together you dont want to cement the truss rod(s) into place.

[weezy]

Probably. If the truss comes into play then this is definitely outside of my wheelhouse, so I'll take it in to a dude who fixes these kind of breaks for a living. Either way, I won't have to pay for it which is good.

[Anthony Flack]

Man, the ribbon in my ribbon mic is totally sagged out like grandma's underpants. I never subjected it to any sonic abuse so I suspect that it may have taken a shot of phantom power recently. Feck! I presume that even a little DV voltage through the ribbon would cause it to violently fling itself away from the magnets.

Anyway I happened to have an entire replacement ribbon motor assembly that I have been looking for a suitable home for, so I swapped the entire assembly out and good ol' ribby is back in action.

Now I have a busted motor and nothing to lose so fuck it, I am going to give this shit a go. I've ebayed a sheet of 2.5μ aluminium foil and some crimping gears and I is gonna attempt to makes me a new ribbon. Do I have the surgeon's hands required for such a delicate operation, or will it all end in tears with torn shreds of aluminium stuck to the tears? Tune in next month to find out.

[Rodabod]

Do I have the surgeon's hands required for such a delicate operation, or will it all end in tears with torn shreds of aluminium stuck to the tears? Tune in next month to find out.

Give it a bash. I can't remember if I ever wrote up how to do it as I haven't done it for over ten years, but get yourself a quality scalpel. I used a curved blade, Sheffield steel (can't remember the brand). You can use ethanol or meths as a temporary adhesive to hold it in place. Use something as a dropper, like a large sewing needle upside down, or whatever will reliably transfer small droplets of ethanol. Tensioning should be just enough to remove the slack, in order to keep the natural resonance subsonic. A cheapy jewellers loupe may help for inspection. Something like what they sell as a "2.5x". A bit like with mechanical watch repair (which I now do as a hobby), make sure your screwdrivers are perfectly suited and "dress" them if they are worn or poor fitting for the screw heads.

[Anthony Flack]

Much-appreciated advice as always, Mr Bod.

The plates clamping the ribbon down are held in place by nuts and bolts and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to approach that. Whether I should plop the bolts in when positioning the ribbon and try to get the nuts on at the end, holding the whole thing together with my fingers, or just loosen that shnizz up and try to slide the ribbon underneath. Or maybe a little of column A a little of column B.

Or maybe those are both crazy bad ideas and I should try to glue the nuts in place before I begin. I guess dude must have managed to do it somehow in the first place.

[TylerSavage]

this is barely DIY but I'm happy with the way its turning out

I was going to fix the inlays in my Greco LP custom ripoff that I'm refinishing... well, the lamp I was using fell over and burned a giant hole so then I had to make a new peghead veneer and do the binding.
I've never done 5-ply binding, so that part has been a learning process









I liked the way this looked with the black and white but I just didn't have wood that worked right
nor did I think I could pull it off.




I wanted to do a detailed inlay pattern so figured I might as well have backups...



But I gave up and filled it with geso anyway. This turned out alright but I had a better piece of wood









Where I'm at right now

[elisha wiesner]

super cool!

[endofanera]

super cool!

Seriously! So great!

[llllllllllllllllllllllll]

Really nice, excited to see how it looks on the whole guitar

[japmn]

I quit my job and magically have time to do stuff again. Worked on a bunch of foam and ran a bunch of cables for speakers through the wall in my basement. I have a rack of amps for the Pa and the 2 Phase Tech monitors in another part of the basement so I dont have to hear the fans. everything in here is all set up and working now, but I'm going to move all my preamps into the "Live Room" with a couple of xlr patch panels on the front of the rack so I dont have to walk around the wall to adjust the levels. I might just move all the patchbays in there too, but I'm a little low on space.

[Facundo]

I finished two Auratone 5C clones in MDF with cheap materials: MDF, wood glue from a chinese bazar, recycled electrical cable and Pioneer speakers from a car, in the wait of a pair of Visaton FRS8-8. Each box without speakers is under $20 of cost. It was my first DIY project for a lot of years and now I am so motivated that I can not sleep because of the incipient bizarre ideas that plague my mind such as the leather or cork pickguards.

next things:

- A kind of plate reverb with electro dynamical exciter attached to a metal sheet instead of a regular speaker: http://www.visaton.de/en/industrie/koer ... 60s_8.html with additional ideas to learn acoustics like static positioned handmade piezo pickups.

- 8ch passive mixer, simple as the DOD 240.

- Double cut telecaster with recycled hardware, lipstick pickups from a broken danelectro 56, bridge and tuners from an epiphone lp.

[TylerSavage]

I finished two Auratone 5C clones in MDF with cheap materials: MDF, wood glue from a chinese bazar, recycled electrical cable and Pioneer speakers from a car, in the wait of a pair of Visaton FRS8-8. Each box without speakers is under $20 of cost. It was my first DIY project for a lot of years and now I am so motivated that I can not sleep because of the incipient bizarre ideas that plague my mind such as the leather or cork pickguards.

next things:

- A kind of plate reverb with electro dynamical exciter attached to a metal sheet instead of a regular speaker: http://www.visaton.de/en/industrie/koer ... 60s_8.html with additional ideas to learn acoustics like static positioned handmade piezo pickups.

- 8ch passive mixer, simple as the DOD 240.

- Double cut telecaster with recycled hardware, lipstick pickups from a broken danelectro 56, bridge and tuners from an epiphone lp.

Those sound like great projects.


I ended up binding my headstock only to realize my peghead had shifted enough to cause me issues on the top of it. So I routed it back, only to realize I routed off the mitered corners of my binding. ARGH! I got discouraged and gave up for a couple weeks to do other things. Came back and I think I got a decent fix, but I had never bound an open book headstock and it was hard. Especially hard since I was rebinding in an old slot - definitely clean out the slot, I would recommend just re-routing the whole slot. I should have from the start - old glue made binding super frustrating.
Going to touch up my screwups before paint but here it is so far



dammit!




The irony of my desk being covered in necks in various stages of perfection is not lost on me

[japmn]

Now that the Portland winter rain is in full swing, I'm getting some water leaking into the walls of my basement, so I had to pull out ALL the gear. At the worst of it, I mopped up about 10 gallons of water. I've been using an angle grinder to open up hairline cracks and stuffing them full of Hydraulic Cement. Huge job. Hard work. After about a week and a half of solid grinding and cementing, As of today. have no visible water leaking in so if it is still dry after tonights downpour, I'll move everything back in and reconnect everything. Huge bummer, but at least nothing was damaged and now it should be in good shape.

[scrotescape]

@japmn

I went through similar deal last year after buying first house;put gutters on100 y.o.
House that never had them cause basement was getting wet. Was good til big rain.
Ended up excavating down 3-4' around and filling cracks
Then backfilling with gravel and building up/changing grade to assist water draining away.
Threw out me back in the process--All good so far.

Those homeseller disclosures are a load of shite!

[endofanera]

We'll be replacing our gutters soon because they are set up inefficiently and are not big enough to handle roof drainage.

We added an extra scope of work with our landscape contractor who was working on retaining walls and general slope, drainage, and lawn stuff, to improve the drainage on the uphill side of the house in much the way FM scrotescape describes. His crew excavated down around 5-6 feet or so, covered basement wall with waterproofing on outside, filled the trench with drain pipe and gravel, then covered that.

That drain pipe and the downspouts on the front of the house are now all tied into an underground set of drainpipes that empties on the downhill side of the property, away from the house. We also put in hydraulic cement in the basement and removed all remaining penetrations, such as an old disconnected gas line that was responsible for waterfall-like water intrusion until we did a halfway fix on it a couple years ago as an in-between measure.

The basement is now dry as a bone. Best money we spent.

[japmn]

I am certain everything I did is just a band-aid. Ballpark, whats that excavation and seal think gonna cost a fella?

[Adam P]

My folks had some water seepage issues when they moved into their new house a few years ago and I think they had good success with painting the walls with Drylok (or some equivalent).

Excavation type stuff can run up into 5-figure territory I think.

[endofanera]

I am certain everything I did is just a band-aid. Ballpark, whats that excavation and seal think gonna cost a fella?

When we had it done in 2014, the total for excavating along the foundation down to footing on one full wall of the house, landscaping along that excavation to help drainage, parging and waterproofing with sheet waterproof, installing the the trench drainage, geotextile fabric, and gravel, and back-filling and compacting was $6,100, albeit as part of a larger landscape project.

I am sure if we had to do it along more than one wall it would have cost more, but doing it along this wall and adding the drain pipes for the downspouts fixed our drainage problems by helping water move away from the house.