Category Archives: Design

Bicycles, Design, Woodworking

Bike Rack Build 2 – Finishing

Sanding, sanding, sanding, sanding. So much sanding to take these rough cuts of dimensional lumber down to a finish to be proud of. Moderately proud of, anyways. I’m not going for a high gloss, pristine mirror finish. I’ll be sticking to some simple poly stain to compliment the colors of the ceiling beams in my apartment. A natural color for the drop, and a dark cross beam.

The green doug fir 2x’s that I bought were definitely rough. I started off with my random orbital sander with 80 grit sand paper. After a thorough twice-over with that I moved to 120 grit, then to 220. At this point the wood was nice and smooth, but I was done for the day. The stain would have to wait.

The orbital sander makes quick work of the sanding, but isn’t the best choice when applying the stain. As a last step before the stain I used a sanding block with 240 grit sand paper and went over everything one more time, sanding with the direction of the grain. I doubt I got all of the swirls from the orbital sander out of the wood, but I didn’t notice many by the time I was done.

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Arduino, Automation, Design, Electronics, Guitar

Pickup Winder DC Motor Control Prototyping

I Have a Dream

…of one day playing a show with all gear that I made. Guitar, amp, pedals, all of it made my me. I don’t plan to all the way, I’ll be buying the potentiometers and caps and probably most of the hardware. I do, however, plan to make the pickups.

I’m also going to make the machine to wind the pickups. That’s what I’ve been poking at lately. As of now I have a very basic PWM based speed control for a brushed DC motor. I scavenged the motor from an air bed pump I got at Goodwill. It was a couple bucks and has a good basis for everything I’ll need to get up and running.

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Bicycles, CAD, Design, Woodworking

Bike Rack Design

My new apartment has considerably more square footage than my previous place and I can finally bring my bikes inside out of the elements. This is great considering the added moisture in the PNW. However, we need a way to keep them neat and out of the way but still accessible. They can’t stay leaned up against the wall by the door, anymore.

I picked up a few bike racks from Amazon to mount on the wall. However, as has been an issue in a few other posts, the metal stud drywall setup in the new apartment doesn’t hold up to any sort of load. So after quickly installing the bike in drywall and seeing the drywall anchors slowly pull out of the wall I knew I’d have to take a similar approach I took on my guitar rack. 

Step one is to nail down the design. I took some rough measurements and made a couple quick sketches until I could take it to Solidworks. 

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Crafts, Design, Electronics

Adventures in Vinyl (aka “Put a Bird On It!”)

DIY Christmas Presents

We decided to do some crafty, homemade presents for my girlfriend’s family for Christmas. Having recently moved to Portland, we wanted to make a present that had a feel of our new digs. What we came up with was very hip mason jar with stuffed candy and treats. We would spice up the jars by getting crafty and etching everyone’s favorite bird into the glass jar.

We created vinyl bird silhouettes stencils to etch the patterns into the side of the mason jars. My girlfriend created the artwork in Illustrator and I cut the stencils on a vinyl cutter I had access to at a workshop I use. We would use a chemical etching solution to create a frosted pattern in the clear glass.

Here Come the Birds

Step one was finding out everyone’s favorite bird. We didn’t even think most people would have an answer, but some of the responses had clearly been thought about for a while. For example one cousin’s choice was the titanis walleri, and his fiance’s was a shoebill stork. After a few days we had a list of birds to work with.

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CAD, Design, Electronics, Guitar

Prototype Boost Built, Testing to Come

Building on my work from a couple weeks ago, I put solder to iron and built up a first prototype of the boost circuit for my buddy’s 8-bit fuzz pedal. Th EagleCAD board layout I made earlier was almost exactly what I needed. However, because I was fumbling my way through the software I didn’t have the correct packages selected for all of the devices.

I tweaked the layout with the actual components I ordered from Digikey a few weeks ago. The biggest curveball was that I ordered some gigantic orange 1000pF caps. I just wasn’t looking that closely at packages when I ordered, but I had plenty of board to work with.

I hooked up some 1/4″ jacks to the I/O terminals and connected a 9V. I tested with my Epiphone Les Paul into a Focusrite Scarlet interface. The signal came through clear and clean, and there was no audible (to me at least) distortion as I rolled through the gain range. 

Test-Setup
Board-Left
Board-Right

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I’ll take the board over to check out the performance characteristics on an oscilloscope soon. Then, I’ll start looking to shrink the footprint of the board as much as possible so I can cram it inside an existing pedal.

CAD, Design, Electronics, Guitar

Planning and Prototyping a Mosfet Boost Circuit

Long ago I promised my friend Nick a mod for a guitar pedal of his. His 8-bit fuzz pedal caused a volume drop that he couldn’t overcome by tweaking the settings, and he didn’t want to put a boost after because he would have to hit two pedals every time he wanted to switch to his fuzz. I had been looking at making a couple of different boost circuits and offered to put one in his pedal.

Now, some years later, I’m actually putting some effort into the project. The circuit I chose is the Mosfet Booster pedal from AMZ .  The circuit was simple and would make for a very transparent gain stage. The idea is to make a small add-on board for his current pedal and wire the boost in line before the output jack.

I had seen a Hack-a-Day series about creating PCB’s in a number of different software, in particular a walk-through of using Eagle CAD. I’ve seen so many mentions of Eagle CAD over the years, but never used it. This simple circuit would make a good intro to the program.

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CAD, Design, Guitar, Woodworking

Bassman Amp Design – CAD Model

Motivation

The recent find of some good looking 3/4″ plywood was the swift kick I needed to get the ball rolling on a long dormant project. A few years ago I started down the road of building a Fender Bassman clone based on the 5F6 circuit. I was going to do this remotely with a friend. He would handle some electronics analysis for some mods we had in mind, and I would guide the mod selection and build the cabinet. I even went so far as to buy a chassis.

Unfortunately the project never went much further and the chassis sat in the corner of my room for a long time. Then, looking for a CAD project to practice on, I picked it up and got a sheet metal part about 80% done. It was a full box with one of the three faces completed with punched holes.

Getting Started

Knowing I had the chassis model nearly done I started to put together a model of the plywood cabinet. I’ve never had much luck modeling larger assemblies from the ground up and wanted to try something new. I had heard the term “top-down” in relation to CAD models and it seemed like the way to go.

Step one was to do a little research on Fender cabinets similar to what I had in mind. I wanted to skip the 4×10 configuration the Bassman is known for in favor of a much more portable and apartment friendly 1×12 combo. I used a few pictures and drawings of the 4×10 configuration to get an idea for the parts involved, then changed the baffle design and size to fit a single 12″ speaker.

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