Ulu

Banging it out on the custom Stratocaster. I’m playing through a little portable radio amplifier so it makes an expensive guitar sound like a $12 ukulele. youtube.com/shorts/SIfzqqM-dYo?si=MdTik7UKPRLWaT61

The leather came from the sleeves of a motorcycle jacket that used to fit me when I weighed 240 pounds.

I upholstered the ends in leather. “Mint” powder coated steel badges are from some garden store.

It’s got up to 90°F in the boatyard, and the weather was absolutely lovely. I covered my speaker cabinet today. I spent an hour just ironing the canvas cloth. Somehow this took me from 10 AM to 4 PM. I didn’t upholster the ends yet. I had to re-fit them first, as all the screw holes were filled with black paint. I sealed those boards up tight because I didn’t want any warpage. It took an hour just to iron the canvas. I start with the spray glue and staples… 16 screws for the leg brackets. Another 16 hold the ends on. Now the ends have to come back off, and I am going to cover them with some used leather.

My 2012 Tacoma has Zerks on the steering joints and ball joints. It’s pretty easy to service. No jack required to grease it or change oil. It’s just tall. The spin-on filter is on top, between the battery and air filter. It has it’s own little drain rail and tube. You can stick a 16oz plastic bottle under the tube to catch the drips. But there never is more than a drip, because the filter is inverted, and it has an anti-drainback valve in the filter. All modern filters do, but they don’t work as well if the filter lies sideways. That allows some oil to hang in the horizontal passages, which won’t happen if the filter is inverted.

Work on the speaker cabinet. Amp is on it’s own board, in back. Blacking out the baffles. Painting the legs. These NOS legs came from my Dad’s collection of junk. They’ve been kicking about here since the 1960’s. The grille cloth frames are re-sawn from reclaimed maple and oak. I rabeted the corners and lapped them. Here they have been shellacked and are drying, but I painted them flat black too.

Building the speaker cabinet. Once that varnish dries I can finish this. In the meantime I have purchased two old vacuum tube radios to work on. Niether one is completely dead, but each has a problem. One is original and unmolested. 1950 Sears Silvertone. Early AM/FM did not say AM. They said “standard broadcast” for AM. $26 The big one was $66 but it was highly molested. 1961 Zenith AM/FM hi-fi. 7” speaker + tweeter All the tubes light up but there is a broken tuner string and there is no sound from the original amplifier. The speaker wires are cut. Someone had tapped a modern Bluetooth device into the radio and it was playing out thru the original speakers. I bought both of these with the intention of using them as vacuum tube guitar amplifiers.

There’s gonna be a mile thick glacier coming down off mount Whitney into the San Joaquin Valley before I ever pick up a snow shovel again! 😛

Building another amp from a discarded boom box and four 8” Mexican alnico speakers from an early 70’s Sanyo quad. Test rig on the bench: 1965 Silvertone guitar, played thru a Fulltone 2b booster amp, which I juiced up from 9v to 15v with the 2 amp power supply from an old aquarium pump, then the bare Sanyo mainboard. It’s loud enough to be lots of fun. Now I need a cabinet.

It looks like the weather will be nice enough to work on the car again soon. Meanwhile, stuck indoors, I built this old radio into a portable guitar amp. it was my Dad’s, so it had sentimental value. It was also my garage radio for years after he died. Needed a good cleanup, a new power switch and plate, plus a 1/4” phono jack for the guitar. Just two wires: the blue wire goes to ground, and the tan wire goes to the base of the audio pre-amp transistor. I’ve attached it to that transistor’s shunt resistor lead just for convenience. It sounds OK for 5 watts max (2 nom), and even better with the amplified pickups, or an external booster. I’m using the FullTone 2B booster seen here. Both it and the radio will run from 9 volts, which is very convenient.

Wait, this had five crankshafts? Whoa! Was there another 5hp engine just to pump the oil?

We are in a state of denial, that is certain. From the Yahoo news: ”…a critical National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office on the Monterey Peninsula that is on the front lines of tracking and helping to mitigate the effects of climate change…” We’re getting better at tracking things, but as far as mitigation is concerned, I don’t see a possibility that humans can control or even mitigate the changing climate. When you understand how many ancient cities are under the sea, you realize that this has happened before and it’s going to happen again, and we don’t have any control over it. Now in the concept of chaos theory, we might certainly have an effect on climatic change that could end up being broad, yet we would have no knowledge of what that action might be and what effect it might have. That’s where the chaos in chaos theory comes in. You don’t know that if you start your car in the morning that that extra puff of energy into the atmosphere was the very beginning of a cyclone. As far as this earth is concerned, human beings are just along for the ride, and where it starts and where it ends is totally out of our control. Now I’m starting to get religious so I will stop there.

Well 50 years ago I moved to the desert because I don’t like snow. It appears that you folks that like snow are going to have to move further north. If the earth wants to get warmer, we’re not gonna be able to stop it. Same thing if it wants to get colder. It’s generally still very dry here in the San Joaquin Valley but this year we seem to be having a little more rain than normal. We did have some hotter temperatures this year but the heat waves didn’t seem to last as long. But the boat yard is all still wet from the last rain and my boat and project cars are covered up with tarps. I’ll be indoors messing around with my guitars until this clears up.

I once had the overdrive ignition circuit wire on my Edsel short to ground while driving. It blew the condenser wire right off the condenser. The engine stopped. I taped up the shorted ignition wire, but that engine would not restart until I replaced the condenser. I had a used one from our old Scout, at least 10 years old, which worked instantly. I never bought a bad condenser for a car, but I bought computers loaded with faulty ones right from the factory. 20 years ago, Taiwan had a big run of bad motherboards. Not just one maker either. We had 8 at work which failed one by one, within a couple years. Different boards with the same brand of weak capacitors, splitting open, & leaking burnt oil.

I found out that Kay also sold guitars as TrueTone brand, through the TrueValue hardware store chain. I have been doing a lot of work on the old Silvertones. The 1448 got a custom bridge, saddle, and pickguard. It is in good shape now, but the Bobcat had delaminated veneer, and is getting glued. I also made a bone nut to replace the molded plastic on the Speed Demon. I will have to post some photos, after I make more space.