No real updates.  Most things I end up posting on <a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/118393350380853916534/posts“>Google Plus</a> or Facebook.  Since my own blog has usually just been a place for longer updates than Facebook can handle I haven’t had much time for updating it since our daughter was born.  And while I feel an increased need to share stories and photos of her with our families and friends but less with the world in general I didn’t want to have to deal with accounts on here to protect private posts.

I’m not getting rid of the blog, but I’m not sure just what I’ll be posting here now I’ve gotten to play with google plus.  When I have projects worth sharing with the world I’ll still post them here, but that still doesn’t mean they’ll be exciting.

And maybe someday I’ll find time to build a theme.  Until then I like this ultra simple theme I had experimented with previously.

Bottom line, I still enjoy the e-ink nook for actual reading much more.  But I spend a lot less time with it now that I have the color.  The color is just so addictive I can’t put it down unless the battery is ready for a charge – and even with “only” 8 hours of battery life only once have I had to put it down because the battery was in need of a charge (and even that time it was only at 35% but the battery indicator turned red so I figured it was low enough to need a charge – only when I plugged it in did I realize it was still at 35%.)

I do have a few corrections to my last post.  It turns out that the issue I had with things being too spread out was not due to the scaling/resolution issues I thought it was.  It was actually a simple option setting in the launcher I was using (ADW Launcher) that was quickly and easily changed in the Preferences so I could have a 5×6 grid instead of a 4×4 grid.  (I could actually pack even more in there, but 5×6 works well for me.)  I also learned that the ultra spiffy box it came in had another surprise in store.  I wondered why the bottom was filled with some kind of high density foam with a section missing.  Then I saw someone’s blog post about the nook color and realized that the box folds into a stand for displaying the device.  Slick.  Not really useful unless you’re selling them but still a very cool package with a lot of thought behind it.

So in the past week my nook has acquired over 60 apps, I’ve yet to find any apps that don’t work on it – though I have kept in mind that with no cell, no gps, no bluetooth and no camera some apps just aren’t worth trying  I’ve also tried several other launchers (launchers are kind of like your “desktop”, it’s the main interface you use to launch apps from) and right now I’m favoring Launcher Pro, it seems a little quicker and more stable than ADW – though I did prefer the way ADW worked for customizing your screens.  ADW and LP can both do pretty much the same stuff – it’s just how you do it that’s different.  And it’s not like I’m constantly customizing things so the stability of LP is a much bigger plus for me.

Childrens Books

This surprised me.  As one of the big selling points of the nook color I expected quite a bit from the kids books selection.  And yes, the selection is pretty good with a lot of new books and a bunch of classics I remember from when I was a kid.  But the prices (like most kids book prices) are outrageous.  Pretty much any that support “read to me” start in the $10 range!  And even the non read to me books are in the $7 range which seems quite high given how small most of those books are.

But what really surprised me is how much better and more affordable the kids book in the android market are than the ones B&N sells.  Maybe this is a big part of why they’re dragging their feet on getting their own market launched and letting people use apps on non rooted nooks.  I was able to find a Mercer Meyer Little Critter book for $0.99 in the android market and it blows away the offerings from B&N.  Not only does it have read to me, but it also animates the pages with zoom effects and page turns, plus kids can touch various things on the page and it will show the word for them and speak them out loud.

I picked up a few other kids books that were cheap or free and our friend’s 4 year old Savannah had a blast with them last Wednesday.  In fact she spent more time reading kids books than she did playing games when I let her use the nook (though that may be mostly due to me not having many games loaded on it and her being bored with Angry Birds already )

So it’s a great device for kids books – but being rooted and getting them from the android market results in better books at a better price.

Magazines

I also went ahead and got myself two magazine subscriptions to try out.  Rolling Stone and Food Network.  Again like the kids books I’m a little underwhelmed.  When you buy magazines on the Nook color you get two weeks free to see if you like them which is nice.  But when I started the trial for Food Network it just hung and never completed until I rebooted and tried again.  I was able to get the Rolling Stone subscription started before rebooting so I’m guessing it was an issue with the B&N server or the publishers server and not something on my nook.

With my two subscriptions up and going I gave reading them a try.  The overall experience I found lacking compared to reading a real magazine.  The amount you can zoom in is fairly limited so on Rolling Stone zoomed in full you’re still not seeing things as big as in the actual paper magazine.  Which is a bummer because there is some great photography in there than I really enjoy and it does look great on the nook color and I would love to zoom in just a bit more to see more detail.  You also end up doing a lot of zooming and panning.  Viewing a full page (or two full pages in landscape) text is too small to read so you pretty much have to zoom in.  Which due to the nook colors great multi-touch capacitive screen is quick and easy.  But once you’re zoomed in you do a lot of panning to follow an article – and quite frequently I found myself accidentally flipping to the next or previous page trying to pan which results in loosing your zoom and having to zoom again.  That got old quick.

They do offer an article view which strips out the text of an article and presents it in a strip overlayed on top of the display.  It is easier to read that way, but you don’t get any of the images or graphics to go with it which kind of defeats the point of reading a magazine on a full color device like this.

Overall for the price of subscription I’m not sure I’ll be keeping my magazines very long.  I’ll give them a few months to see if they grow on me, but I could probably get the paper versions delivered for the same price or less than what they cost on the nook and have a better final product.  But who knows B&N may have some improvements in store and the publishers may come up with some changes on their end to take better advantage of this kind of delivery.  So while I’m disappointed I’m also cautiously optimistic.

There is one other problem I’ve discovered with the nook color which is probably mainly due to my oily skin.  I have to clean the screen two or three times an evening.  The oils from my hands build up on the screen and eventually reach a point where it’s detecting touches that simply aren’t there.  At which point I have to put it to sleep and clean it.  I’ve washed my hands more this week than normal (and my hand washing has already been much higher than normal since Katie was born!) but my skin is just oily and washing only helps for a few minutes.  I may try a screen protector to see if it helps, but for now I just keep the nook wrapped in a nice microfiber lens cleaning cloth I was given by Canon and it works wonders for keeping the screen clean.

I also ran into a little software problem trying to do a full nand backup (for you non techies that’s a very low level backup of the entire “Drive” that the nook runs on.)  I installed a custom “recovery partition” which makes this possible – but apparently there’s a small bug in the install process I wasn’t aware of which resulted in me being unable to boot anything but the recovery software.  Uh oh.  Thankfully the fix was easy (just had to use the recovery software to install a special package that un-installs the custom recovery, which is simply a matter of putting the package on the micro SD card and selecting it.)  I was then able to find instructions on fixing the bug and got the recovery working correctly so I can do full system backups.  Don’t think I’m going to do a custom ROM install anytime soon though.  Since the color boots of bootable SD by default I’ll stick with testing custom ROM’s on SD when I want to experiment with Froyo, Gingerbread and Honeycomb (newer versions of android.)  If someone manages to get the stock nook color apps running on one of those then I may consider flashing to a custom ROM but for now I like the stock rooted setup better than the full custom.

So like I opened this post with I’m going to close on the same note – I love this thing.  I can’t put it down.  I still switch to the e-ink nook for reading in bed and when I want to just read.  But I’ve barely touched our notebook the past week since almost everything I did on it I can now do on the nook color.  While the nook color hasn’t replaced my e-ink nook it does seem to have mostly displaced my notebook and it does complement my e-ink reader very nicely.

Well, sure enough we both fell in love with it as soon as she got it charged up.  So a few weeks later I managed to save up some cash and get myself one as well, another refurb to save money – but the price had gone up to $120 now.  Still with free shipping I considered it a deal and it’s gotten a lot of use.  (Before buying I actually went through and priced a lot of the books I’ve bought in the past 2 years and found that the nook would literally pay for itself within 2 years if my book buying habits stayed the same due to the lower cost of ebooks – which made the justification of buying one a lot easier.)

Of course me being me I couldn’t leave well enough along.  I had to root it.  This proved a little tricky.  The latest v1.5 software on the e-ink nook closed the hole that had been used for rooting in the past (mainly due to a change in hardware design causing the new versions of the nook to only work with Firmware 1.4.1 and newer while the old hack method relied on downgrading a nook to the original 1.0 firmware.)  The new method of rooting a nook really isn’t that hard if you have a router that lets you tweak it’s DNS resolver – but it’s still finicky and sometimes takes a few tries to work.

Once the nook is rooted you can do more with it – but it’s still fairly limited for a number of reasons:  The screens.  e-ink is slow to redraw so you’re not going to do video or anything on it.  The overall responsiveness of the nook is kind of slow as well – not a big deal when reading and all you have to do is redraw the page every now and then…but for trying to make it to much else it’s really clunky.   There were two things I added with the nook rooted though and for me they were worth the cost of entry – Trook and a Crossword game.  Crosswords are self-explanatory, but Trook warrants a bit of description.  Basically it’s an amped up RSS reader, but it also supports various on-line library formats like Stanza and OPDS.  It comes with a couple of free libraries pre-loaded but you can also setup your own if you have a bunch of ebooks you want to organize better than the nook makes possible internally.

To be honest I don’t think I’d recommend rooting the e-ink nook to most people.  It seems to reduce the battery life, I’ve had problems with the nook suddenly loosing it’s registration which means you can’t access any of your B&N books until you re-register which isn’t hard…but if you’re not near a Wifi (like on an airplane) you’re screwed until you can get connectivity again.  I fixed most of the loss of registration issues by not disabling automatic B&N updates – but rebooting the nook, which I almost never have to do, does still cause it to loose registration and Amy’s non-rooted nook doesn’t have that problem.

But the main reason I wouldn’t suggest rooting is because the nook classic is a GREAT e-reader without rooting it.  It’s one of those wonderful devices that does what it’s meant to do, does it outstandingly well and really leaves me with very few complaints.  At least with the 1.5 software – the older firmware page draws were annoyingly slow.  They’re still not LCD fast but they’re completely tolerable and a small price to pay for a device that can go the better part of a week with regular use and no charging.  I don’t get the 10 days battery live B&N claims…but that’s probably because I do more than 1 hour of reading a day like the expect.  I get about 2 hours of reading a night and seem to have to recharge every 3-5 days depending on how much I’ve been able to read.  With an e-ink screen simply being on uses almost no power at all, it’s the page draws that use power so using a smaller font and fewer page flips you can get better battery life.

Which is another interesting side of the e-ink nook.  The screen is just a little small for my tastes.  I tend to like paperbacks over hardcovers since I find them more comfortable to hold and the page/font size is more pleasing to me in general.  But the nook’s standard settings end up with less on a page than even standard trade paperbacks.  So you’ll have to read 2-3 “pages” before the page counter goes up a page.  I also found that I MUCH prefer epub format books over PDF format books.  PDF forces too much formatting while epub reflows better.  PDF also forces a font on you and on a screen like the nooks that can make some books hard to read.  The flexibility of epub is a BIG bonus with an e-reader.

The biggest complaint I have really about ebooks isn’t so much about the readers or the books as it is about the options for DRM (Digital Rights Management) – the software that keeps you from stealing books. One of the things I really like best about the nook over the Kindle is the nooks support for more formats.  With a Kindle you’re pretty much stuck with buying books from Amazon and reading PDF’s which as I already said are non-optimal for ereaders.  With the Nook you have a lot of options.  I’ve downloaded ebooks from our library in epub and pdf format, I’ve bought books from google, and of course I’ve bought books from B&N right through the nook and through their website.

The B&N option is of course the simplest.  It just works.  And if you have more than one device linked to your account your content just happily shows up on all of them.  So when I got my new nook color as soon as I registered it all my B&N books from my nook classic were right there.  If you use the nook app for android or iphone it works the same way.  Nice!

Adding books you got from non B&N sources, known as “sideloading”, isn’t quite as simple and the nooks handling of them internally isn’t the best.  You have to use USB to add them – no way to do it over Wifi currently.  And for books with DRM like the ones from the library and most from google books and other sources you’ll need to use ADE (Adobe Digital Editions).  ADE can be goofy.  I was able to get it running on our Linux notebook through WINE but it took a lot of work and still requires tweaking some settings in WINE each time I want to use it.   On my windows desktop it just installed and ran no issues….but it still sometimes freaks out when getting permission to open some books.  Really ADE is the big weak point in the entire system right now despite being the least obnoxious option for DRM (which while I loathe I’m willing to accept is necessary if you’re going to get publishers to offer popular books…at least in todays society.)

So my bottom line on the e-ink nook is that it’s a great ereader that has met and exceeded all of my expectations.  I love reading on the e-ink screen, it’s not much heavier than the paperbacks I normally ready, the books are cheaper, I can carry my entire library around with it, and I can go days without having to charge it.

There are a few things B&N could improve in the software.  The store is a little annoying to navigate and doesn’t use your past purchases to help find other books you may be interested in (Their website can, and the nook color’s store does.)  Generally I find it easier to use the website than to buy books right from the nook.  The support for side-loaded books is also minimal.  They’re segregated from your B&N books and there’s no way to organize them and only minimal ways to sort.  So if you have a large library it can be hard to find the book you’re looking for.  Note: There is a custom library that solves these complaints but you have to root the nook to install it.   But really software complaints are a minor issue since afterall they can be fixed with new software – and B&N has so far done a good job (not a great job) of releasing new firmware with fixes and improved features.   And while I doubt they’ll ever combine your B&N library with your sideloaded library since they want to encourage you to use the B&N stuff – I do hope they’ll add better sorting and searching of both libraries in the future.

Enter the nook color

So being a big fan of my nook yesterday I found myself with some birthday money and debating what to do with it.  I tossed an idea out to Amy expecting her to talk me out of it “What if I put my birthday money and the B&N gift card Katie got me towards a color nook?”  My ever predictable wife proved to be completely unpredictable and instead of being the fiscally responsible one I know her to be instead more or less talked me INTO buying a nook color instead of talking me out of it as I expected.

I wasn’t totally convinced.  I don’t like the idea of a backlit LCD for reading, and I’m not sure the hardware of the nook color is that well suited to use as a tablet computer instead of just an e-reader.  But I figured I’d go up to our local B&N so I could play with one and make a more informed choice.  ”Fortunately” the display model’s battery was dead so the only way for me to try one was to buy one.  I figured I can return it if I don’t like it so why not and pulled the trigger.

My initial impression before even opening the box was that B&N is getting good at this.  The box itself is impressive.  Nice heft to it and it’s a cool clamshell design with a magnet embedded in it so it snaps open and closed.  Really other than Apple I can’t think of any hardware I’ve ever bought that came packaged this impressively.  Taking the nook color out of the box I found where that heft came from.  It’s considerably heavier than the e-ink nook.  (According to on-line sources the weight of an e-ink nook is similar to a 400 page trade paperback while the weight of a color nook is similar to a 400 page trade hardcover…but to me the color feels a little heavier than that.)

I haven’t had the nook color for even 24 hours yet.  So my impressions are still very much initial impressions.  But right off I found my preconceived notion to be correct.  As a reading device I don’t like it.  It’s a great bright colorful screen which is very impressive.  But not at all what I want for reading.  Yes you can turn the brightness down…but then it looses contrast and isn’t any easier on my eyes.  There also aren’t hardware buttons for page flips which means you have to touch the screen or do finger swipes which I find distracting – with the e-ink my fingers just fall right on the page buttons and flipping pages is no effort at all, heck it’s easier than reading a “real” book.  The color does respond to page flip swipes MUCH better than the e-ink does but I still miss the hardware buttons.

The other issue with the screen is it gets dirty.  You touch it a lot since it’s a touchscreen.  I may have to invest in a screen protector to keep it nice especially if I let Katie start to use it for kids books at some point.  And that’s the one reading task it really exceeds at.  The NC came pre-loaded with a sample kids book featuring “read to me” where it reads the book out loud.  I gave it a try and Katie was instantly drawn to it.  I still prefer to do the reading myself but it’s a neat option and sure caught Katie’s attention even at only 9 months old.  But with a kid using it I imagine the issue of keeping the screen clean will only get worse.  Thankfully the bright backlit LCD does help minimize the annoyance of the dirty screen since it makes the smudges less noticeable…but at some angles they can suddenly jump out at you.

Unless your primary reading is magazines and/or kids books where the bright color screen is not just impressive but necessary I really can’t recommend the nook color as a reader.  I tried reading some of the novel I’m currently reading on my e-ink nook on it and after just a dozen pages or so was ready to go back to the e-ink.  Reading on the NC is like reading on a computer, reading on the e-ink nook is like reading a book.  For before bed reading the e-ink is a huge win since the backlight of the LCD on the NC is just as bad as watching TV or using a computer and that light shining at my face can make it hard to fall asleep afterwards.

But I’m not about to return my new nook color despite finding it sorely lacking as an e-reader.  Because as you’re probably already guessed if you know me I had to root it the same night I got it.

Rooted Nook Color

Rooted the NC is a whole different story.  It’s an amazingly capable tablet computer at a price that no other options come close to.  Yes it’s lacking a few things I’d really like to see in a tablet (Microphone, GPS, Bluetooth – though the hardware is there it’s just not supported in software and may not have a good antenna since it’s not supported) but what it does have is remarkably good.  The 800mhz processor is slower than that in many new high end phones…but can be overclocked and really seems to do just fine.  It feels faster than any other android phones I’ve used already and the capacitive screen is very responsive and supports multi-touch – pinch zooms work great and instantly.

The root itself is almost as simple as can be.  You just have to burn a special image onto a microSD card, turn the nook off, put the card in, then plug the USB cord into the NC and your computer.  Then wait about 5 minutes until the NC reboots itself.  The Auto nooter does all the work for you and installs all the standard android tools you’d expect as well as configuring any options that need adjusting.

Getting the android market working does take a bit of fiddling (you have to use the youtube and gmail apps to get your account setup) but isn’t that hard if you can follow instructions.  With the market installed it was a piece of cake to add an android launcher to replace the stock B&N interface – and boom the NC works just like a standard android tablet.

Google sky does seem a bit flaky, not sure if it doesn’t like the accelerometer in the NC or if it’s due to the lack of GPS.  But otherwise every app I’ve tried has just worked.

I’m currently using ADW as the launcher and it does have a little issue due to the resolution of the nook.  As a result you end up with a lot of wasted space on the screen and it’s showing as “full” even though it looks like there’s plenty of room for twice as many app shortcuts.  This is correctable and is due to the way scaling works on android and the settings B&N used on the nook to try and make it a better e-reader.  I haven’t had time to mess with changing it yet and really the empty space is no worse than the same thing on an iPad where it always kind of bugged me.   I also haven’t tried other launchers yet just because I haven’t had time.

I only have 2 other complaints about it and so far they’re both very minor.  First the “home” button is a bit too stiff for my taste and a bit loud when it clicks.  But that’s a VERY minor complaint and if you toss it in a backpack or purse I’m sure those same things probably count as features to keep it from waking itself up.  The other complaint is that the back cover just kind of feels cheap.  The overall feel of the NC is VERY VERY good – yes it’s a bit heavier than I’d like but it feels solid and well made.  Except for that back cover.  And really the big problem with the back cover is that it feels loose in one spot.  If that spot didn’t happen to be right where my left fingertips rest when I hold it I doubt I’d even notice it or mind.  So again it’s a VERY minor complaint.

After less than 24 hours my initial impression on the nook color is pretty much what I expected – very sub-optimal as an ereader and if that was what I bought it for I’d probably be taking it back.  But outstanding as a budget tablet that costs less than $300.

So, up, up and up I got. I showered, got dressed, ate some cantaloupe while checking e-mail and Facebook, read the morning news (at least as much as I could take). I read the morning pregnancy blogs and yelled a lot at the dog (who thinks it is her bounden duty to bark at everything that moves past the house).

The day was paved with good intentions. I planned to (not in any certain order): take a painting into the frame shop; go to the bank; the library; church choir practice; take the hound to the dog park; go grocery shopping; make important phone calls to family members, among others; get the rest of the nursery cleaned out and ready to paint tomorrow; and get all the thank you notes written for various baby showers over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, not a lot of that happened.

Psammy and I took off for the dog park about 9:20. With the Yuma traffic, we got there at 9:30, where there was butt-sniffing, barking and rough-housing galore, plus numerous trips to the water bowl to replenish Psammy’s bladder so she could continue to mark territory. She seemed to have unlimited quantities of energy; I did not. But I managed to sit down on the bench for a while after it was vacated and I chilled with the doggies. The temperature was so perfect and the dogs behaved for the most part. However, I have to say this: if you pull a dog’s tail repeatedly (even if you are 75 years old) don’t get upset when the dog snaps at you. Geez! After the second tail-pulling session, I got fed up and Psammy and I left. She seemed tired (but apparently she was just fooling me) and laid down in the truck all the way home (in the front, cause that’s where mommy lets her ride when daddy is not with us).

Home about 10:45ish and I realized I didn’t have a lot of time to get ready for the next big event of the day: Kerry and Rox’s baby shower at noon. I still had to get hostess gifts and thank you cards and I still needed to go to the bank, etc. And I had missed church choir practice since I took Psammy to the bark park. So, chop, chop, I tried to find something to wear, that was cool (I was so hot at this point of the day). Not a lot to choose from since I hadn’t shaved my legs (I can barely see them anyway, but you don’t show up to a party given in your honor with hairy legs, or other hygenic faux pauxs but I have never been a person who looks ‘put together’ so most days I don’t bother), so dresses or shorts were out. And I thought I’d better wear a maternity shirt since it was a party for a pregnant woman. Better try to look pregnant (a side note: I have looked mostly fat throughout my pregnancy, not cute and pregnant; I get a lot of the “Well, you don’t look pregnant” sentiment, as if it is the worst thing in the world to look pregnant. It’s not folks.).

By this time, I was running out of time, so I hastened downtown to do some short errand and ended up at Kerry’s house about 12:05, not too late, but not too early. Lots of good friends came, and it was a blast playing with Sydney. But at this point, having been up for almost 5 hours, I was already exhausted. Big time. I felt like I was wading through syrup for most of the party and food did not help. It is so easy to get tired here toward the end (we are almost at week 37).

But I did make it home for a nap at 3:00, slept until 4:15. Well, moved in and out of sleep for that long anyway. My pelvis was really sore at this point. Sitting was painful, laying down was painful. I couldn’t be on my left side because it felt like my hip joint was rubbing itself to bone (and probably is, given what the knees and ankles look like on X-ray). Now it is 10:29 and I have accomplished very little. Never made it to bank; or choir; or frame shop or grocery store; or get phone calls placed to family and other important stuff. Still no labor bag packed. But we did get the nursery ready for painting, I did get some notes written, the bedding in the back is spinning in the wash and the baby is fed. We get to start all over again tomorrow. Let’s just hope I don’t wake up at 7:30 again.

Oh sure, she has a regular wake/sleep pattern that I know pretty well. She does change it up every couple of days, though, I guess this is normal. I like laughing at her and how she vies for my attention or if I put something on my stomach that she doesn’t like or wants to play with (Wii controller, she likes; tight pants, not so much).With the first baby, it’s hard to know. Everyone has an opinion and everyone says something different. That just goes to show you how unique babies are as individuals even when they aren’t here yet.

And speaking of “getting here,” we hit 34 weeks on Tuesday, so baby is coming soon. A couple in our childbirth class who was a month ahead of us (timewise, anyway) had their baby on Wednesday, a beautiful boy. So, it seems more real as time draws closer. If only the nursery were done. But that’s a weekend project for this weekend (hopefully).

My rear fence is really hurting again.  I don’t expect the older tarp to last the night on the carport.

USGS maps of quakes near us from this afternoon.

Checking the live map now it looks like it’s up to 533.

Oh well, at least distant friends and family can get an idea of what Amy looks like right now.   Full album here.

So here it goes, a bit of background and then the first steps of building my second cigar box guitar:

So first a little background. Back in their first year Make Magazine ran an article on an electric cigar box guitar. It was strung with masons line and used a piezo element for a pickup. I was intrigued. But I can’t play guitar and don’t have an amp. So it was filed away as something for another day. And sure enough a few issues latter Make ran an article on how to make a cheap amp out of a LM386 audio amplifier chip.

It just so happens I have a handfull of LM386′s laying around. Back in High School and friend and I bought a bunch to build small amplifiers to go with some experiments we were doing with building our own sound cards. (Well, not full sound card’s. Just resistor tree DAC’s hung off a parallel port with the computer doing the hard part.) I even knew right where I had the 386′s. A quick trip to Radio Shack for a few little things I didn’t have on hand, and a trip into the garage to find an old surround speaker without it’s twin followed by an evening on the breadboard and with the soldering iron later:

I had an amp!  I also finally came up with a cigar box and decided it was time to build.  I followed the instructions in Make and came up with:

My first cigar box guitar!  It was strung with masons line as the Make article suggested.  I experimented with nails held on with rubber bands for frets like the article used…but found it easier to play fretless.  Not that I could actually play anything.  I also had a heck of a time trying to get it into any kind of tune and within a few days found a number of online cigar box guitar sites and learned just what was possible.  I ended up replacing the twine with actual guitar strings fairly quickly, then modifying the eye bolt tuners to try and get them to hold the tension of the real strings.  But it just wasn’t working well.  Plus the tension of the strings was starting to warp the neck.

So I never really liked it enough to really learn to play it.  A few friends who already knew how to play guitar did manage to crank out some actual music with it though so I knew the potential was there.  And eventually (this past November) I ended up getting some actual tuning machines for it and suddenly it was playable enough I started to get interested in it again.  I even cut up some cotter pins and made frets for it.  The neck was still warping worse and worse but I was actually able to start learning how to play it successfully for the first time.

And about that same time my friend J mentioned he had an empty cigar box if I wanted to try and build another.  It took awhile for us to get together and to finally get my hands on the box, and at first I wasn’t very hyped about it.  It was very plain, in a reddish brown color that didn’t call out to me, and it was built differently than most cigar boxes.  But it was nice thin real wood, and did ring nicely when I knocked it with my knuckles.   Besides I still had 3 tuners left over and was itching to build!  So on the way hope I stopped and picked up some red oak to make a neck, and a smaller piece to make a fingerboard.  The color of the box was starting to give me ideas.  I also looked through every home improvement store in town looking for little brass hinges or other things that might make a nice tail piece to make mounting the strings easier.  I bought a couple hinges but ended up not using any of them.

My first attempt at using real tuners on the first CBG was very rough and I wasn’t 100% happy with how it came out.  There wasn’t enough break over the nut even with the tuners cut in like that, the tuners weren’t positioned very well at all.  But it did give me ideas and inspiration for another idea on how to do the head.  Not wanting to waste the one chunk of oak I had on hand I decided to test my idea on a piece of cheap pine first.

The idea worked.  And the little chunk of pine strung up with strings I didn’t use on an actual guitar ended up being nice for testing how boxes sound, just touch it to them and give it a strum to get a feel for the tone of a box.  I did cut the lower portion just a hair too thin on this test – but since it was just scrap wood anyway that was no big deal.  It was also good practice to get a feel for how to make the necessary cuts and how to do a better job on the piece of oak.  Thanks to that the oak came out very nice when I did finally put it on the saw

I did burn the oak a little on the blade of the table saw, most of it sanded out but some is still visible.  While waiting for the glue on the head joint to dry I worked on the fingerboard.   The first box had an absurdly long scale length since it was meant to be used with the masons line originally and I never got around to shortening it up.  It also had way too much action making it VERY difficult to play without a slide.  So this time I knew I wanted to have lower string action and a shorter scale.  I figured using a fingerboard on top of the neck would help get better break over the nut and bridge while enabling me to set the action up nice and low.  I also planned on using real frets this time so with a separate fingerboard if I messed up I just had to make a new fingerboard and not a whole new neck.

But it’s time for me to start thinking about making dinner, and this is getting to be a fairly long post so I’m going to leave it hanging here until I get a chance to update again.  It probably won’t be tomorrow night (we’ve got brew night) and it probable won’t be for a few days after that since Kieth is supposed to be in town for a few days starting any day now.  But just like I finally got around to starting this story I promise I will get around to continuing it.  I need to finish it up soon too, CBG #3 and #4 are already under construction and I’d rather be talking about them right now.