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.

But it’s the last day of the contest so I’ve got to try one more entry:

How to build a cigar box guitar – Free Plans at www.cigarboxnation.com.

In the meantime rather than post about my own CBG I’ve been building…which I really should do.  I’m going to post about Cigarboxnation so I can try and win a professionally built CBG.  In exchange I promise I’ll come back and post a real writeup about my CBG at some point…and update this software…and install Amy a blog for the upcoming baby.  Oh yeah…I guess I haven’t even mentioned that here lately either.  Facebook…you made me lazy!

Anyway, here’s what finally made me remember my password and post an update:

How to build a cigar box guitar – Free Plans at www.cigarboxnation.com.

Oh.  And I know that both nevermindthesand.com and blog.dunephotos.com are having problems getting here right now.  Just haven’t had time to deal with it.

Ok, I know I’ve promised a couple of people a weekend update.  It’s going to be a bit longer…it’s really not worth the wait…but I don’t have ANY photos to go with it.  And since the whole point of the weekend was photography that just doesn’t seem right.  The chemicals are cooling right now so I can process the film I shot and Amy will hopefully give me her memory card tonight.  So this is just a place holder post.

The reason for the placeholder?  I added a new skill to my resume just now.  Camera repair!  I recently bought a Bronica ETRS off ebay for $45.  The camera is gorgeous, looks like it’s been in it’s original box it’s whole life.  But – something was wrong.  I could remove the film back with the darkslide out…and the shutter wouldn’t release.  Not wanting to make it any worse but now having everything except a body I placed another order, this time to KEH, for a new body…and while I was at it a $10 “ugly” finder, a $10 “ugly” speed grip and a $30 “Bargain” 150mm lens to go with the $50 “Bargain” body.

The new body from KEH works great.  I found that my $10 ebay special film back sometimes skips frames…but for $10…what are ya going to do.  I’ll just keep my eyes open for a deal on a back in better condition…I want 2-3 more anyway.

So tonight with the original and much nicer looking but locked up body sitting on my desk teasing me I figured “What the heck”.  It’s broken already…let’s see what’s wrong.  Working the winder and various levers and catchs I thought I had a pretty good idea what may be wrong with it.  There was one lever that appeared to be behind something it should have been in front of….it was part of the lens release mechanism but seemed to be connected to the film back detection levers.  So I took that side off first.  Examining the workings I pretty much determined that yes – that piece was what was causing the problem.

But couldn’t get it back into it’s proper position without releasing the shutter…which I still couldn’t do from this side.  So I screwed it back together and took the other side off instead.

Figured out the other shutter interlocks on that side…but still couldn’t release the shutter.  Decided to put two and two together at that point.  Took the other side back apart again so both sides were now bare…and manually triggered the safety while pressing the shutter…ca-chunk.  It worked, the shutter released!  Recocked the shutter…and pressed the shutter without manually overriding anything…ca-chunk – it worked again!

Put the sides back and and dry fired it a few more times…it works great!  What’s more is I think I know how it happened.  I think that if you cock the shutter while holding the lens release back this could happen.   I didn’t test it while I had the sides off…but I’m going to avoid doing that just to be safe

So here’s the guts of my now repaired camera:

What was wrong

 That was where I found the problem.  The little round thing with the spring around it is part of the lens release.  There’s a little lever that’s supposed to be captured by the groove on that deal.  It was behind it instead.  This is after I fixed it so you can’t really see the lever that was misplaced.

Access to the problem area

This was the sideview of the problem area.  The lever that was misplaced is attached to the brass bar near the bottom.  The entire thing was supposed to be pushed more forward.  Pushing the grey bit on the right towards the lens tricked the camera into thinking the film back was properly seated and the darkslide was removed.  That should be the default position…but the lever was stuck against the round thing which kept it from returning to the default position.  Pushing the grey bit forward was the key to releasing the shutter and allowing things to reset properly!

The winding mechanism

And this is the other side, the infamous winding mechanism which is apparently one of the first things to go on these cameras.  Figuring out how the shutter release worked from here helped me figure out how to solve the problem.  But I now know the problem could have been solved entirely from the other side.  Still neat that I got to see this.

So – I now have two working ETRS bodies.  I’ll probably keep this one and re-sell the KEH one…or I may keep it as a spare.  We’ll have to see what happens!

I think it’s cooled now…and Amy just got home from work with dinner and some ice cream to go with it   My first attempt at a lattice (could have used one more strip in the one direction) and my first apple…hope it’s good!  Sure smelled good!