November is time to do things...

So, as per the past few months I have been quite slow to update and quite lazy to produce things. But I'm going to try to switch that up for November. Just by writing this giant post I'm off to a good start. (Halloween costume pictures at the bottom)

One of the things I want to do includes actually finally making the arcade controller. I've invited friends over on the 20th specifically to play games on this thing, so it will be done. As a matter of fact, about a week ago I bought wood and material to put it together and tonight I finally decided on the button layout. I wanted to drill holes as well but I need a second opinion on spacing before I commit to drilling. So that's set aside for tomorrow instead.

Another thing I'll be doing this month is writing (what will hopefully become) my next Christmas book. But right now I'm aiming for one long novel, rather than itty bitty short stories. And to motivate myself I've joined the ranks of NaNoWriMo. An effort to get wannabe writers to take the month of November to write a 50,000 word novel. Seeing as how my last Christmas book was only 6500 words of new content(though only written in about 4 or 5 days), I'm not holding myself to 50K but we'll see how far it goes.

Also I showed my untouched violin project to a musician friend of mine over the weekend and he seemed to feel like it wasn't the worst thing ever. At least for what I had. A few months ago I was extremely disheartened when I attempted to put the chin rest on it and the very heavy weight of it kept making the chin rest come off. His not completely negative comments about the violin have renewed my interest so I'm going to start working on this again after the controller is done.

As proof that I should be able to get these things done, with a little help and some significant deadlines the whole week leading up to Halloween I spent working on my costume. During the process, I sewed a green cape, a brown satchel, and a pair of sword holsters.

With a bit of help to make a mask, I crumpled tinfoil, plastered, glued tissue paper, and painted.

And I grommeted and laced a shirt. I think it all came together very nicely.

Time to do more things!

I've got two pictures to share.

First, I got my shipment of joysticks and buttons! This is to round out the rest of my 4player arcade controller. Red and Blue will be first and second players with six buttons each. Green and Yellow will be 3rd and 4th players with four buttons each. Then each player gets a #player button and a coin button. The things on the right side of the picture are switches and fasteners.

Just need to swing down to home depot to get wood and screws and this thing should go together pretty quickly!

Second, is the pair of Thai fisherman pants that I mentioned in my last post. I swear they are comfy and look much better while worn.

Not very punctual at all

So then a month and a half passed without a single post. I've been quite unproductive but that isn't to say I've done nothing.

About three weeks ago I saw some interesting looking pants called Thai fisherman pants. They looked pretty comfy and relatively easy to make. So I looked online to find some patterns, went down to the fabric store and got to work.

Pair of pants #1 was a failure. The idea behind the fisherman pants is that they are one size fits all. So my small girlfriend Oz and I each planned to make a pair. She finished her pants the day after we started and they fit her great. That should have been my first impression something was wrong with mine. After an hour or so my pants were nearly done and they didn't come anywhere close to fitting properly. I abandoned them to Oz and she finished up the hems and waist tie. It also fit her quite well.

A day later with more fabric and armed with a new pattern, I started work on another pair of pants. Made the pattern, cut the fabric, sewed it together and rejoiced! It fit much nicer. Hemmed the pants all the way up to the knee and my fisherman pants became fisherman shorts.

(pictures of both to be posted later today)

Hopefully this weekend I'll get back to work on that violin...

This is a Zombie Blog

Cause I'm back from the dead. Seemingly I have had a very UNproductive month. No posts for nearly four weeks... whoops. Anyway... Check this out!

I made an arcade control panel! This is just a preliminary design. I was inspired a week or two ago to play some old arcade games emulated on my computer. And what's the point of playing old arcade games without old arcade controls?

This was just step one. I plan on having a party with a bunch of friends and the goal for it is to have a setup that four people can play at once. This was made just to order some parts to make sure they were good quality and assure myself I could handle it.

If you're interested here's a picture of the inside. You can see my lazy unorganized wiring but again this was just to make sure it works. In the bottom portion of the box you can see a white and green circuit board which makes the whole thing possible and very simple to boot. Also the lovely wooden box used to be an endoscope box; it probably likes its new job better.

Flat Land

Went down for a weekend trip to Long Beach Island this weekend and brought along my violin and some tools. I decided it'd be a good time to try out the hand planer. The setting seemed right since the island only has an elevation change of 12 feet over the course of 18 miles.

The first two pictures are of the backside. If I was going to mess up, it should be on the side people won't necessarily see. You can plainly see where the different sections were glued together. Also you can see the shaping I did two weeks ago, the side pieces were hand filed down to get the curve I wanted.

Before planing:




Then after some trial and error, some blood and blisters, and about 4 hours later. The top and back of the body were nicely planed down, as well as the top of the neck and the top of the headstock.

After planing shots:




Here's the look of the whole thing so far, couldn't crop this picture down while at work. There's still plenty more work to be done on it. I need to file down the curves more and take off a lot more wood.

2 Steps and 1 Week Later

After the main body was glued together, I went away for the weekend and let it set thoroughly(the glue only needs 24 hours to properly set). Once I got home, I removed all of the clamps and it was definitely solid.

Since then I've done more to the violin but forgot to take photos of the progress. Last Monday I cut out a few small blocks to add to the main body for aesthetics and some level of functionality. They were glued into position and left alone for a day. Following that I cut out a larger portion of the neck using the jigsaw. Between the hardness of the wood and the irregularities of my previous cuts the difficulty of using the jigsaw has made me give up on it.

The most recent thing I've done has been to rasp down the curves of the body. The curves are nowhere near finished but at least I've shown myself that I can continue refining the violin's shape without power tools. After I spend a little more time on the curves I'm going to see how the planer handles leveling the top and bottom. And may test out how a drill and chisel can help me on the project.

A robot could hold this better

So a few hours pass and TA-DA!

I cut up the third piece and got to work gluing and clamping. With a little forethought it wasn't ridiculously difficult to get this set up. Now it needs to be left alone for 24 hours to properly cure. I may try to add the side pieces to the body tomorrow but we'll see about that later.

Sawdust everywhere

My current workshop is my basement, where I get to duck ever so slightly because of the low ceiling and which I'm nestled between boxes of empty wine bottles and a few bicycles. It works out well because it's below ground. Working down there shouldn't be too noisy and I don't have to worry about any mess I make.

Speaking of which, red sawdust everywhere. I didn't think to take the picture until I had already swept up most of it. But I collected about a cup and a half into a jar for whatever reason I could possibly use for bloodwood sawdust(maybe filling in cracks with mixed epoxy?)


And all that sawdust has to come from somewhere. I've now cut out two and a half of the profile pieces. They're looking pretty rough but that's what they're meant to be. I left around half a centimeter of wood around the outline because I wasn't sure of how straight my cuts would be or if the blade was properly set to perpendicular. I didn't get a chance to finish cutting the last piece because I started after dinner and I figured 9 o'clock was a good time to turn off power tools.


This afternoon's work will include finishing the last rough cut and gluing/clamping the whole thing together. As well as cutting down a few small pieces to glue on the next day for shaping the upper and lower body.

Yea, yea, yea, but what about Phase 2?

Well, Phase 3 is profit. And Phase 1 was collect all the parts(read: underpants).

So far Phase 2 includes:

-Use an old jigsaw to cut out a test piece. And after less than an inch of cutting, understand that the old jigsaw just isn't going to cut it(pun intended)

-Borrow a relatively new jigsaw from work.

-Use the new jigsaw to cut out a test piece. (More or less accomplished)

-Get the bloodwood and cut it up into 4 separate pieces. (Totally accomplished)

And that's it so far. The next immediate step is to cut the pieces down to a rough cut level. Three of the four pieces you can see above have the profile view penciled onto them. I'll probably cut them to within a few millimeters of the penciled lines. At that point I think it will be time for gluing and clamping. After that point it's a mystery, but hopefully I will soon decide.

Hope to do the rough cuts tomorrow or the next day.

4/4 Violin Project Begun

The 4/4 refers to a full size violin. Violins are made in multiple sizes for children as their arms get longer. 3/4 is the next size down, then 1/2 and 1/4. I think I heard the sizes go as far as 1/16 or 1/32 but a 1/32 is not actually one-thirty-second the size it's just smaller.

So I've finally gathered up all of the important parts and pieces and tools that I should need to make my violin. (Except wood glue and strings but those aren't important yet) And here they are:

Top Left- The fitted bridge
Top Right- Tail piece and connector
Left- Chin rest
Bottom- Ebony fingerboard


These are the open gear tuners.


Here's a close up of the gorgeous bloodwood I'll be making this out of. (It's ridiculously heavy for a single piece of wood) Also this 7-foot-long, 4-inch-wide piece cost $27.38 and was only 2.115 boardfeet. I never want to make a table out of exotic hardwood, it'd cost a fortune.


And last are the rough sketches I made of the side view and top down view. I'll be making another set of these that are "finalized" to trace onto the bloodwood for the first roughcut.


I'm planning on cutting three pieces of the Side view and then laminating(wood glueing) them together. Then measuring things out and making the rough cut for the top down view. After that point it should all be planing, filing, drilling and sanding. Let's see how this goes.

Violin Project 3/4 Begun

Earlier this week the guitar tuners came in the mail. It's a set of six open tuners with 3 for each side of the headstock. The "open" refers to the fact that you can see the peg screw and the gear that it turns. Since violins only have 4 strings, I'll end up with 2 spares.

Now that all of the hardware I ordered has been delivered, I started sketching out the blueprints to get an understanding of dimensions. I made both a side view and top-down view. They're mostly finished except I haven't decided on what angle the headstock should be. The neck of the violin is 3degrees lower than the body; this sets the strings and fretboard in line with one another. Yet the angle of the headstock does not effect the functionality of playing so the angle can vary. Seemingly different manufacturers claim it effects the tone of the instrument and as a result the manufacturer selects an angle and makes it their standard. I might just decide to make it 5 degrees, very scientific.

While mentioning the headstock and drawings, companies patent the design of the instruments' headstocks. Though the shape of the headstock doesn't change the sound much at all, companies usually put their brand name on it and try to make a recognizable shape to associate to their brand. So I went ahead and sketched tons of different shapes to try to find my design but in the end simply rounded the top to make the woodworking as simple as possible.

Also since the dimensions have been drawn out, I can make an educated guess as to the amount of wood I need. And if it stays dry enough, I'll stop by the lumber yard after work today to pick some up. Another thing after work today is going out to dinner with Oz's parents which means I get a random assortment of tools!

Violin Project 1/2 Begun

So with the piezo pickup working out just fine, the electrical department is all taken care of. Also tonight Oz and I are getting dinner with her family for her dad's birthday but I'm the one getting presents in the form of hand-me-down tools. I'm hoping then that I'll have the majority of tools I need to get started. With everything lining up, I went ahead and purchased the parts and pieces I expect to need to make the electric violin:

1 Ebony Fingerboard - $10 For another 10 cents I got the 'Better Grade' AND interesting fact, ebony is poisonous.
1 Hardwood, Black Dyed, Violin Chinrest - $5.75
1 Violin Fitted Bridge 4/4 size - $2.50
1 Ebony Tailpiece 4/4 size - $4.25
1 Tailpiece Adjuster - $2.40
1 6pc. Set of Open Gear Guitar Tuners - $12.53

Total $37.43 +13.95 for shipping

I'll still need to get violin strings but I'll grab some tonight as we pass the music store. I also need the actual wood, which I'll check out the local lumber yard to see what they have and figure out what I'd need.

In other news D&D this past weekend went well. The players checked out 2 more dungeons, and figured out a puzzle through trial and error. Nobody fell into any of the lava traps. And they were ambushed. I may scan in another the dungeon map with the lava traps marked out. Oz is on a mission to make more gridded, laminated paper so I can have more space to work with. The dungeons have so far been very small, more like intricate chambers rather than sprawling dungeons.

Stories live in your blood and bones... and your internets.

"As you head to your favorite search engine and look for streaming websites of your top ten childhood cartoon shows, you're browsing the internet. On any of your searches, you're seeing the top 10% of the internet. That's referred to as the green zone and we secure it to keep you safe.

We accomplish that goal by clicking farther and linking deeper. We've been to the red zone, where there are far worse than pirates, identity thieves and viruses. It's the Unmoderating Host of bots and spammers, and these are not the kind that you grew up with. These are self-replicating plagues and auto-updating digital monsters. We get in the way of their encrypted packets as they attempt to spread and we Control, Alter and Delete.

We are The InterNauts, We're going IN."

I had some semblance of this idea for quite a while and last night it clicked in my head. A fantasy story about fighting monsters and brigands on the internet in a lawless place. Like the idea of sea monsters in the ocean back in the 1000-1300's mixed with the lawlessness of the wild west, all taking place on the internet.

And I have never heard it used before but I googled "Internauts" and it's already a slang word for people learning about the internet, and protocol and yaddayaddayadda. But maybe nobody's made a story about it yet. So that task can be up to me :)

The past few days I've also been working on the story line and settings for the next game of D&D happening this Saturday. Hopefully I'm further prepared for anything the players can think of doing.

Great Expectations, That's the one with Pip right?

So as some may know, I tend to have very big ideas but fall short on the follow through. Due to the vast resources of the internet that we all wade through, I occasionally come across items or projects that I figure "I can make that."

For about a year, one of my idealized projects was to make an electric violin. After months of procrastination interspersed with research, I've taken one step forward toward this goal. That first step was making this:


Simply put, this is an acoustic pickup for my guitar or any vibrating instrument. Specifically, it's a piezo element wired to a 1/4" TRS jack. The piezo element has crystals between two metal plates and when the plates vibrate causes the crystals to produce an electrical signal. The black wire from the piezo is soldered to the Sleeve(ground) connector and the red wire is soldered to the Tip connector. There weren't specific directions about wiring and as a result yesterday this did not work. After a bit more plodding through the internet I found I soldered the black wire to the Ring connector rather than the Sleeve(ground). NOW IT WORKS! I'll try to put some audio up at a later time.

Also during the construction phase I had to make a wire with 1/4" plugs to attach the pickup to an amp. So I grabbed scrap wires from around the office and ended up with this little 3 foot guy.



Now after this whole process, I know for sure that the "electric" part of my electric violin plan will work. My next step is to acquire any sort of wood working tools I can get my hands on, buy a few specific violin parts and get some nice hardwood. If anyone would like to donate planers, chisels or power tools Please let me know.

Hardly Weakly

As my last post was the first of the month and the twenty second is not seven days later, this is hardly a weekly blog. However, there are a few bits and pieces to show for it.

Back on the fifth, I decided it would be a good idea to get a few friends together and try to play the famously, dorky game of Dungeons and Dragons. Then this past Saturday, four friends came over and we spent the afternoon delving into our first game of D&D 4th Edition. Now to play D&D you need players and a Dungeon Master; A Dungeon Master is someone who describes the setting and events happening in the game world and gives the players oppurtunity for adventure. So rather than using an adventure that was already made and planned out, in the time between the 5th and the 22nd I did a little brainstorming and writing to end up with a little 3 page introductory adventure for the players.

The quickest summary of the story so far is that these 5 adventurers met on the road when 2 were attacked by wolves. After they defeated the wolves, they made their way to the nearest town. Then they decided to help a man cure his son of some magical illness. The did so by bringing the boy to their only link in the mystery... a dungeon! They killed zombies and rock monsters and then cured the boy. They also found a map of other secret locations in the woods, so who knows where they'll go next.

It was definitely a fun experience, running the game as well as doing all the prep work for the game world. I can definitely say I was unprepared with the level of description everything needed. I made a map of the dungeon, a little sketch of the boy they helped and the map they found at the end of the dungeon.

Two pictures of the map the characters found...

And my DM map of the dungeon the characters explored...

Also to prepare for a large table top game, we needed a large table top! So by using the base of an existing desk, a large piece of cut board, and some finishing trim, we made a nice big table and future workspace.

Now to get the paint out of the basement, the brushes out of the draw and get around to painting on my giant table.

I suppose you have a heart in there?

This weekend was not filled with painting as I expected but instead lots of sewing. During Oz's teachers social on Friday night, she and a friend decided they'd be making puppets of themselves on Saturday. While I didn't care to make myself into a puppet, I was inspired to make a stuffed animal. We got supplies for everything Saturday afternoon and worked on our projects the rest of the day. I sketched out on paper what I expected to end up with and made a very simple pattern off of that.

I finished my stuffed animal Sunday morning. Here is the final outcome. I call him Zippy.





He completely unzips except for the back of his neck so that the two halves stay together. His organs include a brain with backbone, lungs with trachea and bronchi, a heart with superior vena cava and aorta, a stomach connected to intestines, and one squiddily spootch.

Expect the painting next time.

A man who never made a mistake never made anything

In an attempt to expand my hobbies and experiences, I've made this blog. Whether it be through writing, art, music, technology or handiwork, I plan to post the things that I am creating week to week. This way I hope to push myself to do other things in my free time and have something to show at the end of the week besides just a pay check.

To start the blog rolling, I'm posting my '09 Christmas card/book. There's a free pdf download at the following link, however be warned that it may include some crude humor and strong language:

Treasure of the North & Other Christmas Tales

If anyone was so inclined to thoroughly enjoy the book, a physical copy is available under the "DOWNLOAD" link. It's priced at $5.48 because that is the cost for the company to make it. My only profit is knowing you wanted a copy on your bookshelf.

Look forward to more posts, I currently have a painting all sketched out and hope to paint it this weekend. I also plan to detail how the book was all planned out.