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.