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.