Happy New Year 2018

New Year's Eve is upon us, and I just want to wish all of you a happy New Year.

2017 was my second full year of retirement and was better in a couple of ways than the first year.  The biggest was that the year was free of medical issues like my emergency gall bladder surgery in June of '16.  It was largely a year of doing what we felt like doing - the privilege of retirement.  We took two vacation trips, one to South Dakota for a week with the kids and Precious Grand Daughter; the other to Tennessee to see the eclipse and they met us there.  We currently don't have anything planned for 2018, so it's getting to be time to plan something. 

Retirement is a relatively new concept in society, at best a couple of hundred years old, and it's evident that society (in some sort of nebulous, society-at-large sense) is having troubles with it.  See "underfunded pension plans" with your favorite search engine.   

I was looking at last year's blog entries to see what I was doing a year ago, and most of my posts were about completing the CNC conversion of my Grizzly G0704 - a year ago this weekend, I was completing the plumbing for the oiling system.  I also pointed out traps and tripwires that Obama was leaving for Trump.  We've encountered some of them as the year has gone by.

I had the mill built into a functional mill, completely under CNC control by February 2nd.  That quickly turned into a couple of months of tweaking and  improving.   First was reducing backlash on each of the axes, followed by completing an enclosure made from 12mm aluminum extrusion and plastic panels from the local Borg (mostly the blue Borg, not the orange).  And no, I don't know where that nickname comes from, other than I think it was the old Usenet newsgroups (kids, ask your parents).

I can't say I was done, because as recently as a few weeks ago, I talked about improvements to the rotary axis I originally added last May.  I can still think of things to do to improve its usability and user friendliness.  Then came adding an oiling system, fighting leaks until I went over to manual oiling, and finally adding a misting cooler.  It's probably best to never think of a project like this as done.

Then, of course, there was my "Son of Side Project".  Originally, Side Project was a joke because the project was putting a new side on the sawed away Breedlove guitar.  The original side was plastic left over from making the mill's enclosure.  Son of Side Project was a sequel to Side Project to replace the plastic with wood.  Now, it has a quilted maple side where the plastic was.  I gathered up the tools to do a setup on it this week and now it plays quite a bit better.  The guitar was most likely a Quality Control reject, so it needed lots of work.  The frets were uneven and had to be leveled with a file.  It probably needs some additional work.  I know the $8, eBay-special tuning machines I bought for it need to be replaced. 

As far as projects with my CNC'ed, four-axis G0704 mill, I haven't accomplished much.  I built the GB-22 but never got it to function reliably.  It's still sitting as a "one of these days" project, in pieces.  I built the Little Machine Shop wobbler steam engine.  After drilling out the flywheel on my rotary table, I took the whole thing apart and put a shinier finish on all of the parts by lapping them on finer grits of sandpaper, and/or turning in the lathe's chuck.  Put it back together to find it doesn't run as reliably as it did.  I think I took too much mass out of the Flywheel.  I will turn a new one and get it back to where it was. 

In addition to my ham radio antenna project, I have another electronics shop project, a box for a component called a variac.  This will allow me to put lower voltages on older vacuum tube equipment, at least while I get it running the first time. 

The black rectangle on the top is an AC voltmeter/ammeter like one of these and the AC outlet on the front is still under consideration.  This is going to be like my controller box for the CNC 704, with the panels laid out in Rhino3D CAD and cut out on the CNC mill.  This time it will be cut out on the big system, though.

Aside from those two, I'm looking at more projects for the metal shop, with fewer involving guitar resurrection.

Happy New Year!  Remember, if you drink, don't text and if you text, don't drive.  Or something like that. 

Son Of Side Project

Back in June, four months ago to the day, I gave an update on my side project, my Breedlove guitar.  At that time, I had put some kerfing strips in the side pieces in the gaping 14" hole in the side of the guitar allowing me to cap the missing side with a plexiglass piece and called it done.

Such projects are never "Done" done,  and it was mere hours before reader Raven prompted me in the comments to consider replacing that plexiglass with wood, and offered me a piece of scrap from his bin.  Son of Side Project was born.

Let me just say right out front that I don't know what I'm doing, OK?  I figure I'll make a few mistakes and eventually get there, but this is such a radical repair job that chances are pretty high that nobody has done a repair like this.  It's a training piece that I hope to learn a lot of things from.  Even more, I hope the things I learn will be useful on some future projects.  I have four or five books and I have a friend in town who is guitar technician/repairman.  He has been willing to share all the tools and techniques I can ask for.

Strangely enough, he found a useful video that contains ideas to emulate on my guitar, and I started down this road.  It took a while to get to this point, but by early August I had the side glued where my plastic side used to be and I was looking forward to trying to get that finished.  That's when I found the problem in the upper left hand corner of the side in this view.  At some point, the backing piece of wood I had in this corner broke out, falling into the body, and the wood had a little give to it. 

The rest of it felt solid, but that little piece is important because other things need to be glued to it.  My friend said, "pull it off and start over".  Gulp.

I had glued the side on with TitebondIII wood glue.  That's removable, although it takes a lot of managed heat and the proper mixture of delicate but strong touch.  The majority of luthiers prefer to use hide glues because they're removable with steam and joints are reworkable.  A little steam generator will loosen the glue and make removal easy.  I had to head back down to the friend, hat in hand, to use a heating pad he has for this sort of task. 

With the side removed, I came home, expecting to spend hours chiseling out the old kerfing strips to replace with new ones I ordered.  Thankfully, they removed easily with a combination of a very fine-toothed saw to cut open the glue-filled saw kerfs, wood chisels and a cabinet scraper.  (True story: I bumped the chisel into my finger and when I looked at it and realized it hadn't cut me down to the bone, said, "I need to sharpen these chisels").

Finally, with the back and sound board cut back to clean wood, it's time to glue in the new kerfing boards.  This is the top.  

That's when I found some damage in the guitar's body, in the lower bout.  From time to time, the guitar has fallen over, or taken a small beating on my workbench, and one time, a worse fall.  It probably happened then.  Not a big deal; if I have the glue out and clamps ready, what's a few more joints?   

I'm notoriously bad at estimating how long it will take me to do things, but it looks to me like I could have the new kerfing in place along with the replacement side by the middle of this week.  There's still a lot of work, because I have to duplicate this trim on the top edges.

The center, faux abalone shell, has the thin black border on it from the factory.  The two other black strips, the white spacers, and the two other white strips are all separate pieces of plastic. 

For this work, I'm switching to fish glue.  The main difference between fish glue and hide glue is that it has a longer shelf life, especially if you keep it in the refrigerator.   Like the hide glues, it's reworkable with steam, or even water.  This is where the products out of "primitive cultures" frankly amaze me.  Who thought, "you know, I bet if we put the left overs from the horse - hooves; ligaments, whatever - into some boiling water we could make some really handy glue"?  How much refinement was required to get today's hide glues?  Likewise fish glues.  This artists' site says fish glue is made from the swim bladders of sturgeons. Who guts a fish, looks at the swim bladder and says, "I bet I can make some glue out of that"?  I'm betting the answer is "no one".  I'm betting someone that was starving gathered up the fish entrails, heads and whatever they could and tried to boil it into a soup.  I can hear them saying, "this is the worst fish stew I've ever had! And look, the spoon is sticking to the bowl like it's been glued."  Yeah, I know; necessity is a real mother.

A Little Update on Son of Side Project

I don't want to jinx myself, but I could be getting into the last little bit of the project I call Son of Side Project; adding a wood side to my Breedlove demo guitar that was introduced to Mr. Bandsaw and hasn't been complete in perhaps a decade.

In that last update, I had gotten to the point where I was ready to glue on the internal wood strips (kerfing strips) that would hold the side.  I eventually got those glued in place.  I had some issues with a couple of pieces of it shifting before the glue would hold it.  As a result, I had to learn how to loosen fish glue and re-stick the pieces.  I replaced one.

Once the side was glued on, I took it down to my friend who has a fixture designed for routing the top of the guitar to add the trim binding strips.  The fixture uses a small, trim router and ball bearing collars to allow an exact width and depth channel to be cut.

This is how I brought it back last Wednesday.  There was an unfinished end like that on the front and back of the guitar where we didn't push the router too far.  So how to cut those off and extend the channel the rest of the way?

Rather than try to do this with power tools, like the rest of the channel for the binding, I went for hand shaping the wood.  I clamped a piece of wood to the top of the guitar as a guide and used a 1/4" wide woodworking chisel.  I cut straight vertically leaning the chisel against the guide to form the back wall of the channel.  The flat back of the chisel would form the new back, and I pushed the chisel in a little at a time (no hammer!), then went in parallel to the top from the side taking out small chips to remove the spruce I had just scored with vertical cuts.  It's a lot like chiseling out the waste in a dovetail joint, parts of a mortise, or pretty much anything. 

This picture is preliminary, before I finished cleaning up the channel, and it's magnified much more than I was seeing with Optivisors on (which is why I took the pic).  That step from top to the floor of the channel is 1/16".

Then it was time to start gluing up strips to try and match the colored strips you see in cross section in the corner.  I've done this a couple of strips at a time, and now have that top strip in place. 

The tape is in place as a "clamp" for 12 hours, so I can take it off in the morning.  There's a mess of to cleanup here, and some gaps that need to be filled with something or other.  The sides and back trim need to be done as well, but that will be simple compared to this top strip. 

Like I say, I don't want to jinx myself, but I'm making progress. 

Done Done

It has been a long time getting here, but the guitar project I've been calling "Son of Side Project" is done.  (You know, I don't have the slightest memory of why I came up with that name).  Since the last update, there have been hours spent in "fiddly bits" of the job, trying to come up with a match for the abalone inlay, three coats of stain, 15 coats of varnish, and today's visit to my friend to use his really large polishing system designed for guitar polishing.

Here's a look at some of the fiddly stuff.  All of those white and black strips get glued up separately, some are first glued to each other then into place.  This is before some light sanding, staining and varnishing.

A little detail in the corner that I'll see the most, after the staining and polyurethane.

Finished on the bench today.

This has been an interesting and very challenging project.  Machining is typically letting the machine do the work, with the occasional hand file work; most of this it was meticulous hand work.  Obviously, this isn't a normal guitar, and there's really no way I could have made it one without spending more money, time, and effort than it would take to buy all the same woods and make a guitar from bare wood.  This seems like a good compromise. 

I told the luthier who helped me out on the project that it had dampened my interest in making an acoustic guitar from scratch for myself.  He laughed and said this was nothing at all like building a guitar.  It's like a repair project that no sane guitar tech would ever do.  Building a guitar from flat pieces of wood would be easy in comparison. 

I'm still not looking to jump into doing one soon. 

Thanks again to Raven, who donated the wood for the side, and practice pieces.  From his own tree, no less!  The quilted figuring in maple is said to occur only in Western Big Leaf Maples and is truly beautiful.  It's really reminiscent of the look of the gemstone called tiger's eye (or tiger eye). 

Wandering Weekend

Yesterday got away from me but not in the usual way, which is that I'm here working on various things including finding something that I think is worth posting but can't really find anything.  Sometimes I start down a path and either mess it up or can't find a piece of information I want.  Sometimes I get distracted by a different project or something to play with. 

The big difference was that yesterday was entirely family-centered and hours away from home.  Mrs. Graybeard and I don't have much family left to interact with, so the events of the last year have changed that in a remarkable way.  I've mentioned son, DDL (Dear Daughter in Law) and PGD (Precious Grand Daughter), and long time readers might even remember those acronyms.  Unfortunately, they live over a thousand miles away so they're difficult to visit with.

The changes have come from my older brother's son and daughter.  Nephew got married well over a year ago, and had their first baby around a year ago.  They were living out of state until summer of '23, and we met niece-in-law on last Thanksgiving.  I have no idea what to call my relationship with the baby.  Not to be outdone, my niece got married in mid-'23, and while she lost one pregnancy, she delivered her first back in December.  I neglected to mention that niece-in-law is expecting their second in March. 

All of which sets up where we were all day yesterday.  Actual niece decided to throw a baby shower for niece-in-law at nephew and niece-in-law's house over on the west side of the state.  They're in location that's just hard to get to from here. As the crow flies, it's around 65 miles, but any route the map programs give me are in the vicinity of 120 miles. So two hours driving instead of one, each way. 

That's awfully long; I just don't see much of a way of shortening it.  The setup is part of the story because it illustrates that both of these women, 30-ish year old millennials, are playing the role that seems to be called "trad-wife" - a disparaging term to the screaming liberal girls that we see on the 'net in a never-ending series of memes.  

It was great visiting with the two couples, along with the rest of the family. 

And for something completely different...

To begin with, Mike Myles at 90 Miles from Tyranny has a clip from a Tucker Carlson video that is a good intro to this.  

The topic isn't RFK Jr. or autism that he's talking about, but it kind of leads to what I'm thinking of.  

I certainly don't agree with everything I've heard him talking about but if the numbers he throws around have truth behind them something is seriously messed up in our health care, especially with the dramatically higher rates of many conditions.  Another line of evidence shows up in this video, also from 90 Miles. 

The fundamental issue is that in virtually every instance the science behind public health questions is poor quality - and that's because higher quality studies are inherently difficult and expensive to conduct.  The study run by the doctor in that second video may be about as good as the studies get.  Until the Covid era, I was one who pretty much swallowed all the crap on vaccines.  Then I started learning more about how little they test things like the recommended series of vaccines for children, and I'm really unsettled about that now.  The tests I'd like to see are in the category of “inherently difficult and expensive.”

Let me add two buzzwords I keep seeing and I have no idea how important they are in terms of health. They’re clearly important to get people talking and selling newspapers, online reading or something, but what little “science” I can find is even lower quality than usual for this sort of the stuff.

The buzzwords are “microplastics” and “forever chemicals”.

When I first heard of microplastics it sounded like a good thing. Everyone was worrying about plastics in the ocean and talking about the great Pacific Garbage patch when all of a sudden (that link is dated '17) it turned out that the plastics were being partially dissolved or even digested by some sort of bacteria or maybe a critter. That meant the big pieces of plastic were becoming small pieces of plastic, and if it’s a surface area phenomenon, smaller pieces have a higher surface area to mass ratio (very little mass) so they disappear faster.

In the last year or two, it has turned into people saying we have microplastics everywhere, and it’s getting talked about as something to be alarmed about.  I have yet to see any explanation of why we should be alarmed.

The second term, “forever chemicals,” seems almost self-contradictory. I’ll borrow a quote from a news article that came out recently.  

PFAS are aptly named “forever chemicals” because of their nearly indestructible chemical structure, which prevents them from breaking down in the environment. These chemicals build up in soil, water, and even the human body over time.

Exposure to PFAS has been linked to various health issues, including cancer, hormonal disruptions, developmental delays in children, and weakened immune systems.

My issues here are both different than usual and the same as usual. The different thing is that a “nearly indestructible chemical structure, which prevents them from breaking down in the environment” means these chemicals don’t react strongly with other chemicals (and everything, is a chemical).  I read that as saying if they don’t react with other chemicals, or only react very weakly, they'll react the same way with the chemicals in our bodies.  So how can they be "linked to various health issues, including cancer, hormonal disruptions, developmental delays in children, and weakened immune systems?"  It has to be another “correlation versus causation” trap that so many of these studies fall into.  It sorta works like this: a researcher notices an increase in these “various health issues” and compares the rate of increase with various things until they get something with a similar rate (yeah, that's the same as usual part).

The same article states “Among the most troubling effects is the potential for hormonal disruption, particularly in men, where PFAS exposure has been associated with plummeting testosterone levels.”  Again: chemicals that don’t react much if at all with other chemicals are breaking down a select group of chemical pathways?  If they’re not reacting, how are they doing that? 

An editorial cartoon from Rubbernews - found by web search for "forever chemicals."