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What's On Your Workbench?

but you can't tune a sturgeon?
Correct!
"You cannot Bluefin-big.jpg lake-sturgeon-virgil-beck.jpg." :smug:
 
I love the sturgeon. started my third or 8th, or something career working with them in the Great Lakes.
well I have some experience with them on lake michigan growing up... or moreso the stories of the one's that were "this big" but got away from brothers/uncles.

You shall now be known as the Sturgeon General.
Congratulations.
lol... i AM the sturgeon general aren't i! hehe

I was going to go with “you can’t sturgeon a bass.”
"mmm... that's good bass!
 
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Hard to beat the hand drills for tiny bits and keeping from busting out the back side. I used them for the tuner screws in the headstock.
I've got two hand drills. One works very nicely, the other one the chuck has some issues and doesn't exactly center right. But I love the one that does work perfectly and I tend to use it on a lot of stuff, especially small things like side dots and the small tuner screws as well, things that I just don't want to get too "out of control" with.
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The roughest of the three I bought last week on the operating table. It’s a Craftsman 107.1 from the late ‘40s or early ’50s (I think) and made by Millers Falls.

Once I scraped some of the grime off of the crank wheel I realized it had some dental problems. A single missing tooth on the outer, faster gear isn’t even noticeable in operation but the inner gear is pretty badly stripped.

I went looking for a replacement wheel on eBay where I found wheels for every model breast drill but this one; all way too expensive. For a whole lot cheaper I found the whole drill with a lot of surface rust and no missing teeth. That wasn’t really the direction I had planned to go but I’ll combine the best parts of both drills for a keeper and the drill made of the lesser parts, which will still work fine on the fast speed, will be given away.

…or it will further clutter up my basement and vex my wife.
 
...or maybe before I clear out those three projects. The desire was too strong on this 1.75" thick piece:
View attachment 3882936

Good news is that I should be able to make a 10" wide lap steel and still have enough left over for a few bookmatch sets of tops too.

Since I was mixing up epoxy anyway I decided to start filling the holes in this mappa board. Those holes are serious -- many go all the way through the board. Anyway, this is some pretty nice stuff for the lap steel... some day.

first_coat_epoxy.jpg
 
So this has been happening for the last couple of months as I’ve had a little time here and there to work on it.
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It’s just your basic parts bass; another for the arsenal, but it’s one I’ve been planning for a long time.

The neck is an ‘80s ESP that I’ve had on several basses over 30+ years. Most recently it’s been on a no-name Jazz body and, while it was perfectly good, I just wasn’t loving it.

I had a G&L pickup in a drawer for several years and I kept thinking it would be nice to build a poor-man’s L1000 if a P-bass body turned up. Recently a friend offered me this paulownia body of unknown provenance (I suspect maybe it’s from Guitar Fetish) and I ran with it.

Made templates for the G&L pickup and bridge, made a template from the old P-routed pickguard, pulled the neck from its old home and plugged all its existing screw holes, routed and shielded the body cavity and here we are. All I have left is to drill for the G&L tuning machines, wire up the electronics and do a setup.

Instant fake G&L!

The paulownia body is extremely lightweight. Possibly even too much so, but I’ll see how it balances. The long-term idea was to use this as a proof-of-concept and, if I dig it, make a nicer body out of pretty wood sometime later on. Of course, if it’s great I’ll just leave it alone.
 
The jury’s still out for me. The body turned up when it did and it was convenient but I don’t know if I really like the shape (it’s more slender in the horns than an actual P shape) and the pickguard shape is a little weird and lopsided. I would have liked to make a more graceful pickguard shape but I didn’t want to fill and redrill all the PG holes and the control cavity sort of dictates this weird shape anyway.
I’ll live with it for now and, if it turns out I really like playing it, it’ll give me an excuse to build a body for it from scratch that I like better.
 
I need to finish drying, and also sterilize, the hard maple boule I bought a couple of years ago, so I decided to build a solar kiln for the back yard:
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At about 8'x2'x3' it doesn't exactly fit on my workbench but I would totally have put it on my workbench if I had a bigger one!

It is made from two pieces, one on the bottom that the wood stacks on, and the sides and top that are dropped down over top of it. I left the right insulation panel off to keep it from getting too hot in there until I get some wood inside. I'll also add a Wemos SHT30 to monitor temperature and humidity levels over WiFi.

Since drying wood isn't something I plan to do a lot of this build fell into the "cheap and easy" category rather than "nice", but I am hoping it will kill anything living in the boards and also drop the MC down to 8% in the next month or two.

Also not really on my workbench, more under it, was this guy:
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When I had the garage door open to cut the lumber for the kiln I guess he found his way in. I don't ever remember seeing a snake in Ottawa before so that was kinda cool.
 
I welcome all the things that most people are put off by. Bats, garter snakes, possum, etc.
Possum keep the tick population in check, bats- mosquitos, snakes- frogs and insects.
Now, if we could just bring back Trex and cave bears,....
I mean, 8+ billion humans is a problem, if you ask me.

8+ billion of these particular humans, yes. I'm with you.