Machine Your Own Guitar: Another awesome DIY guitar project to add to the “how to build a guitar” list – this one is a bit more complex, using tools that you’ll likely only find in heavy duty workshops (mill, band saw, drill press, extra long drill bits). But for someone who has access to their high school/college/work workshop, the write up steps you through all the instructions in a very clear way.

The shape of the wood slab forced the guitar to be designed in a way that you don’t see often, with the grain perpendicular to the strings. I love the unique way that ends up looking, but can be a bit dangerous as the tension from the strings put a lot of strain on the grain and can cause cracking/breaking.

Because the creator already had a neck from another guitar, he was able to make this one for about $100 – but says that using better wood and electronics would bump the price up to the $450-$600 range. Still, a very decent price for a custom, sweet looking guitar.

Materials:
- Approx. 1.5″ thick hardwood slab, large enough to accommodate your design
- Prefabricated bolt-on guitar neck
- Double coil humbucker pickups ($33 for two on eBay)
- Tune-o-matic bridge ($12 on eBay)
- String tail-piece ($6 on eBay)
- Jack plate ($3 on eBay)
- 1/4″ mono jack
- 2x knobs ($3 each on eBay)
- 2x 100k audio-taper potentiometers (pots)
- Les Paul rear plate ($6 on eBay)
- Strap pins
- Sacrificial piece of 1/4″ to 1/2″ thick plywood
- Wire
- Solder
- Triangle wood wedge
- Large sheet of paper
- Wood conditoner
- Wood stain
- Urethane wood finish
- Paint thinner
- Cloths
 
Tools:
- Mill
- Assorted mill cutters
- Assorted Forstner bits
- Mill slot-clamps and assorted clamping bars/rests
- Drill press*
- An extremely long 3/8″ drill bit
- Band saw**
- Sandpaper
- Sanding block or palm sander
- Wood rasp
- Soldering Iron
- Bubble level
- Pencil
- Protractor
- Mallet

About ten years ago, during a brief residence in San Diego, I partook in a fun local tradition that dates back to 1971: The Rosarito to Ensenada bike ride, a 50 mile trek through northern Baja California. I snapped photos throughout the ride on a very rudimentary digital camera and posted them along with a writeup on one of my old sites (now available here). It was such a fun experience that I’ve decided to share it on the DOIT blog.

This bike ride is actually quite easy and well organized. I highly encourage everyone who has the chance to do it. But first…

Five simple but important tips for anyone embarking on a long bike ride:

1. Map. Bring one. One of the great things about riding a bike is the freedom to take any path that catches your eye – but when you find yourself headed off the main road, you should make sure you know how to get back.
2. Phone/charger. Amazing that cellphones weren’t very common little more than ten years ago. Keep it handy for emergencies. I keep mine switched off and tucked into the furthest part of my bag so I can enjoy the ride with that unplugged feeling.
3. Food. A few Powerbars can make a huge distance when you realize you still have a couple hours before the next gas station.
4. Water. Even riding at a slow pace is physical work. Keeping hydrated can not be overstated.
5. Jacket. Shifting weather, setting sun, even entering a forested area can cause a big temperature drop. A lightweight biking jacket or windbreaker can be your best friend to keep you warm and dry.

And one bonus one:

1. Training. If you know you have a ride coming up, even a few sessions around town can be a big help. If you can’t ride outside, use the exercise bike at the gym. You don’t have to go to Armstrong-esque levels, but being conditioned can make your ride much more enjoyable and is not that hard to do.

Click to continue »

Bike projects are awesome. And it doesn’t get more awesome than this: a home-designed and built mega-fat wheeled bike. Capable of traversing soft sand with great ease, this thing looks like it will take you just about anywhere.

This crazy vehicle was created by Instructable user marple200, who describes the project as a combination of wanting to design and build a bike, and to learn to weld. He handled both in one of the best ways ever.

The two big challenges with his design were creating forks to fit the oversized tires, and engineering a system to allow the chain to reach the gear outside of the tire. The wheels on this beast are from a Yamaha ATV, and the frame is pieced together from a existing bikes. The issue of the forks was created using some rigid electrical conduit pipe and scrap pieces of bike carrier racks found in a dumpster behind a bike store.

The drivetrain issue was sorted out in a pretty novel way: a jack shaft/transfer hub. The pedals drive a chain that is mounted to a raised gear behind the bike seat. The gear turns a spindle that stretches to the outside of the tire and is connected to a second gear on the rear wheel. All of the mounts are creatively sourced pieces of donor bicycles.

The write up is a good example of the capable and creative abilities of the bike’s inventor. It’s one of those projects that gives me that awesome inspired feeling to drop everything and get into my workshop. I’m itching to get that bike trailer sound system started…

Extreme Fat Tire Bicycle on Instructables.

One of the fun capabilities that the CHDK hack for Canon point and shoot cameras enables is super fast shutter photography. By snapping the shutter at 1/10,000th of a second (or faster), you can freeze moments that are imperceptible to the human eye. Speeding bullets, balloons popping, or one of the more common shots, splashing water.

Once you have a camera that can stop time, you need a way to tell it exactly when you want to do so. Instructables users SaskView has created an awesome solution to that problem by building a laser trigger that causes the shutter to actuate when the beam of light is broken. What’s more impressive is that he’s sourced most of his parts from a 99 cent store – this is truly a lost cost/high return project.

Laser Triggered High-Speed Photography – More DIY How To Projects

Materials
I got the following at my local Dollar store (each item was actually $1.25: talk about misleading advertising!) Laser pointer Door chime USB Cable Magnets Clamp Shelf brackets Mini-tripod Self-Adhesive backed Velcro Small picture frame (for the plate glass insert) Eye drops (for the dropper bottle. I poured out the contents as I believe anything purchased at a dollar s…

The Camera
You’ll need a Canon camera because we’re going to temporarily modify its firmware using the Canon Hacking Development Kit. CHDK is loaded onto the memory card inside the camera, allowing us to override most of the camera’s functions, turning a cheap point and shoot into a highly adjustable way-cool time freezer.Currently there are 47 Canon cameras that CHDK will work wi…

The Circuit
At the bottom you’ll see a link to a pdf containing the schematic. To trigger your CHDK enabled camera we’ll be using the USB remote function. In this case we have to use it via the ‘syncable’ method, which is lightning fast compared to the normal USB remote. The syncable remote also operates differently. It triggers the camera on the falling edge instead of the risin…

The Laser
The laser pointer has a momentary switch but I wanted a slide switch that would allow the laser to remain on without me holding the button. The Dollar store magnetic door chime not only had the slide switch that I wanted, but also it used the same kind and number of batteries that the laser does. This was cheaper than buying just a switch from an electronics supplier. …

The Drop Rig
Below is a photo of my setup. Some pieces of wood and some steel shelf brackets clamped to a TV tray. The laser is mounted with the magnets on one of the brackets, and the photodiode on the other. In between and slightly above I’ve velcro’d the eye dropper bottle filled with milk.

CHDK Settings: Enabling Synchable Remote
In order for the USB cable remote to work, you have to enable it. With CHDK installed on your camera go into the Main Menu and at the very bottom you’ll see Miscellaneous stuff. Enter that menu and at the very bottom of it you’ll find the Remote parameters menu. In that menu set Enable Remote [.] Make sure there is a dot inside the square brackets, meaning it’s enable…

CHDK Settings: Extra Photo Operations
Now go into the Extra Photo Operations menu at the top of the main menu and set: Disable Overrides [disable] Include AutoIso & Bracketi [.] Override shutter speed [1/10000] Value factor [1] Shutterspeed emun type [Ev Step] Override aperture [5.03] Override Subj. Dist. V [350] Value factor [1] Override ISO value [80] Value factor [1] Force manual flash [.] Power of flas…

Adjusting the Camera Settings
Normally you would be triggering an external flash, while the shutter is open using a cable release with the camera in ‘bulb’ mode. Once the flash goes off, you let the shutter close. This requires the room to be darken because the shutter will be open for many seconds. In this setup you can have the room lights on because the flash and shutter are triggered at the sam…

Adjusting the circuit
With your drop rig in place mount the photoresistor to one of the steel brackets and the laser on the other one. Adjust the position of the laser so that the droplets fall through the beam. Adjust the position of the photoresistor so that it’s illuminated with the laser. Power up the circuit. LED1 will light up, indicating power. Before we begin using the eye-dropper,…

Third party manufacturers that want to make iPhone/iPod charging devices have to agree to a secret hardware setup that will allow the devices to work, and promise to not disclose what components and specifications are needed to make a charger work. Engineer/hacker/braniac Ladyada (of adafruit.com fame) disassembles a few charging devices to investigate the exact resistors used, and how a wall charging device (AC) differs from a battery charging device.

Read more of her notes and explanations about USB charging, the differences in iPhone chargers over the last few generations, and a great photo of the innards of an iPhone wall jack.

Adafruit sells a variety of electronics kids: Arduino supplies, breakout boards, power supplies and more.
If you want to build your own battery-powered Apple charger, get the adafruit MintyBoost kit here.
Two other fun and hilarious electronics kits from them: Tweet-a-Watt and the Digg Button Kit.

One part of the video of particular interest is the soldering blower unit that Ladyada uses. Designed to allow for the teeny-tiny components to be soldered or removed safely instead of being bashed with a blazing hot metal iron tip, this thing melts the solder with hot air, so you can then safely manipulate it as needed. She uses the Hakko 851 hot air soldering station – it’s not cheap, but I think I need to get one of those things.

The 851 hot air rework station is ideal for soldering and desoldering small surface mount chip components, heating heat-shrink tubing, and other local heating operations.

• adjustable temperature control from 100°C to 540°C (212°F to 1004°F)

• ultra-light setting for air volume control

• ESD safe by design

On Catch It Keep It, I had the weekly challenge of designing and building an insane method for destroying an object of considerable value, and then figuring out and building a solution to the same challenge in order to show the contestants that the objective was not impossible, should they fail.

Being who I am, I often found my solutions breaking the “keep it simple” rule – partially because the contestants usually took the simple route, and partially because I wanted these things to be awesome. That created situations with considerable potential for failure, when failure really wasn’t an option. But the show was real, and just like in real life sometimes things don’t go as planned…

This is not going to end well...

Episode five was the Les Paul challenge. Who doesn’t drool over the idea of owning a heavy, thick slab of rock lore? I sure do (although, sadly, the prizes were only for the contestants). The method of destruction? Surround the guitar with 100 lbs of thermite – a compound that burns at 4500 degrees. That’s a LOT of thermite – we had to special order the materials (aluminum powder and iron oxide) due to the quantity requested.

As the episode geared up, I had two solutions in mind: surround that heavy, thick guitar with a heavy, thick box, and shield the whole thing with ceramic tiles and sand (interesting aside: I successfully fused sand into glass during testing), or mechanically extract the guitar from the stage. The contestants wisely, but boringly, chose a box solution – essentially building a fortified dog house, not the most exciting build to watch for an hour, but it had the best potential for winning. Thankfully, they added a small external cooling system to keep things interesting; I thought Bruce’s idea to wrap the entire thing in copper pipe and pump cold water through like a radiator would have been brilliant, but it got vetoed by their team.

I wanted my solution to be big and exciting, and I had drawn up plans that were just that: a pulley system that would loop the guitar and fly it off the stage along a line that ended in a protective net. In order to actuate the lasso/pulley, the system needed a tall tower for a counterweight fall from, connected to the pulley via a block and tackle system that would move the guitar quickly.

It worked great in testing, over and over. But perhaps we tested it one time too many, perhaps a line got tangled, or perhaps the lasso connection was tied too tightly and didn’t want to release. Either way, I never imagined I’d be responsible for torching a $2000 Les Paul.

As frustrating as that was, I’ll admit that the footage of the flames raining down on the guitar is absolutely mesmerizing and beautiful, especially in slow motion. I put the clip online, and as a bonus added a couple other slow motion shots from the show as well.

Watch the series via iTunes (or get it on Amazon).

Build your own Les Paul style guitar with this Saga LC-10 kit.