1. A shot glass on the table -- no booze, but full of component leg offcuts, for onboard jumpers and wire links on 3pdt switches.
How about you?
My soldering workspace is the only place a cup of tea will go unfinished in my house. This is indicative of my hierarchy of obsessions.
i'm not really obsessed about diy, but i have a room for that. and a painting cabin in the garage.
Looking through project docs and deciding I need to build something because I know that I have ONE of the cap values it requires on hand. Justifying the purchase of 79 components to use up one leftover.
I'm a coffee junky but each morning before I go to work I do about an hour of building. I heat up my large cup of coffee for the garage and bring it down (mind you I've down half the pot already) and then I get so involved in the building my coffee goes untouched. A coffee foul if you will.
Finding clipped component leads in laundry, shoes, pedalboards, cereal, my dog's fur...
I get in an hour of building before work, half an hour at lunch, and three hours after my wife goes to bed, pretty much four days a week, yet I can't figure out why I'm so tired all the time.....
Thinking about clever things to do building-wise whilst riding my bike to work (15 min trip) and then missing my last turnoff because I'm obsessively thinking about switches, caps, pots etc..... And the cold coffee/stale beer thing!
I once was so into building that my untouched cup of tea developed a layer of ice on top.
I live in Canada.
Jacob
Better ice than mold...
I've had a few cups of tea and/or coffee hide on my workbench for a while... Yuck
I am guilty of eveything mentioned above.
I have an organ magnet that won't turn off. I see a free organ and I see a component goldmine, my wife sees me spending hours upon hours in the shop taking doo-dads out of a pile of crap and treating as if they were treasure when I could be doing things on her honey-do list.
Even organs that are mostly air, with PCB's bolted to one side with a heap of proprietary ic's on them? (Seriously, that's about all that trademe ever has.)
I'm a TV magnet. I stripped a projection TV about 8 years ago of all it's boards and to this day I'm stripping parts. Bottom line...grab parts from whatever source you can.
Internet Explorer's "Your most popular sites" when opening a new tab. Top 5 are:
madbeanpedals.com forum
freestompboxes.org
diystomboxes.com forum
mouser.com
smallbear
;D
Quote from: alanp on October 13, 2012, 01:57:17 AM
Even organs that are mostly air, with PCB's bolted to one side with a heap of proprietary ic's on them? (Seriously, that's about all that trademe ever has.)
Yeah, in that case I'd pass unless some of those IC's were any good like BBDs and it had a good set of speakers. Alot of times you can get a replacement parts list that will cross reference the house numbers on the organ components to what they really are. If it's from the 70's and has a cassette deck built in, yeah keeper, there's Germanium in those! Lowrey? Okay, I'll take the nice speakers, miles of topcoat wire, ElMenco 100v capacitors, and right size 56k carbon comps to make a true bypass mod on a Thomas Organ Crybaby only as visible as the switch. If it is a Hammond like my M103 that came to me for $80, well that's a keeper. If it's a hammond that's trashed, then it can still become a guitar amp if the iron is good, stock Hammond labelled tubes are sometimes Amperex and Tung Sol, and you can probably salvage some parts to sell on ebay especially if the tone generator spins free, vibrato scanner is good, start motor works. etc. etc. etc.
You can see my organ magnet working hard in the paragraph above.
I got one of these the other day from overseas, had =no idea= what it was and had to research it and my paypal account to figure it out. It was an "and or not" ClariNOT squared. I didn't even remember ordering it. ::)
I stay up all night, have built only one pedal so far, broken an OCD trying to desolder the IC, built a test rig, and ordered enough boards to keep me busy for years. I'd say I'm terminal and loving it.
(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-8QC6vLP7fXs/UHodPQfNF6I/AAAAAAAAiP0/_SjmtHQgHMY/s531/TERMINALBUILDAGE.jpg)
Quote from: calciferspit on October 11, 2012, 04:13:00 PM
Looking through project docs and deciding I need to build something because I know that I have ONE of the cap values it requires on hand. Justifying the purchase of 79 components to use up one leftover.
I'm very guilty of this, especially with unusual IC's. Except whenever I order them, I always order at least one extra. It's a vicious cycle.
I keep a folder on my computer with subfolders for documents about projects I have planned (and another folder for completed projects). Currently the "planned" folder is 24 MB! :o The "completed" folder is only 20 MB. :-\
I am constantly plucking component ends out of my feet.
I build projects just because I like one of the colors on pedal parts plus that I haven't used yet.
I complete a build, spend 10 minutes with the guitar testing it out to make sure it works properly, and then put it in a drawer and start working on another build. Even the ones that sound really good! Eventually I'll slow down and spend more time playing I hope....or at least lend them to friends who actually play guitar.
And so on....
Quote from: calciferspit on October 11, 2012, 04:13:00 PM
Looking through project docs and deciding I need to build something because I know that I have ONE of the cap values it requires on hand. Justifying the purchase of 79 components to use up one leftover.
This reminds me of what I do, just a little different.
I'll look through a BOM and see that I don't have a part, so building the pedal gives me a reason to buy more of them than I'll ever need.
Masking tape is a must-have, I reckon. Not the blue stuff that the American posters photograph every now and then, the white-cream coloured stuff that you can write on with pencil, biro, vivid marker, anything.
You can use it to hold down IC sockets, SIL socket pins of any number, cantankerous components that will not stay bloody still, PCB mount pots, all sorts to the front side of a PCB while you're soldering the back.
You can use it to mark out drill patterns on painted enclosures.
You can use it to make wires stay put temporarily.
All this, and it will come off cleanly, in one piece, and won't damage the paint.
+1 on the masking tape!!
If nothing else, you guys are making me feel better about myself. I thought I had a problem. Bad news is...it's confirmed. Good news is...ummmm...let me think...
I've spent enough money on velcro for my builds that I'm on a first name basis with everyone at Home Depot.
Gordo, simply repeat my mantra
"It's not a problem if I'm OK with it"
I'm sure there's a 12 step program for us all, however, if we were all in the same room, I'm certain it would just turn into a new OD with 12 diode selections....wait, that gives me an idea....
I've actually been thinking 'bout that! Would be nice, big rotary switch and all....
I said it cause I've already done it. Built a hot rodded TS9 clone with switchable transistors, stacked opamps, dual footswitchable gain pots, and a rotary for all kinds of diode selections. And the end result - a total of three sounds I love, and the rest I can live without. But had to try it. One day I'll get around to boxing it up.
Yet another sign of terminal buildage - a second desk covered in completed unboxed projects and enclosures drying in the garage.
No, I don't need help ::)
Right now I have random parts and etched proto pcb's of varying success across 3 rooms in my house for projects I've been working on and continually modifying...
All while my poor amp kit is still sitting lonely in the box it arrived in and 3 guitar bodies lay neckless in the dining room and bedroom.
Wifey picks up a pcb and asks "is this board any good or is it trash..."
"well...it's version 1 of (insert project here), don't throw it away, I'll put it in the BOX of FAIL to rip components off when I get a min. Meanwhile I continue to pull nice new shiny resistors and caps out of the storage bins for more attempted chaos..
Son then says... "when I grow up I'm gonna fix and build Mustangs and sell them, like you do with guitar stuff"
I say.. "better get a well paying job first"
The poor kid comes from a long line of tinkerers, he has no chance of escaping the quick sand.
Josh
Haha. Dad is a terminal collector in some ways -- "This will be useful someday, better hang onto this!"
There's a neon sign transformer, a 486, a Pentium 66, ten bicycles, a pie warmer, all sorts in his shed.
Kids are good barometers. My four year old daughter made a comment yesterday about the nice chicken head knobs on a pedal. :)
My one year old son's favourite room in the house is the Master Bedroom's Walk In Closet, which is where he finds a guitar leaning agains the wall he can strum, and my desk of creation/destruction at which he tries to pear over the edge and reach for my tools... I'm just waiting for the day he tries to cut his finger off with my wire snips.
Some days I think about quitting pedal building entirely because then I could become a superstar guitarist and record multiple albums a year because of all the time I'd save surfing the interweb and tweaking Eagle layouts.
Jacob
Quote from: jkokura on October 18, 2012, 06:00:45 PM
My one year old son's favourite room in the house is the Master Bedroom's Walk In Closet, which is where he finds a guitar leaning agains the wall he can strum, and my desk of creation/destruction at which he tries to pear over the edge and reach for my tools... I'm just waiting for the day he tries to cut his finger off with my wire snips.
Some days I think about quitting pedal building entirely because then I could become a superstar guitarist and record multiple albums a year because of all the time I'd save surfing the interweb and tweaking Eagle layouts.
Jacob
Yeah, I've thought about actually playing the guitar instead of building but I'd like to keep my gear to talent ratio at 1000 to 1. It's not that my gear is special and 1000 great, but my talent level is surely a 1 :(