Wren

A funky 50's sailplane by Frog.

Plan on Outerzone.

This one is unique for its lifting tail and dual fins. As a sailplane, it's not a very smart design. Counter-intuitively enough, you will usually lose more by way of drag than you gain with such a tandem configuration. The Wren's structure is also obnoxious, to say the least- the open boxes just want to snap and fold. After crushing the fuselage in my hand at least once, I finally just rebuilt completely with diagonal braces on the sides. I haven't flown it much; it's a ceiling-swinger.

The color scheme is an homage to the sadly recovered Medicine Man.

Medicine Man

My first R/C sailplane, built Summer 2019.

This one was designed by Ryan Grosswiler in 2008 for Make Magazine- plan on Outerzone.

It's a good 2-channel flier that's not hard to build and looks very beautiful.

Alas, it looked even better when I first had it covered. The moral of the story is not to bother covering your big and involved glider with crappy tissue from Michael's, especially when you don't have any dope and are hoping to use Elmer's glue and clear coat. Any time you come near a grassy field (in other words: Glider Flying Location,) the whole thing will go soggy noodle on you.

This sad misadventure made me vow to get some dope and silkspan and do the whole thing properly next time.

Here is a bonus shot of the hi-start and parachute I made with bike tubes. It wasn't quite a success- the rubber doesn't pull nearly far enough, so when you let go, it just snaps, resulting in maybe 150-foot launches that quickly porpoise out into 50-foot glides. I'm casting around for a proper hi-start- they don't seem very common these days- but in the meantime I've gotten some nice proving flights with an improvised power pod. If making your own parachute, be prepared to face the unsettling feeling that you are actually sewing pretty doll clothes.

Tandem Bike

 This is an idea from sheldonbrown.com.

When The Hub bicycle co-op had to move here in Bellingham, they left a gigantic knot of frames behind at their old digs. Before the building got wrecking-balled, I was able to go in and pick a couple of things out, leading to what you see here.

I used a hacksaw and file to slice the head tube of the rear bike and remove the seat stays from the forward one, smoothing out the resulting surfaces best I could. I also clipped off a few cable fixtures and moved them around to set up better cable routing for the finished product. Then I stuck the two together, along with the fixtures, with vice grips, and took the whole thing to the welding shop. You should probably fillet-braze something like this, but I haven't died yet...

The "ghost chainring" has now been replaced with a tensioner of sorts. You may be able to tell that I hacked and filed the head tube so I could fit the superior fork and headset from the rear frame. The rear U-brake also had to be rigged with a sheet steel plate to provide spring tension (not a safety issue- it is fails the brakes will just rub a bit.)

Mockup...

After some getting used to, it is actually totally serviceable and fun to ride. It's crammed for the person in back, so you need to mostly like each other, but it at least turns tight and accepts regular-length cables. I don't have any experience with what a tandem bike is meant to feel like, but I don't think it's hard to pilot at all. After rides involving many miles of gravel, dirt and steep inclines it doesn't seem to have broken anything. Emulate at your own bodily peril.

Gameboy Music

This is just a picture of all the stuff I used to use for making Gameboy beats. Things I actually made here are the several messy cables- LSDJ sync in the upper left and analogue sync in the middle- and the Altoids tin splitter, which took stereo 1/8" to separate 1/4" for recording.

I made a handful of LSDJ tracks in 2015, put it down, then made a bunch more in 2017, and since haven't touched it. It's fun for making music while walking around outside, and the unique sounds and strict limitations make you get really creative. Honest-to-god, I just hear dirty synth noises, but most folks obviously think of vidya games. The sound doesn't lend itself to being taken very seriously, which is actually part of the appeal- low pressure. Anyway, I got some good composing experience while appearing to be playing Gameboy.

The TI-82 in the upper left ran Houstontracker, which is a free tracker for TI calculators that's fun to use- still under sporadic development. I hoped to sync it to LSDJ by panning a click track to one side and extra tones to the other. I guess that if I ever make more music this way, that might end up being my shtick.

True Stand

I made this in 2018 with extras from my guitar cab. I think it's clever, but it's sort of rickety, so it only really works if you hold still. Still, it's miles better than truing wheels on your bike. It doesn't have any symmetry built into it, so you need to find a good spot on your wheel in the first place or do some careful measurement to set the gauge. It's annoying, but not a deal breaker.

Casio SK-1 DJ mod

Capable of cool beats and analogue sync with Volca or etc.!

I messed with this SK-1 a lot back around 2014. I started by spraying the keyboard that sticky silver color and adding the switches to its right. They have some of the usual odd circuit-bendy effects.

Eventually I discovered, poking around inside, that there were a few points which produced regular pulses in time with the onboard drum beats. I soldered a mess of wires to these, some other points with cool and/or weird effects, and a ground, then took them out to a terminal connector I got off an old game pad with a weird number of pins. The matching chord ran to a tin full of buttons and some outs for sync.

We did some jamming with it years ago involving LSDJ (Gameboy) and Volca stuff, and it worked just fine. The trick, as always, was getting patterns to start at the right time. I haven't used it much, mostly because the drums actually sound pretty bad... along with everything else. Sorry to the people who love SK-1s.

The buttons are gridded so that you could hypothetically remember cool combinations and actually sort of DJ on the thing. The two 1/4" outs supply a regular pulse in time with the Casio's beat- the fast one being twice as quick as the slow. The "sync multiply" doubles each. Really, this is just a switch which shifts the signals- I found three pulse outputs that were multiples of each other. A lot of the buttons are actually really useful, and change the drums up in interesting ways. Most of them mess with the sync signals, but you find ones that don't. There is a lot of havoc with the chord accompaniment, for better or worse. Usually worse...

Grasshopper

I designed and built this one during Summer 2016. It was meant to be a good 4-channel all-rounder. It was basically a success, and of all the airplanes I've ever built it's survived by far the longest without smashing explosively into the ground! It can't fly very well inverted, due to its very high, thick and flat-bottomed wing. It can do some fun maneuvers, though. If I wanted to do a second draft, I would make the nose longer, the tail feathers stronger and the wing lighter. I also would probably ditch the slab fuselage for old-school built up sides.

Westwind

The Westwind, designed by Ted Strader in the 50's for escapement. My first scratch-built R/C airplane. It flew, but I sort of goofed on it in a few different ways.

Basically, these old R/C models were meant to be free-flighters that you could kind of herd around over the field instead of worrying about them setting down in a yard full of rottweilers. As such, they are very stable and have pretty tiny control surfaces. I was hoping for a more responsive aircraft, so I should probably have scaled these up a lot... but I only grew the rudder a tiny bit. I also added pretty darn small ailerons way out on the very tips, where tip vortices start to make them less effective. Taking some dihedral out might also have been smart. The plane ended up needing a lot of rudder and aileron into the turn to bank well.

Something else about old plans that drives a lot of people crazy is nose stubbiness. Presumably, the .049 and tank that were meant to go up front of this thing were no heavier than the motor and battery I used, especially when low on fuel. Combine this with the heavy-ass radio gear they were using over the wing and it's hard to see why it takes so much weight to get the CG in a good place. I ended up doing surgery to move the wing back half an inch. So, build a long nose. This is a cool plane, though.

Plan on Outerzone: https://outerzone.co.uk/plan_details.asp?ID=3228

Raven

Alien Aircraft Raven kit designed by Tom Herr. My first kit-built R/C airplane, from 2012, probably. This one was fun but ended up smashing into the ground very many times very hard and is totally atomized at this point. Nothing against the kit though; it's easy to build and flies well.

PVC Air Gun

I hoped this would make a good water cannon, but it really found its niche shooting darts made out of 2 inch nails. It does do a good job, if you fill it with water, of blasting wasp nests. Maybe I made this in 2014.

Attempted Guitar Pedals

 These are mostly being preserved because they look cool. Both from 2015 probably.

The "Fuzzy Peach" had an ugly robot sound and kept burning out.

This is a non-functional Atari cartridge made into a splitter and kill switch.

Talk Box

Junked mini guitar amp meets some nasty plastic tubing... from around 2016.

There is a small speaker inside the tin, underneath the soda-can funnel.

Spring Reverb Tank

Circa 2015. This one is cool...

Not complicated: speaker and piezo with a spring glued in the middle. This is the first time I discovered the obnoxious need, when it comes to mixing a clean channel with an amplified one, to have some kind of buffer on the clean (the option is instant and horrible feedback.) In this case I used one channel of a crummy ready-made stereo amp from ebay to drive the reverb speaker and the other to buffer the clean signal. Disadvantages of this setup:

• Gain shared between buffer and driver
• Unusual 5 volt power supply
• Very dirty clean signal

The last problem being basically a symptom of the first. To get the gain high enough to drive the reverb well, the clean channel had to also be pushed well up into distortion then cut back with an inner volume pot. I justified the resulting monstrosity by calling it a "reverb/robot fuzz effect-" the distorted sound is actually very unique and not quite 100% bitcrusher or fuzz. This is one project I actually fully intend to refurbish some day, with a made-to-order spring reverb circuit that will sound good and take 9vdc.

Pedalboard

It looks and works a lot better with new elastic. I think I made this one back in 2015 or so in shop class. It hangs onto five pedals, which is comfortably three more than I'm using in this picture.

Keyboard Stand

...With upper attachment

Uke Bass Conversion

This is a Dean portable guitar turned bass. I took the middle two tuners out and stuck filler in their old holes, along with those in the bridge. Then I painted over, drilled through the bridge, opened up the remaining tuners, and made a new nut. I also had to put an ugly hatch on the back to make it easy to stick strings in. Maddie got me all of the supplies for this one 👍

Slide guitar?

My best effort at an instrument as of 2013. It turns out that coils from an alarm bell don't have nearly enough turns to make good pickups.

 

Electric Ukulele

I made this over Winter 2018 at the Bellingham Makerspace of wood gotten just a couple blocks away at "Hardwoods to Get." I seem to think that material costs for the whole thing were only about $20, but I paid a lot more in membership at the Makerspace because I couldn't come in very often. I did have a place to fix things though, which was a plus.

It's a tenor. Cool features of note include the hardware store adjustable bridge, zero fret plus wooden string spacer, and stereo pots and knobs given to me by the notorious figurehead of a certain local Seinfeld-centric harsh noise project.

It plays pretty well, and definitely has acceptable action without buzzing for a ukulele. I meant to sell it, and probably will eventually...