I'm just gonna ignore...

...the fact that I haven't posted in well over a year, and act like I´ve been at it fulltime ;-)

So, today I finally got around to making a template for the body. My first idea was for the warmachine to kinda look like this:

(And I still may build this one day)...

But since I bought quite a good looking piece of mahogany (will post picture at some point), I've been starting to toy with the idea to make this a guitar with a more natural finish, so the texture of the wood would be visible. Another thing about this piece of wood is, that it's slightly to small for the original design, so I had to redesign it a little so it would fit. This gave me the opportunity to change the design a little, into an orignal shape, as opposed to the more familiar esp-esque shape:

After printing this design, came the (very precise, thus verrrrry annoying) part of cellotaping the prints together, 

and then cutting it into a life size paper version of the  body...

I stuck this to a piece of [no idea what it's called in English] (we call it MDF).

At this point I would like to extend my everlasting gratitude to my son for lending me his crayons (as you can see I even destroyed one. Uhm...have to talk to santa about that). I used these to to create an outline of the template on the MDF.

And then... at last... power tools! I cut the folowing template from the MDF:

Not bad for a couple of hours work.

Next time (hopefully within the year this time) I may have a story about routing the actual body using this template. Until then: Merry Xmas, and a very heavy new year!

Sorry, no sound samples yet, but...

JUST LOOK AT IT !!!!

I've printed the graphic on decal paper, turning it into something very thin, like the little membrane inside a chicken's egg. To make it a bit stronger and protect it from the water I needed to tranfser it from paper to metal casing, I sprayed a couple of layers of varnish on it. After that I stuck it to the casing, finishing it of with another 4 thick layers of varnish.

This sounds like a fast and easy job, but it has to be done very carefully (even with the varnish, the decal's a fragile little f**ker) and both the de decal and the layers of varnish take 12 hours to dry.


But I love the results, and I will need to redo the casings of the other stompboxes I've already finished (which is no problem anyway, since the tubescreamer is broken, and the distortion plus needs tinkering, since it sounds like shit!)


I have a totally different idea for the casing for one of my next projects. I don't want to spoil it yet, but the picture below should give you a clue.



Keep Rocking!

Building The Boogeyman

After building versions of the tubescreamer and distorion+ pedals, I figured that if this primarily was to stay a heavy metal project, I needed to build a high gain distortion. The TS and + are more in the realm of overdrive, and I feel I need to make some mods before they look and sound good enough to show them here.


So I rounded up some schematics for a project called Dr Boogey, a pedal meant to emulate the sound of mesa boogie's high gain dual rectifier amps. Soundclips on youtube got me quite excited about the broad variety of sounds other builders were able to squeeze from their pedals, so I sent the drawing if the schematic to someone from the newtone forum, who was very accommodating in etching a PCB for me, usign said schematic.I also ordered the casing and all the parts (in mulitple orders, since I kept forgetting stuff, duh!), and after a lengthy soldering session I have the electronics in place:






After soundtesting the above tangle of wires and resistors, I'm rather satisfied with the immense amount of destructive sounds I'm able to coax out of the circuit.


NOISE APPROVED!!


At this point it was time to start work on the casing. I decided that dr boogey was not scary enough as a name for this box of mayhem, so rebaptized it "The Boogeyman" and designed a very cool graphic for the pedal. Using a draft of this graphic as a reference for the location of all the potmeters and switches and outlets, I stuck it on the blank aluminum casing and used it as a drilling template.






After I finished drilling the casing looked like this:






Since (as you can see on the draft) the graphic is mainly black, I spraypainted the casing a matte black.




After this I printed the graphics on a decal transfer. I stuck the decal containing the graphic and at this point this is drying. When it´s all dry enough (probably tomorrow) I will have to apply lots of layers of varnish to permanently stick the graphics to the casing and protect the whole lot.


I will post the finished product, and if I manage to make some, some sound samples, as soon as it's finished.


LATER!

I'm back...and daddy's building stompboxes

Hi all.

Man has it been a long time since I posted anything.

Of course I have a whole bunch of excuses:

• I'm still hoping my coleague will fix his CNC router, to save me from doing some really hard precise work.


• Since my wife's pregnancy I started work on the baby room.


• The baby room used to be my guitar room, so I'm without guitar building space at the moment.


• And last but not least: I have a beautiful son now. He's absolutely fantastic, but quite incompatible with the sound of woodworking!

So, until I find a proper (and affordable) worshop/garagebox somewhere, it's a bit difficult for me to practice woodwork.

BUT FEAR NOT! THE WARMACHINE PROJECT CONTINUES!

When I first designed the warmachine, I thought of it as the ultimate metal machine. One of the original plans was to integrate distortion circuitry into the guitar itself, hell, I was even in doubt whether it should be bypassable! (who needs clean sounds, right?)
This obviously required me to take a look at how effect circuitry is normally made. In my quest for this knowledge I stumbled upon websitessuch as BYOC, DYIstompboxes, freestompboxes and newtone, all of which offer a wealth of information about DYI effects circuitry! The last one (newtone) is a company based in The Netherlands that sells parts and compete construction kits of effect stompboxes. I ordered some of them and immediately liked the way I coul easily build these stompboxes and modify the way they look as well!

So I decided to expand the warmachine project to include stompboxes! So far I've built an MXR Distortion+ clone and an Ibanez Tubescreamer Clone and I am currently working on the housing of a stompbox that emulates the capabilities of Mesa Boogie's Dual Rectifier sound.

As I'm still working on them you'll have to wait for some result pictures, although I will post some pretty soon.

Well,

good to be back, and I hope to post a little more often from now on!!!

Wow! That's a long time ago!!!

Damn! It's been over 3 months since I posted. That's a new record! Well, unfortunately it's not all because of holidays (I wish!). I've had a lot to do, the last couple of months, part of it is holiday, most of it was jobs around the house though. We are improving the first floor in our house, and that's been taking up a lot of time. One of the rooms was going to be the guitar room, though, so it was also in the best interest of the WarMachine project! Then the following happened:

Results:

• The room will no longer be the guitar room


• Probably even less time to spend on the WarMachine


• A VERY HAPPY ME!

It will at least be half a year until I become a happy daddy, so I still hope to be able to work on it, shortly, and I will keep posting results on this blog!

Shaping the head

Now the "wings" have dried, it is already time to destroy them again: time to shape the head of the guitar. Using a photo of an ESP explorer headstock, I created the following outline:

It's not exactly to scale, but that doesn't matter: neither is my practice neck. I've printed the outline, cut it out, and put it on the headstock panel, and of course forgot to take a picture of that :( Than I used a bow saw to cut the headstock according to the outline. Couple of sheets of sandpaper later, this is the result:

If I can make some time tomorrow, I'm going to try using a different material for the fret inlays, since the epoxy stuff was such a disaster.

Wings!

I finally did some building again. In order to make my practice session more complete I glued some wings to the headstock of my practice neck.

Wings? Well yeah. In order to eventually saw the headstock into the correct shape, some more width is required, so I cut some more of my old bed up into two small pieces of wood, which I glued to the sides of the headstock on my practice neck. With any luck the glue will have dried tomorrow and I will be able to cut it into shape and sand it down.