#scrap build

[magicclam]

Recently my son has gotten more interested in music. A month or two ago, I helped him research and buy a small headphone amplifier for his desktop PC setup.

However, in addition to the amp, he wanted a vacuum tube preamp since he's seen the one I have for my PC (you can see part of it in the last pic) and wanted a similar configuration. :)

So I set about gathering some parts I had on hand to put one together for him. He selected the wood for the case from my stash, and the white aesthetic to match the rest of his PC setup. I used 2 6C4 tubes because I had them and they seemed like a fun choice for this.

Most of the work came in constructing the enclosure. I used my chop saw to cut pieces to length, then resawed them on my bandsaw so they were thinner. I then glued up the wooden box with some support blocks to increase the strength and give me somewhere to mount the metal plate that will hold the parts.

I'd recently scored a bunch of aluminum and steel sheet, so I used one of the aluminum plates to mount all the parts. The thicker plate was really nice to work and drill and allowed me to chamfor the holes so the wires won't scrape. Then I painted it up and mounted in the components.

This project involved a lot of 3D printing as well, all the transformer covers and the capacitor brackets were printed on my FlashForge 3. Boiled Linseed Oil was used on the wood for a natural finish, and the power light enclosure is an old glass bottle that I 3D printed a diffusion cap for.

Overall I'm really happy with this project, and so is my son who's been using it constantly over the Thanksgiving break. :)

Stay tuned for more fun with tubes!

[msnogood]

Junk as Art & Craft Material

Suffer from hoards of junk from your dungeon

Realize you despise each and every one of them

Stop, before you burn them with heck fire, and think

Can I use any of them as materials, and turn them into something less despicable?

Bonus points for combining more than one junk into new art

If yes, profit! You shall art and craft with free materials!

If you ever stumble upon this post, please tell me about trash you creatively used for art that you thought was so clever you want to tell everyone about it (I want to hear it).

Mine are:

Packaging closed cell-foam blocks as needlefelting base

Using all sorts of fiber for needlefelting, my cut hair, my cat’s hair, my mom’s and aunt’s dog hair, unraveled yarn wool, unraveled wool from felted phone case for a long-gone dumb phone, and my most proud one was poly-liners from grocery deliveries from the panini era (absolutely atrocious and opulent one-use material cause poly-fluff isn’t even cheap from crafts stores)

Random plastic pieces incorporated as parts for my projects like little red heart tabs from bubble tea bottles as ears, salvaged plastic flower stems for my strange flower. Colored plastics and plastics in interesting pre-mold shapes are my preferred junk.

Using junk doesn’t mean the end result ought to be flimsy either. It really depends on your choice of junk and how they are used. I recommend paying attention to the material of choice, and recall / visualize how they behave from your own experience. Some plastics are more brittle and UV susceptible than others, and I avoid those.

I also used to scoff at plastics and prefer biodegradable materials. Then I had a brain thought on: if the junk biodegrades, they don’t really need saving (unless they’re really interesting). So it seems sensible to incorporate non-biodegradable junk in my projects.

Downside (sort of) is, sometimes one of these creative use of junk becomes a preferred method of doing things and you either have to loot your friends and family’s dungeons or buy more for your future project.

But I am grateful for the original junk that gave me these crafting ideas out of necessity, and implore everyone to really reimagine your trash as art and craft materials. This practice opened my mind about how strongly my preconceptions can be about inanimate objects sometimes due to frustration, sometimes due to environmental / context associations.

Every object can be deconstructed, some are useful for your work while some may not be. Your choice of material can be your inspiration. I am no master at this, but when a piece of “junk” clicks with my project seamlessly, it’s like the stars aligned and I discovered a secret thing that was meant to be. As if the Muses say: hey, here is a great piece of guilt-free money-free material for this exact project you will want to make.

It’s a blessed thing. Junk.

[elusivegreen]

I made things, to hold my jars of beads. Just out of stuff I had around, didn't purchase anything new for this one. The backs are also leather, which lets me give the jars a little nudge to help get them out. Kinda wanna put handles on the tops, but for now they work.

[magicclam]

Here’s a random project...

I decided the other weekend that I had enough extra speakers lying around, that I could try and build a pair of desktop speakers.

Found a slab of walnut in my wood scraps, and a pine board and a poplar board.

Am using the walnut for the front, and the pine for the back... the poplar will be the sides. First cut the walnut piece in half on my tabletop band saw, then used my scroll saw to cut out circles (ish) for the mid-range speakers I’m going to use. Next I used my drill press and a hole saw to cut the holes for the tweeters.

Then I cut the pine board down to the right lengths for the backs of the speakers. I measured out the size of the crossovers, then drilled holes at the 4 corners of the rectangle and used my scroll saw to cut out the remaining material. I’m much better at straight lines than I am at circles... :)

Not pictured... I’m gluing up one of the speakers now... so the back is being fixed to the sides. The boards weren’t exactly straight... so I’m doing what I can with glue and clamps. We’ll see how these turn out, this is the first time I’ve built speaker cabinets, so... who knows how they’ll sound.

Stay tuned for other things!

[pinkyinmyjinkies]

made a second gaslands cat

Its been a lot of fun learning to paint things and jusy increiblly happy eith how this turned out

[velken69]

PIRATE HAT

PIRATE... GUN?