I want pics of the FR installation.

BTW do you ever check in over at TGP? There's a guys who did this great brazillian rosewood fretboard, brass inlays (birds) and rosewood veneer on the headstock. ridiculous amount of work, but it came out real nice. You really have to have a lot of time and money to do that shit.

oh hell here: http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showth ... ?t=1087082

Nice. I am totally not into inlays for myself, but i really enjoy the folks who do crazy ones. Especially those guys that make really detailed ones using different materials as if it was a collage, or in some cases, as if it was paint.

Also, the laser seems a bit cheating, no? I probably wouldn't have been able to resist doing something totally insane with the inlays if i had that to play with.

I am really not into overly done inlays. simple is fine with me. I prefer PRS' hollow birds to the full birds. Squares, trapezoids, and dots are my preferred inlays. I had a Jem with the vines, but even that was too much for me. Jem Pyramids are nice though.

Tried out a couple of these today.



They actually work pretty well. 2oz of alcohol boils a couple cups of water in about 5 minutes, and burns for a total of about fifteen minutes. So in theory one could make white rice from the scratch, or various pastas. Ramen would be easy on maybe only one ounce of fuel.

Myself, i made hot chocolate. But that is because i am not living under a bridge. Yet?

ver' nice

You got some good contraptions, Chris

Mechanical Victory, it approaches:



I need one more piece to arrive, and then i shall attempt to resurrect, The Device.

Quoth Tom Waits: What's he building in there?

What are you building in there, anyhow?

Looks like the parts for a pillar drill of sorts

I also will make a can stove when I get home

I have been collecting parts over the months for this behemoth block of 50s American steel and violence:



Here it is mostly disassembled; there are a lot of bits that would be bolted onto it in normal operation, but first i have to get it operating... normally.

Scale is difficult to tell but it is over seven feet long, and weighs a few hundred pounds. It can be set up as a drill press vertically as normal, or horizontally(as shown).

Or it can be set up as a grinder, or a tablesaw, or as a lathe. I also have an attachment for using it as a jigsaw or as a disc sander.

It was my grandfathers and now it is mine. Unfortunately, it was my uncle's in between, and so it is in a more damaged state than would be desirable and was missing some very important pieces, like the drill chuck itself.

Waiting for a pulley puller to get here hopefully today so that i can remove the (not pictured) half shattered motor pulley and replace it with this shiny new one.

The digitach is more for convenience, as this machine was not designed to accurately portray the speed it was running at. Originally it did not even have a speed adjustment but the company produced the speed changer that this one bears(middle pulley contraption) in the early fifties. Still, it just slows the thing down, doesn't give any indication of what speed it is actually going.

The forstner bits are mainly for making more or less precisely vertically walled drillings, and also for removing large quantities of wood without just burning through router bits.

In the immediate timeframe, i intend to be be using The Device with the forstners as a drill press, mainly to add a degree of precision and repeatability to those drilling operations that can tend to be a wrench in the works of playable guitar makings. Bridge mounting, tuning peg drilling, body-through ferrules, that sort of shit.

Imma use it for its saw and lathe abilities off in the future for sure though.

Assuming that i can get it working correctly here in the next few days.

The thought of fingers getting caught in belts on that has me wincing already. In a previous life I had to deal with a lot of large power tools all the time. Man you gotta respect those motherfuckers or they will fuck yer shit up righteously.

Hell yeah, this is definitely the "1950's version of a safe power tool". I mean, what, only seven or eight years out of WWII, i guess "safety" would have been a real relative term. Or as my older sister remarked as we were joking about The Device's inherent dangers, "yeah, i mean what is the problem, it is wayyyy safer than like, a Jap with a bayonet, right?"

That is actually why all of that blue tape is stuck to the bench. Making cardboard mockups so that i can fabricate some actual like modern style sheet metal belt covers.

Because, when this fucker is in a vertical position as a drill press? That stack of belts spinning at 6800 rpm is oh, right about eye/neck level.

Totally fucking safe. For uh, 1952?

yeah, Reddit is full of those-who-have-little-respect-for-mangling-machines.

Yes, we were much better off with built in population control before all this OSHA shit got in the way.

Oh also, i built a whole bunch of them, and this was the best design i found:



You need more cans to make it(two or three, depending on how precise you are with a blade), and it is a little harder than some of the designs, but it does work much better. Primes faster and uses less fuel to boil, AND, because it uses the can top for the jet side, you can use it properly with a pot on top without an additional dedicated stand(but you have to be very careful in using it without a stand, to make sure that the pot does not tip the whole works over, being that it is lighter than a very light thing and filled with invisibly burning denatured alcohol. )

But yeah basically, the jets location, and the double walled interior make it the finest option for a purely beercan-based hobo stove.

Chris, that is fucking cool, and I suspect if you can get it restored it would work like a charm. All the old shit I've encountered, it really was made better and meant to be fix'd if something broke.

Yarr, it seems to be in decent shape. The motor runs smoove and quiet, and the gearing inside looks good, clean, crisp, and properly greased. Thing is dead simple mechanically, made of Really Heavy Parts, and they made thousands of this model, of which a really large amount are still in service. Even though the company no longer supports this model, they do still manufacture the one that came after it(first out in '56 or so i think, had properly covered belts and was a slightly more compact machine). The upside is that the "newer" model does share several parts with this old one, like the drill chuck, which the one i got is technically from the newer machine, with the older one being slightly different in design.

But because so many of these are surviving, there is a support network in place for the machine. The motor pulley i bought for instance, is a recently manufactured item that some dood had done up to supply the need.

In some ways actually this older one is even kind of better than the newer versions. It makes a slightly more stable lathe platform, and the drive shaft is nicely overbuilt with two bearings to the newer one's single bearing, which basically helps the thing stay running/spinning truer for a much longer timeframe before it needs new bearings/maintenance/calibration.

There is a certain pleasant AK47-ish simple sturdiness to the way the thing is designed. It is no cliche to say that they do not build anything like this these days. Not for consumer/garage/diy use, anyhow.

I made a similarly designed can stove but it needs a little refinement. Namely the jet holes could have been smaller as I could only fine a 2.5mm drill bit, 1mm would have produced more pressure for the jets so I'll try that next time. Also the internal fuel collar has little too much overlap. It still worked fine though despite using inappropriate fuels, I only had bbq lighting fuel which is too heavy and acetone which is too light.

Yarr, i just used the ol' "stab it wif a pushpin" method for my jet holings. I was concerned that it might somehow disrupt the easy flow out of the flame to have them stuck inward like that but chose to do it for my experiments anyhow, and it didn't seem to cause a fuss.

Further experimentation will resume when I have more cans to play with, which should be too long

Yeah, when first i stumbled upon the concept i was like "oh but where shall i ever come across these aluminum cans with which to experiment?" But it turned out that the problem practically solved itself, in the end.