Chris D, Esq., Maplitonian Master Tinkerer

Picking locks is fun. I am long out of practice though. Some many years ago I discovered I could pick all the locks in the one chemistry room at school and boosted a whole bunch of sulfur and magnesium ribbon.

That being said, my best friend is great at opening doors through questionable means. Apparently it is a skill she acquired in college to break back into her dorm at fuckall in the morning while totally hammered and is bast at it whilst drunk. She opened my upstairs lock when it was stuck a while back though, so more credit to her!

I see that you're putting your dastardly skills to use for good instead of evil, though. Which is, I guess, alright?

Let's not let this become a regular occurrence.

This is pretty much my exact story on how I learned to pick locks.

I just love how fucking easily the Masterlocks open. They are the most ubiquitous padlocks anywhere, and most of them can be picked as fast as it would take to use a key. I only hope that the one at the camp will not be too stiff from being outside for the last couple years.

Oh, and i suppose i will try to use the skillset more for evil in the future. Though, i tend to think that the manner in which i would commit my evil machinations, would likely be a bit less sneaky than all that.

At the moment i kind of just want to get a whole bunch of locks to play with, and to grind some nice picks up.

Been on a bit of a lockpick tangent of late.

Just made these:



Which are an attempt to copy an interesting rake pick style. You can make them with just a couple metal files, and they are very small, clipped together with the spring from a ballpoint pen(or just a random spring, as above.)

They work really well, and one of the neat things about them is that as a pair, you have one wavey rake and one modified half diamond. The back portion of whatever pick you aren't using, is what you use for the tension wrench. Pretty neat stuff. These ones aren't 100% right, but they are about as close as i am going to get with the particular files and metal i have here.

Anyhoo. This is just what i have been doing while i wait for some guitar strings (which i bought, semi-ridiculously with a huge pile of pennies converted into an Amazon giftcard via CoinStar machine ) to arrive.

Which actually, is not the most ridiculous thing that i have had to do with large amounts of spare change this month. THAT, would be buying heating oil.

I like the look of those. Very elegantly wavy. Chris, you make a pretty lockpick!

Also, what are you using for a camera?

And LOL at the large pile o'change. I should probably do something similar with my Holy Grail full of randomchange. I mean convert it to something useful. Not heating oil, which would be silly in my case.

Yeah the picks that i attempted to copy are called "Bogota", made by a guy named Raimundo, and they look like that, with the three peaks representing a Colombian mountain range, as well as being cleverly designed to have sharp peaks and subtle wide valleys for manipulating lock tumblers. He makes them from the spring steel of street sweeper bristles, found lying in gutters after the machines pass. I made these of the stainless steel inserts that give windshield wipers their flexibility. The dimensions of the wiper blade steel are slightly different, but fairly close.

And yeah, for the change, i have had this huge plastic flower planter that i have been lugging around for a few years just chucking all of my change into. This year has been pretty rough money-wise, so i had to take a good look at it. Coinstar takes 10% off the top if you use the machines for getting cash, but you can avoid the 10% if you take the coin value as a gift card, which they offer for several different vendors like Amazon, Lowes, Barnes&Noble, etc.

So i ended up rolling the silver change and bringing it to my bank for a cash deposit(oil money!), and then i just brought what turned out to be about 5400 pennies (!) to the CoinStar machine, for Lowes and Amazon giftcards.

All told, the huge planter had just shy of three hundred dollars in it. Which was really excellent, because i really needed a way to buy oil!

That does seem to be better than waiting at the train station to give handy's for $5/pop.



Wish I woulda thought of that.

Oh, and the camera is a realllllly shitty old 3.2 megapixel Olympus. It sucks hugely for taking close up pictures, the flash stopped working a year ago, and it often has trouble focusing in anything but insanely bright direct sunlight conditions. For pretty much everything, i have to use a tripod to take non-blurry shots.

Then, i usually have to try to fix the contrast some in photoshop. Those pictures probably have a bit excessive contrast adjustment. I liked the way it made the blueness of the steel pop against the red table though.

And after rolling $230 of change into paper sleeves for the bank, i kind of wished i would have thought of THAT!

True. Your arm might be less tired.

Some banks around here have free coin-starish machines.

No charge, it prints a receipt and you get cash from the teller. Don't have to be a member either. I counted coins before taking them in once, just to see if it actually does take a cut, and I got the full value back in cash. It is nifty. One (a BB&T) is right down the street, actually.

Yeah, when i lived in NYC, my bank had that. Around here though, my bank doesn't, and the ones that do, require that you have an account. ALSO, even if you do have an account, if you go in and change more than a certain amount (like $100 or $200), they take a percentage, like 2-4% off the top "for machine maintenance fees" or similar.

The bastards

THE MAN - JUST KEEPING US DOWN...

So, after playing the garbagecaster as an Esquire for the last couplefew weeks, i have decided. I miss the neck pickup. So i am going to disassemble it and route for a tele neck.

I really love the IDEA of these stripped down, one pickup, guitars. But in practice, that is not how i play, or what i want.

I utterly fail at minimalism.

I am, a maximalist?

I still am thinking i will rout the LP-ish body for a single p90 though. It will be a while before i can afford to buy the shit i need for that one though, so i have some time to mull it over. I may just say fuck it and rout for two P90s like an SG/LP special...

I like the idea of a guitar with one pickup, no tone, no volume, just an on/off switch. I'm a metal rhythm player... the areas in between 0 and 10 on my volume knob don't get used, the tone knob is always at 10, and the pickup selector is always in the bridge position.


Plus, if I need a neck pickup, I have a 335. It has a lovely sounding neck pickup WITH a good sounding coil tap. The switch needs cleaned like a motherfucker, though. The tap only works sometimes on the neck pickup and almost never on the bridge.

I actually like to switch pickups a shittone. I'm thinking of picking up one of the Xavier Tele with 2 P-90 and putting a mini hum in the bridge and in the future adding a single in the middle strat like and wiring a 5 way switch like, Bridge Hum,- Bridge split single - single coil - sc& P90 - P90 I think this woulds be quite fun. I'm verry close to the trigger on the Xavier, I just have a trade fior a strat and a new tele coming in next week, so I don't want to overload on new gear.

I like my Xavier Tele a lot.

It has an ash body though, FWIW.