What’s on *YOUR* workbench?

First time making a saddle. I slacked the strings and popped it in just to try it out. The intonation is great but I need to play it a bit more to see if it needs a minor adjustment. The thickness is perfect to hold it in the bridge slot, but I made it slightly shorter than I meant to.

This is for the family guitar, which I was asked to become the custodian of by my mother-in-law about 6 months ago. No one had played it for several years and even with disgusting rusty strings, it sounded amazing- so much so that my own acoustic hasn't been out of its case since this one showed up. Recently my wife asked me to resume playing songs after dinner like I used to. I explained to her that when I changed the strings, the old plastic saddle crumbled and I needed to make a new one. I decided to bang it out so I could bring it to dinner on Thursday.

The guitar is a Sigma DM-2 from about 30 years ago. Sigma was an import name for Martin, and this one is D-18ish. The earliest Sigmas were made in Japan, and then Korea. I don't know much about acoustics but I know this one sounds and plays great.
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Big Monk said:
Fixed the FUBAR Trimit:
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I liked the previous one..
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..But the new one is really goodlookin'!
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I'm finding that the dust from working with bone to make nuts and saddles is really tearing my hands up. Each time after I make a nut or saddle, the skin on the palms of my hands and fingers gets completely desiccated to the point where the skin cracks and bleeds. I wear a dust mask because I know that it's really bad for my lungs too, but does anybody experience this with their hands drying out and cracking?
 
I wanted to replace the speaker in my Orange Micro Crush (or whatever it's called) because it sounded pretty minimally acceptable. I'm only using it as a desktop pedal-test monitor, but there's always room for improvement.

I found some internet forum accounts of people using Visaton speakers as upgrades for mini-amps, and I found a local source for them, so I bought one. I overpaid, but I wanted it now.

Arrived today, so out with the old, in with the new...
 

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(Part two)

Here's some bonus gutshottery and a pic of the new speaker installed and ready to go.

So, how does it sound?

I am very happy with the level of improvement in sound quality. My expectations have been exceeded. It's gone from a raspy little box of nastiness into something that sounds surprisingly decent and usable - and the overdrive channel, which was basically a horrible piercing wall of buzz, has turned into a very decent sounding fuzzy distortion.

I liked it so much I made a quick demo - using the neck pickup of my PRS SE Mira. Sounds good with the bridge pickup too; the high end fizz has been reduced to quite a pleasant level of crispness.

I hit the "Over Drive" button about halfway through.
 

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@MichaelW sent me some smd quad op amps awhile back to see if I could do anything with them...beyond losing them that is (I'll find it eventually). One down...

@Robert came up with adapter boards, and I ordered a stainless steel stencil from the same design. Unfortunately, the EZ-Bake oven was out of it's groove. Some of the paste did not melt, as seen below (this is after cleaning chip pad). I soldered the headers in hopes that a good enough bond was formed. Nope. I'll try the air station on this to possibly salvage it, but I'm gonna go ahead and mark it as #2 down.

Just a regular 1/4w resistor for perspective...

c7ElbI0.jpg
 
fig said:
@MichaelW sent me some smd quad op amps awhile back to see if I could do anything with them...beyond losing them that is (I'll find it eventually). One down...

@Robert came up with adapter boards, and I ordered a stainless steel stencil from the same design. Unfortunately, the EZ-Bake oven was out of it's groove. Some of the paste did not melt, as seen below (this is after cleaning chip pad). I soldered the headers in hopes that a good enough bond was formed. Nope. I'll try the air station on this to possibly salvage it, but I'm gonna go ahead and mark it as #2 down.

Just a regular 1/4w resistor for perspective...

c7ElbI0.jpg
Click to expand...
What flavor opamps?
 
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fig said:
@MichaelW sent me some smd quad op amps awhile back to see if I could do anything with them...beyond losing them that is (I'll find it eventually). One down...

@Robert came up with adapter boards, and I ordered a stainless steel stencil from the same design. Unfortunately, the EZ-Bake oven was out of it's groove. Some of the paste did not melt, as seen below (this is after cleaning chip pad). I soldered the headers in hopes that a good enough bond was formed. Nope. I'll try the air station on this to possibly salvage it, but I'm gonna go ahead and mark it as #2 down.

Just a regular 1/4w resistor for perspective...

c7ElbI0.jpg
Click to expand...
Banana for scale? Is this a screenshot of Google earth?
 
This mess is all connected to an LM389, which is an LM386 power amp PLUS 3 transistors all rolled into an 18-pin thingy. Chaney had them on sale for a pitance so I relieved them of a couple.

This is straight from the datasheet and once I've verified it, I'll putz with the input/output stuff. The tone stack is a modded 6G8 "blonde twin" (or a baxandall derivative).

IYQdZbu.jpg
 
These JAN6418s...I've built all sorts of circuits with them. Someone asked if they glow. I used two because I figured one would go before the other. I have the positive lead to pins 5 and the negative to pins 3. I could connect an audio source to pin 4, and connect pin 2 to an amp...and give the plate (pin 1) 9-26v, but without any filtering it'd be a tad raw.

Welp, the datasheet says the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM filament voltage is 1.5v. So naturally I ignored that...somewhere around 10v one gave up the fight. The other is going in another circuit. (y)

 
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