What’s on *YOUR* workbench?

Bean?
More boards?
Bigger boards that do sillier sounds?

Welp, shut up and take my money and add it to the pile of "to build"
 
Been busy with some Standard Series redesigns plus a few other goodies.

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How are you doing with the suspension of the 1uf 50v wima cap? I was reading on the aion site last night that the supplier for one of the internals of the cap discontinued the material and wima has set the availability of the part to "temporarily obsolete." Aion was redoing some of their boards to accommodate the larger 3.5mm body caps.
 
How are you doing with the suspension of the 1uf 50v wima cap? I was reading on the aion site last night that the supplier for one of the internals of the cap discontinued the material and wima has set the availability of the part to "temporarily obsolete." Aion was redoing some of their boards to accommodate the larger 3.5mm body caps.

I'm still using my Panasonic ECQ-V supply which is what I space my layouts for. They are thicker than the WIMA ones. However, I have a VFE PCB to be released that does require thin 1uF WIMA, so I will probably suggest just using MLCC in that case.

I can't believe how long my ECQ-V have lasted - I bought every standard value in bulk like 10 years ago and the only ones I've run out of are 10n.
 
How are you doing with the suspension of the 1uf 50v wima cap? I was reading on the aion site last night that the supplier for one of the internals of the cap discontinued the material and wima has set the availability of the part to "temporarily obsolete." Aion was redoing some of their boards to accommodate the larger 3.5mm body caps.
Do tell? The Wimas already are/were 3.5mm, smallest comparable current production film caps I’ve found so far are 4.5mm TDKs. Just went through revising three sets of my open source boards, would love to revert to the old designs if possible though.

Edit: just read the Aion article, and can now recommend the 3.5mm reissue Kemet sub parts which will be available in early 2026. Yay!
 
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Do tell? The Wimas already are/were 3.5mm, smallest comparable current production film caps I’ve found so far are 4.5mm TDKs. Just went through revising three sets of my open source boards, would love to revert to the old designs if possible though.

Edit: just read the Aion article, and can now recommend the Kemet sub parts which will be available in early 2026. Yay!
whoops, I meant standard 63v 5mm thickness
 
Officially off the work bench… Originally started this project with a temu body and after trying g to put it together the bridge and neck pocket alignment was not very good… Tossed the whole thing in the trash… Buddy at work gave me a Mexican strat body that was a 2 color burst and I painted it Tuesday at work… Just finished putting got all together.. I had bought some musiclilly A5 pickups for it for $30 on Black Friday…. Not happy with the pickups… they are pretty bad sounding 🤣.. Can’t put my finger on what it is exactly but they aren’t right
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Officially off the work bench… Originally started this project with a temu body and after trying g to put it together the bridge and neck pocket alignment was not very good… Tossed the whole thing in the trash… Buddy at work gave me a Mexican strat body that was a 2 color burst and I painted it Tuesday at work… Just finished putting got all together.. I had bought some musiclilly A5 pickups for it for $30 on Black Friday…. Not happy with the pickups… they are pretty bad sounding 🤣.. Can’t put my finger on what it is exactly but they aren’t right
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Oooh ooh! I know!

Cream covers with a mint pick guard! That’s what’s wrong.

Right? Right?
 
Soon to be on the bench. I got the last tool delivered today that I need to build out my little woodshop in the garage. I put this purchase off for 5 years which was dumb because it's ridiculously expensive now. I got a moderate deal on it, though. Next up: scratch built guitars for me and my close friends. I'm really stoked!

I'm also gonna try a little bit of furniture and fine woodworking, too. It's been a dream for quite a while. This box weighs 100lbs in case you are wondering.

20251205_211802.jpg
 
Soon to be on the bench. I got the last tool delivered today that I need to build out my little woodshop in the garage. I put this purchase off for 5 years which was dumb because it's ridiculously expensive now. I got a moderate deal on it, though. Next up: scratch built guitars for me and my close friends. I'm really stoked!

I'm also gonna try a little bit of furniture and fine woodworking, too. It's been a dream for quite a while. This box weighs 100lbs in case you are wondering.

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Beancasters for everyone!
 
Soon to be on the bench. I got the last tool delivered today that I need to build out my little woodshop in the garage. I put this purchase off for 5 years which was dumb because it's ridiculously expensive now. I got a moderate deal on it, though. Next up: scratch built guitars for me and my close friends. I'm really stoked!

I'm also gonna try a little bit of furniture and fine woodworking, too. It's been a dream for quite a while. This box weighs 100lbs in case you are wondering.

View attachment 107240
Wisdom.

I went another direction back when I decided to get into woodworking.

Vintage...old-school...fucking...hand planes. Cause I lived in a condo, and noise was a concern.

Ohhhhh man.

Ohhhhh mannnn.

It takes so much goddamned time to level a board. Oh em fucking gee.

Been thinking about one of those for a while...I'm probably gonna just stick with a bigger CNC with a flattening bit, though.

Did OK with some hand-tool only builds. Still happy with the coffee table I made...even if it's not particularly refined in its dimensions:
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Well, my Circulator and Seabed Delay have run aground on the sandbar of "I don't have that value." 180K, 360K resistors will be new to my supply when they arrive. But I have enough boards to mess with, so I jumped to something easy looking (without checking inventory of parts, of course). Late tonight I took my PedalPCB Uberdrive SD-1 to the "clean the flux and mount the pots" stage. Oops. Don't have B1M and B20K either. At least not in a PCB mount - I do have some 24mm Bourns so I might try wiring these up to test the circuit.

At the end of this build push, I will definitely have a solid Mouser/Tayda/LMS/SBP order to fill in the needs on all my "almost done' boards.

But I was able to drop some Reagan era Z-spec ceramic caps into the Uberdrive (measured to match what I didn't have/want to use in film). If ceramic caps settle over time, these are well aged and ready like fine port. I also had to do the twist to make the non-Japanese transistors line up with the different orientation. Kind of makes the 2N5088's look like they are line dancing.

IMG_8869.jpeg
 
Soon to be on the bench. I got the last tool delivered today that I need to build out my little woodshop in the garage. I put this purchase off for 5 years which was dumb because it's ridiculously expensive now. I got a moderate deal on it, though. Next up: scratch built guitars for me and my close friends. I'm really stoked!

I'm also gonna try a little bit of furniture and fine woodworking, too. It's been a dream for quite a while. This box weighs 100lbs in case you are wondering.

View attachment 107240
Be prepared for insane loudness with that little guy.. pro tip keep an extra set or two of blades on hand and take as shallow of a pass as you can and the blades will last much longer. If you really use it a lot and upgrade get a grizzly with carbide inserts for the blades..
 
Be prepared for insane loudness with that little guy..

Absolutely! Definitely use ear protectors!

Planers with straight metal blades are typically >90dB, because the blades hit the entire board all at once. The more $$$$ ones with helical carbide cutterheads can be much quieter (~75dB or so), as only a few carbide bits (at most) hit the board at any given time.
 
If you really use it a lot and upgrade get a grizzly with carbide inserts for the blades..

Agreed, after 20+ yrs w/ my Delta 12" (lesser quality than your DeWalt), I moved to a Grizzly 15" helical carbide about 5-6 yrs back - luckily caught in on a deeply discounted introductory sale. It's now more than 2x what I paid for it...

Another much less expensive future option is to consider replacing your planer's cutter w/ a helical one - there are companies that sell them as upgrades for popular units such as your DeWalt.

But @bean - please, first enjoy your new unit, you bought a really great planer for the money.
 
Agreed, after 20+ yrs w/ my Delta 12" (lesser quality than your DeWalt), I moved to a Grizzly 15" helical carbide about 5-6 yrs back - luckily caught in on a deeply discounted introductory sale. It's now more than 2x what I paid for it...

Another much less expensive future option is to consider replacing your planer's cutter w/ a helical one - there are companies that sell them as upgrades for popular units such as your DeWalt.

But @bean - please, first enjoy your new unit, you bought a really great planer for the money.
agreed..... will do a great job if you don't try to make too deep of a pass.... will be great for doing glue ups..
 
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