Guitar Building part 2

The pickguard with the electronics and the piezo pickup.

The routered pickup cavities. Later, I realized that the little one (for string loading) should have actually been six little holes. I'm probably just going to put a wooden block inside it with holes drilled in it.

Stupid camera. It won't focus on the piezo properly. Arrgh. I took about a dozen pictures of this trying to get it to focus. It never did.

The body partly cut out with the jigsaw.

The body mostly cut out with the electronics put in.

The bandsaw used to cut out the res of the body. Dad got it at a garage sale, and it's about 60 years old (the company that made it has gone out of buisness since then. We didn't have the right size blade, so Dad put an old scooter wheel on a metal beam to act as a third wheel so that the larger blade would fit. To see better, we duct taped on a flashlight.

Partly done sanding and routering the edges of the body.

Cutting out the pickguard.

Since when we tested the strings we only used the middle two, the bridge was miss aligned because we didn't see how far the outer two strings were from the sides. This picture is measuring where the bridge should actually go.

The volume knob. It really looks much better than that, the bad quality is the camera's fault.

This is Watson. Totally unrelated.

Everything screwed together for a WORKING TEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Guitar Building part 1

The "parts guitar". I bought it on craigslist, and it came with an amp and the cord shown in the picture.

The parts guitar with the strings taken off.

After taking the pickguard and neck off

Guitar guts.

The wood, after planeing and gluing. You can kind of see the outline I drew on it.

Neck pocket drama. Stupidly, Dad and I routered out the space about 2 millimeters too large, so this picture shows shims being glued on the side to fix the shape. We don't have enough C-clamps, so the wood in the middle is bracing the shims to the side.

The all important router (given to Dad by Grandpa. Thanks!)

The neck pocket done - FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!

The neck stuck in and the bridge resting on top.

Measuring the scale length. The scale length is the distance from the nut to the twelth fret, and the bridge has to be exactly twice that distance from the nut to make sure the intonation is correct.

The bridge clamped on to test the intonation. I played a couple songs on the middle two strings. I don't know why we didn't use the outer two strings instead. If we had, it probably would have saved us a lot of trouble down the road. 

     Yesterday I went to a soapbox derby in Turners Falls, MA. It was called the Montague Soapbox Derby, even though Montague was actually the next town over. On the way there, we picked up my friend, Ben. Be brought a skeleton mask, which he wore and tried to scare people with.
     I made and built my car last year, but I used it again this year. It is inspired by 1920s race cars, with their long hoods and little wind windshields. This year I added a large, black barrel in the back to look like an old gas tank. I painted a radioactive symbol on it in yellow paint. I filled the barrel with water so that the car would be extra heavy and therefore go faster.
     There were a lot of very strange cars. One looked like a go kart frame painted green. There were a bunch of little stuffed frogs on it, along with one enormous stuffed frog that doubled as a seat. I raced it, but it always coasted to a halt short of the finish line.
     Another car was made out of junk. The wheels were enormous metal spools. There were at least four barrels stacked up in the back. The steering was made out of two rusty ice picks. The brake was an enormous metal pipe that was jammed against one of the rear wheels. When it was weighed, the driver was told that the car weighed 409 pounds, and that the limit was 450. The driver ran off. A minute later, he came back with a hammer, some nails, and some miscellaneous iron junk (gears, cannonballs, etc.) Surprisingly, he didn't crash! He did have some steering issues, however. Since the wheels were solid metal, they dug into the concrete and were hard to steer. When the driver tried to steer, it didn't work. He tried again, and he went too far. Fortunately, he didn't over correct and managed to fix his coarse.
      One car, however, did over correct. It was literally 3 feet long, and was painted green. It was made entirely of wood, with plastic lawnmower wheels. The driver of the car held it back at the starting line, but when she was supposed to release his car, she didn't. Ten seconds after the other car was released, an official came over and told her to let go of the car. When she released it, the driver rocked the car back and forth to try to gain speed. Then he started to over steer. The car veered to the right. He spun the wheel to the left. The car slid and veered to the left. This continued, each zigzag bigger than the last. A photographer was taking pictures of him from the grass. He didn't realize that he was going to get hit until the car was about a foot away. He jumped out of the way, and the car rolled over. The last I saw of it was the driver's mother carrying the car away. When it was his turn to race in the second heat, no one could find him or his car. The officials spent ten minutes looking for it, before I told them that the car had been carried off towards the vendors, and that he probably dropped out.
     There were many other cars as well. There was a rat rod car with real rust on it. There was a car with an enormous, metal chicken mounted on top. There was a car with pictures of snoopy on it. There was a brown car with two real missile cases on the sides, a remote control helicopter zip-tied to the side, and a very bad steering system.

Today I made this out of LEGOs.

I made up that a golden monkey lives in it.

The black thing on the front is an air intake. Air goes through the stack of cylinders and to the other black thing: a hot turbine. The turbine powers the propellers on the back. The neon yellow cylinders are neon because of the hot turbine.

       I hope you like it.

On 9/16/12 in Turner Falls, MA, I went to a soapbox derby where I was racing. Some of the cars were very interesting. There was one black wedge shaped one that said Corvette on the back. It had all wheel independent hydraulic suspension, All wheel vented disc brakes, and a steering wheel that looked exactly the same as some real old Corvette steering wheels. It also had a tubular metal chassis and a sheet metal body. Another car had all wheel independent hydraulic suspension, all wheel vented disc brakes, and a roll cage.
     I found this post in my drafts folder-I had meant to post it almost a year ago.

Some people have probably began wondering about why my username is Charger III (My brother, for 1, has). Well, the Dodge Charger III was a concept car built by Chrysler in 1968.  Its design borrowed ideas from its predecessor,  the Charger II. It was by far the most streamlined car built by Dodge. Although Chrysler implied that similar designs would soon be used on all of its models, it took over 25 years for anything like that to happen. For more information, please see this website.

On Rt. 122A in Holden, MA I saw what I at first thought was a Chevrolet Impala with a truck bed. Then I looked up El Caminos online and found out that it was really a 1959 El Camino. It had he exact same tail light setup with the bat-wing fins as the 1959 Impala.  Some pictures of '59 El Caminos ( I did not take them myself):