Dlog

Well the housing market is starting to pick up. I sold my first birdhouse today. (The one with the random paint on it.) I have been making them all summer… missing the nesting season, it seems.

They are all from reclaimed, recycled materials and found objects. The first few didn’t open for cleaning… but after getting […]

We have way more space than we could handle this year. So we have stuck with tomatoes, basil, a pepper plant, some squash, green beans, catnip, kale, and some wild flower seeds to fill in some space. We are still discovering the state of the soil and such, so the tomatoes grew so large and […]

Click the smaller image for a larger view. Grin.
The weather was incredible this weekend so I propped the shop doors open and spent some hours on a Classical Cigar Box Guitar. As usual, I am not finished with this project but am too excited to wait to post it.
Of note, the scale length dictated the […]

Original bass blog here.
Hey there!
Yesterday I etched the control plate for the Suitcase Bass.
All traditional intaglio process, 1. Cleaned and prepped the brass plate. 2. Put a soft ground on it. (Some kid of tar, brushed on, then cooked.) 3. Hours of carving the ground off. 4. Then 1 hour and 24 minutes in […]

So this one is perhaps the wierdest, a hybrid of chimeric ilk. (Heh, Heh.) It started with a film reel canister, (an old Eastman Kodak tin.) Just like all the others, it has a “neck-thru” structure. The tail-piece is a 3-holed hinge. I made the head stock out of some 1/4 inch plywood, and it […]

Please continue to learn about this project here—>

Please read the rest of this post to learn about the cigar box sitar —>

Photo by Dave Rue, drummer for Cicada Omega, right before a show in Seattle. The bass has been in use for a while now. I have worked out a few kinks, caused a few kinks, and worked out some more. Right now it is sounding incredible. So is the band.

(original bass blog here)
The suitcase bass has been in active testing for about 4 months now. I play it in Cicada Omega, and a jazzy trio called Dizzynest, and with Daisy Hill, an old-timey-country-bluegrass quartet, (bass, acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle.) The bass sounds great in all three contexts.
There were and still are some kinks […]

I am making an electric upright bass out of a vintage suitcase. It will be a beautiful blues machine with a real 3/4 sized upright neck attached to the suitcase. I have two soap-bar bass pick-ups for it, am customizing a floating bridge and shaping my own fretless finger board. I am cutting f-holes into […]