Bespoke Engraving
I’m now offering bespoke engraving for the caliper cases. If you have a logo, or piece of art… or any black and white drawing, chances are I can turn it into a vector graphic, and put it on a case. I’m charging $10 for this service (bargain). If you’re interested, email me the drawing, and I’ll convert it, test it and send back a sample photo – your design etched onto an offcut – which will give you an idea of whether it’s going to work or not. I’ve already made a couple of one-off designs for people, and they’ve worked really well. My email address is
Guitar Fret Position Generator
Nothing to do with the Golden Mean, other than tangential affiliations to the mathematical habits/harmonics that tend to underly life, the universe, and everything… … but never mind. Here’s an online guitar (or any other musical instrument) fret position generator for them that would like to build guitars. If you tick the save box, it will download the SVG, which can be opened in drawing packages like Inkscape or Illustrator… it’s dead simple, just lines and dots. I’m not sure if there are laser-cutters that can handle raw SVG, but it won’t be long before there are. With my own laser cutter it’s just a matter of taking the generated SVG and exporting as DXF. Bingo – accurate to the nearest .01 mm I’m not sure if proper grown up luthiers would approve of laser-cutting guitar-fret grooves… possibly not, but… if it sounds ok, then well… you’ve got to admit…
How to take care of wooden cases
Busy again… I’ve learned how to make cases in such a way that I justify charging as little as I do. The early ones should have cost about $500 each, given the time it took to make them. Still… one of the nice things about cottage industrialism is it’s a learning process… you learn how to make things in the months (and years) after you’ve initially invented them. You get better. Anyway… once the cases are cut, they are – washed (yup, water) – a coat of linseed oil – another coat of linseed oil – a coat of beeswax – another coat of beeswax Each of these stages starts with a light-sanding with very fine sandpaper… and is followed by a day or so of drying. There’s a lot of drying… then – buff with soft cloth – leave it for a week or two – buff with soft…
A Sea of Accidental Stars
So the fates have conspired… in the shape of a bungle, and I now have a HUGE number of the 5-part Star Calipers So those are for sale again… here. A couple of the photos here also show the sliding top box… which isn’t included, but which is also available from the shop… … or will be when my laser-cutter is back online again, because it has blown up AGAIN. This happens a lot. If you’re going to run a business off the back of a laser-cutter, you really need two of them – especially in NZ, because if something goes wrong here and you need a part from overseas, you’re basically out of commission for a month. They pretend things get from A to B faster than that, but they never do. Still… The Star Calipers are now accidentally available again… so that’s good news :)
Post-Launch Entanglements
Well that might just have been the most stressful week on record… post-launch of self-made wooden-cases. People like them. Which is great – and to be fair, they do look fantastic, and I’m getting better at making them. I ran into a whole heap of hurdles all at once though… namely 1) Just because you’ve successfully prototyped something, doesn’t mean the design process stops. After you’ve made 3, you’ll think of an improvement… and you can’t bring yourself to send people version 1.0. Result? Delay. 2) Winter has arrived in NZ. It’s at least 5 degrees colder than it was, so the oil I use takes about 2-3 days to dry, rather than 8-12 hours. 3) You need to make things for weeks… months even, before you get process sorted. Until then, there are bungles and clutter, and things taking a lot longer than they eventually will. 4) I was…