Not much to talk about this week I’m afraid. I had hoped to do some downtime activities on the guitar side of things, but the real world got in the way this last week - notably I had to focus on software contracting work and given that’s getting more scarce on the ground at the moment I thought I’d just get on with that whilst I can given the uncertain times in which we currently reside.

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On the bandsaw front I got some recommendations from my woodworking-expert friend Graeme, send me a wonderfully detailed email which pointed me to a number of options that would be suitable for the needs I outlined last week. It seems there’s a good range of mid-sized bandsaws that would suit my needs, such as this example from Record. These should have the power and clearance I’d need for guitar building - not too small, not too large, but just right :)

Alfred Chow, a maker that I met at Liverpool Makefest a couple of years ago, recommended something on a similar scale from Axminster. So I have some options.

At the moment I’ll sit on this one until I can see when we’re likely to be able to move around safely again - there’s no point buying a bandsaw that I can’t get to the workshop to accept, let alone setup and use.

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I also pondered perhaps I could use this time to look into the project I’ve mentioned a couple of times here before, which is trying to visualize how guitar distortion works - I find it wonderous that rock and roll and all that follows stems from a single component in a simple chain not doing its job well, and I feel there’s a fun STEM/Maker interactive stand opportunity here. There’s lots of good videos on this on YouTube, but I love the idea of being able to help people experience it with a guitar and an amplifier at somewhere like Liverpool Makefest, as a fun interactive bit of science.

Given I’m a bit out of my depth when it comes to workout out what I need in terms of oscilloscopes for a project like this, I reached out to a more talented friend (you may spot a trend here) who does a lot of fun stuff with building electronic music equipment for some recommendations on what I should be looking for. His response was wonderful, in that it pointed out I was asking the wrong questions to start with, as I had some incorrect assumptions about digital oscilloscopes and how well they work for audio. Tom’s pointed me in some new directions to research there, and has offered to have a little look himself, so perhaps there’s a potential collaboration there, which would be lovely, but either way there’s some learning to be done, and I always like it when I have stuff to learn.