“Most of my projects become slightly Duck-Centipeded.”
– Me, Random Thoughts.
There’s an old story attributed to Errol Flynn where he tied some string to a piece of bacon and fed it to a duck. As ducks can’t digest bacon and it progresses through their systems quite rapidly, the said duck pooped out the bacon unscathed. Thus he had a duck on a string. A second duck then ate the bacon and he had 2 ducks on a string. A duck-centipede, if you will.
While it’s absolute bollocks because ducks can quite happily digest bacon, it does provide a good metaphor (metaphor? simile?) for the way my hobbies work. One invariably leads to another.
Is it a new thing? I can’t really remember my childhood hobbies other than turning my Hotwheels collection into a scrapyard and having a garage train set layout with a den underneath, I do know that it’s been the case for quite some time.
In the 90’s I had a few classic Mini’s. and as was the norm back then, customising a Mini was a full time passion. I wanted a Dali painting on the bonnet of one of them (can’t remember which painting, but that Mini was called Mitzi) so I learned how to airbrush. In the same way as Philip Castle, cutting out a template and holding pieces down with small speaker magnets rather than pennies. It didn’t get finished before poor Mitzi went to the scrapyard. Along with her 15-speaker sound system.
Anyways, this recent burst started in 2017. I bought an Ender 2 3D printer. It was useful – I fixed the fridge with a little shelf holder and made some lithophanes. I’ve always liked pens, so tried designing and 3D printing one. It was terrible, I was frustrated at the lack of quality. But being in a couple of pen groups I thought I’d get a cheap lathe and make one from wood.
They turned out quite good – I sold a couple and gave some away. Then that naturally led to resin casting to make them different. All this while working in a cellar roughly 4″ higher than I am myself.
I upgraded the printer to an Ender 3 when they came out. The prints improved but still weren’t good enough for what I was trying to do, but I did print one pen that came out quite well with a bit of finishing. I read about something called Inktober where everyone has a set list of words for each day of the month and draws a pen picture representing that day’s word.
I decided to make my own sketch book for it, designed and printed a binding frame. Sold a small few on Etsy to recoup some hobby costs and made the book myself. It turned out quite good but I’ve no idea where it is now. It’ll be around somewhere.
When we moved I had a reasonable sized shed space to play with and thanks to a very nice garden was also back into one of my very early hobbies, photography. I read about photogrammetry and gave that a shot – got some very nice results, too. Around that time I also bought a Mars 2 resin printer.
Do you remember Reboot? That 90’sTV series that was all CGI but got pulled because the storylines got a bit dark? I had the little figures for those and wanted to try to duplicate them as slightly bigger models. Trying to do photogrammetry on those was a pain, so I wanted to learn how to make a photogrammetry jig (the video of it working is on YouTube). That dragged me into learning about Arduino’s and stepper motors, then more Arduino projects…. you can see where this is going, yeah? Another new hobby.
The shed was a good place to be able to play with things like chemicals, so I tried turning these little soldered balls of wire and components into neat little PCB’s. It did ok, but my setup was on the bad side of amateurish. It was going ok until our landlord died and his wife had to sell the house, so another move.
But hey!! I now had a full garage to play in!
I was doing well with the resin printer at this point and we had a good collection of board games going on. (I was still playing with circuits although I was moving from Arduinos to ESP32’s mounted on stripboards). On a whim I decided to make some game pieces.
That mistake was a doozy. I designed them and printed them nicely, but wanted some sort of a finish. Painting / spraying them with metallic paints wasn’t cutting it for me and I fell into the trap of believing that because something looks easy on YouTube that it must be. Warning : GOLD PLATING IS NOT EASY. Correction. Gold plating is not difficult. Getting a decent finish is not easy.
That was nearly a year of frustration, building a decent setup that would work, literally dozens of wasted attempts. I got there eventually, but then something happened (contaminated chemicals maybe?) and it took a back shelf out of frustration. Anyways, the electronics projects were really taking over my time.
Were they successful? All I’m saying is we don’t talk about the Halloween project from 2022. A replication of the scene from Stranger Things where Max floats up in the air with the music playing. No, that never gets mentioned in this house.
But little Kaput the robot was good, he showed emotions. And the Garage Gremlin worked, a little security guard who used radar and reported movement to me on Telegram and screamed messages at people. And the Gnasher Splasher to keep my pet Venus Flytrap (Gnasher) watered while on holiday.
So that’s brought us to within a couple of years of today. While doing the gold plating I wanted to make little masks to mask off areas so I could have gold and silver on the same item. Did I sit and cut little bits of tape out? Hell, no!
I went the whole hog and bought a 2nd hand Cricut to do it. Spent quite a bit of time with that, selling a few things and making that the status quo for a while. Inbetween, things were going on of course, I was converting the old Ender 2 into a little laser cutter then a small (and desperately over engineered) CNC. I was 3D designing and printing. I was designing circuits for the projects.
We had an old electric guitar lying about for a few years. An apparently rare (but not at all valuable) Parrot Union Jack strat copy. I was storing it in the garage, and one day while I was moving things around I strummed it, just for the heck of it. Another key moment.
It was out of tune. I downloaded a tuning app. I tuned it. I looked up a couple of chords…..
Whoosh.
It’s my late teens / early 20’s. I tried learning guitar, was too impatient with my progress so stopped for a few years. Tried again, same result. Swapped my Les Paul sunburst copy for a Honda C70.
Whoosh, back to the present…
I tried playing it. It felt a lot easier learning than it had those many years ago, but it still wasn’t fun. YouTube made me realise the guitar was in a bad way and needed work on it that I couldn’t do. So I did the next sensible thing. Actually, no I didn’t. the next sensible thing would have been putting it back and forgetting about it again. I did the next stupid thing – bought a cheap guitar and amp.
Oh look, another rabbit hole!
At this point I had some spare time on my hands. I was looking for an app that would help me learn, but none of them suited my learning patterns. I did the next best thing. Turned to AI and learned how to make an app myself. The Chord Tamer was born (Yes, I have a short video about that on YouTube too).
I bought a cheap pedal from Temu. It surprisingly wasn’t bad. With my electronics knowledge I wanted to try building my own, so using the net I learned a little about doing that and made a basic Fuzz pedal which worked well. My next pedal (though I didn’t realise it) was, of course, over ambitious and didn’t work. Well, part of it worked.
One of my favourite films is Nightcrawler. The soundtrack also has some haunting guitars. What I’d made sounded kindof suspiciously close to that. I messed with it a bit, and actually got something quite close. (When you put a chorus pedal in line, it sounds freakishly close). I wasn’t aware at the time, but I’d actually wired a chip wrong and forced it to do something it probably wasn’t intended to do. But it worked for me.
(Don’t worry, we’re getting quite up to date now)
The Cricut came back into play – I made a couple of template stickers. I had ideas flowing like the Whiteadder River. (You just thought of Blackadder, didn’t you? That’s actually a Scottish river that runs into the Whiteadder River. )
Add in my recent obsession with the CNC (definitely more about that later, and the software I made for it) and my pedal journey is in full swing right now. The guitar playing? Not so much, I’m a slow learner with that it seems……