December 31, 2025It’s the last day of 2025 so I thought it important to think about and share some of the highlights this year. It’s been a great year despite all of the bullshit happening with the current administration.
Let’s get started. Rewind back to the start of the year. I promise to be gentle.
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December 29, 2025The last few nights I’ve been working through fan edits of the sequel Star Wars movies. The first one, The Force Awakens (Restructured), was good. The fan edit made is better. The second one, The Last Jedi (Legendary), was okay, the fan edit didn’t make it much better. The third one, The Rise of Skywalker (Ascendant), was really bad. I dare say the worst of all of the Stars War. The fan edit did nothing at all to make it better. It’s really just that bad.
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November 30, 2025I bought an Epiphone LP Jr. earlier this year from my favorite guitar shop. It needed a little work so I got a great deal on it. I removed everything, started to strip the nitro, but parked it to work on my Fender Strat build. I started working on it again this weekend and I’m stupid excited about it.
There wasn’t a lot asthetically I wanted to change with the Fender, but this guitar was different. I didn’t want an all black guitar and didn’t want a relic’d black guitar either.
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October 2, 2025After putting down the shielding the next step was routing the grounding wires. I installed the wiring, soldered the ground to the tremelo and jack pin. Everything tested correctly with the multimeter.
Next the pickups. I went with a set of hand wound, aged, Alnico 5/2, with flat poles. According to the description, the combination of Alnico 5 rods for the low strings, and Alnico 2 rods for the high strings, “creates a smooth, well balanced output… punchy attack with well defined bass response on the lower register and warm swelling vintage tones on the upper register.”
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September 23, 2025I remember sitting in church as a little boy, maybe 6 years old. Without fail, nearly every sermon would end with a mention of eternity, the threat of hell, and the call to spend it in heaven with God [1]. And without fail I would feel dread building up to the end, hoping he wouldn’t talk about eternity again.
I remember being very afraid of the idea of eternity. Everything in life has a beginning and an end. You push the power button on the Nintendo, the game starts. You push the power button again, it stops. The idea of something going on forever and ever is unnatural and unfounded in reality. It profoundly scared me.
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August 24, 2025This part of the project was a lot of fun. I spent a fair amount of time researching materials and proper shielding techniques. There are many differing opinions about the effectiveness of shielding and when it actually matters. In the end, the copper tape was cheap, and it was fun applying it.
I covered each cavity with the copper tape then ran a small copper wire between the jack cavity and the main body. Using the multimeter, each cavity and wall tests conductive to every other cavity and wall.
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August 11, 2025After another round of relic’ing it’s starting to come along.
Next is some more relic’ing on the back, shielding the body, and installing the electronics.
July 28, 2025The other day my friend Clay from Franklin Music messaged me asking if I wanted to take on a new project guitar. I’ve jokingly become his salvage guy. Clay had purchased the guitar just for the pickups (and apparently the tuning machines) but didn’t want to invest the time or money to build it back up. Perhaps it was too beat up for the average customer at his shop, or perhaps he wouldn’t get out of it what he would have to put into it. Lucky for him that’s what I like, that’s what I like.
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July 18, 2025I did a thing. Here’s my first album, available on Bandcamp.
safe passage on a ship called nuance
Dustin at DCW Pedals. Your service in unmatched; you’ve won a customer for life.
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June 16, 2025This past weekend my wife and I went to a market event where I picked up a great mixtape.
The tape required fixing a previous repair job that kept the tape from rewinding or playing past the massive hunk of tape.
The recording is very tinny and in several places almost difficult to listen to at normal volumes. The songs lack dynamic range, but I don’t think it’s from the tape itself. This specific model and manufacturing year of Maxell is highly regarded by modern tape scholars (tapeheads, as they cleverly call themselves). Since the sound is fairly consistently thin for each of the songs, I imagine Scott recorded this tape using a handheld recorder in front of his stereo speakers.
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