Shiny New Knobs

I just put some new knobs on my Boss TR-2 tremolo pedal. I think it looks great! They are much bigger than the old ones, probably too big!

What do you think?

Before


After

Welcome to the Wonders of Dendrology

"Dendrology is often confused with botany. However, botany is the study of all types of general plants and dendrology should be considered more as a subcategory of botany specifying in wooded plants" Thanks wikipedia for explaining my wikimedia.

As I was walking back to our apartment from the gym I looked down and picked a leaf up from the path. I occurred to me that of all the trees around me, I couldn't tell you the name of one of them.

I took the leaf home and jumped on the internet to find out from which type of tree it fell. This is the information age after all.

This is my leaf


I simply typed "leaf identifier" into the yahoo search bar and clicked on this link:http://forestry.about.com/od/treeidentification/tp/tree_key_id_start.htm

Basically, you take your leaf and follow the prompts. It was as easy as that. I found out that my leaf fell from an American sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua). These trees have a fruit shaped like a spikey ball. The leaves look like stars,have 5-7 points, and change beautiful shades of red in the fall.


Thanks to bamboosage on flickr for this great gum ball pic.

With your new sweet gum identification skills, you have no reason not to impress your friends the next time you're out in nature. Just let 'em know how great those sweet gums look this time of year.

Thanks to the Solder Master General

I recently acquired a 2004 Epiphone Les Paul Standard Plus Top in Cherry Sunburst from a pawn shop in Plano, Texas. I bought it for a song. Wheeling and dealing guitars and guitar gear has become a small hobby of mine as of late. I bought this guitar with the intention of reselling it. It was in pretty good shape, but the two tone control potentiometers were scratchy (a common problem among older guitars).
I purchased two 500k short stem pots from StewMac. I consulted with the smartest electrical engineer on the planet, Solder Master General,Travis Thompson. Travis talked me through the basics of soldering, including the minimum necessary tools: a cheap soldering iron, some solder, a sponge, and a holder. I was able to acquire all these for under $20.
I was pretty nervous about overheating the capacitors and pots, that may not even be possible, so I took my time and used PlayDough to keep the capacitor from touching the pots. It may not look pretty, but the good news it that it worked and the pots sound totally silent.

Below are some pics from my first foray into soldering.

Enjoy.