Possibly my last post

on this blog.

I took some time to check out Wordpress at the prompting of Vince (albeit several months ago). I was a little frustrated with the limitations of blogspot, but the biggest thing to me is that now people can post comments without having a google account.

So all of you that have just been dying to post ultra insightful and intelligent comments, or just wanted to say hello, head on over and do so now!

http://apassionateapathy.wordpress.com

Pedal...

No, not the bicycle kind. The guitar kind....

I am the kind of person that loves building or improving things. I can almost never leave my cars alone, and prepping our race car is always fun. I have also built a high efficiency bass cabinet to go with my puny David Eden head as well as a sub to augment it.

So needless to say as I continue into the electric guitar realm I had to build my own pedal. I guess the word build may be a little stong here. Assemble is probably a better choice. I bought a kit from generalguitargadgets.com and started assembly yesterday.

The kit I got was the Marshall blues breaker. I chose it because I wanted a simple circuit to start with and I can always use another overdrive tone. It is a reproduction of the original pedal plus the added benefit of true bypass switching. The kit comes with everything you need except tools. The schematics and layout are on the web. I actually soldered everything up, put it together and it worked on the first try! I was not expecting that.

One of these days I'll pull it back apart and paint the enclosure, but before that I am already planning a few little modifications for it. The cool thing about researching and assembling the pedal yourself is that in the process you learn a little bit about what is really going on in that circuit. So if you hear something you don't like you can work at fixing that instead of just heading for a new pedal.

I'm sure this won't be my last pedal, it was a blast! My goal is to work on more and more difficult pedals and ultimately build my own small tube amp. So if anyone is up for having a pedal built, let me know. I'll work for chinese sweat shop wages....

Jan 1, 2008 - 6:30 am......

With anticipation I pull up to my Dad's house. It was cold this AM. I had made sure and put on my long underwear, beanie, sweatshirt, etc. He was already waiting so we hopped in his Jeep and headed out. What would the day hold? Would we find what we were looking for? This journey may be a prediction of our general successes for the rest of the year.

We were pretty sure we know where we were going, but we had not been there in almost a year. So as we turned off the freeway and made a couple of turns we began scanning the horizon for our destination.

The sun was till low in the sky so we had to squint to see as we drove along. My Dad spotted it first, "Turn in there!"

Following his direction I ended up in a parking lot with very few cars..... We had beat the crowd. A big plus for us. We got out of the jeep into the crisp cold of the morning. The back hatch was lifted and we pulled out our gear. Everything got locked up and we headed for the main gate.

We signed in, got our hands stamped and proceeded through the turnstyle.

Here is were the real journey began. Hundreds if not thousands of cars in front of us waiting to be the donor of some needed and necessary part..... Yes we were at the Junkyard....

If you are a gearhead, keep reading. If you are not....

We came to find a big part for his jeep. Now skip to the end....... :-)

The goal for the day was to find a rear axle for his Jeep. Not just any old axle, and actually not even a jeep axle, but a ford 8.8 out of a 95 or newer ford explorer. And today was not any old day at the junkyard either. Today was 1/2 off day!

Rear axles in most Jeep cherokees are usually a dana 35 or a chrystler 8.25. Neither of these axle are very strong and even if upgraded have flaws that cannot be worked around. When building a 4x4 capable vehicle with bigger tires you need axle strength, both in the axles themselves as well as the ring and pinion and the housing. The ford 8.8 out of a newer explorer provides much bigger axles (31 spline) a bigger ring gear and a much more stout housing.

Along with these advantages it has the same bolt pattern for the wheels, it is the right width for the cherokee and comes with disk brakes instead of drums.

We did not go up unprepared. We had sent a scout ahead of time to see if we had a chance to find one of these elusive beasts..... (actually we just knew a guy that had gone up a couple of days before and asked him to look for us). We thought our chances were good. He had seen at least 2 of the newer explorers with the rear ends in tact.

The yard is organized by section so all our look would be confined to a smaller area than the whole yard. On our initial scan we found at least 5 or so potential cars. We checked for completeness and then picked the one with the lowest mileage.

With tools in hand we began the extraction process. In no time at all we had everything loose and it was ready to pull out. We made sure that we had all the little accessory bolts, brake lines, calipers etc and then hauled it out to the road about 30 feet away. This junkyard has a big forklift that drives around and pickes stuff up for you. So he came by and picked up the axle to take up to the front for us.

Once it was paid for, we put it in the back of the jeep and headed for home. Now there is still quite a bit of fab work to do to get it ready for the jeep, but it well definitely provide a good building block for his jeep build up.

I know we may be the black sheep, but for this part of the Lumsden clan, it was a great start to the new year.

And for those of you who read this whole commentary and are sitting there thinking, "I can't beleive I just read this whole thing about going to a stupid junkyard." well.... hahahaha :-)