Got the week finished up, with the inevitable spending all the time dealing with kids (and parents of kids) who haven't done their work, leaving no time for the awesome ones. Failing kids is hard work. The awesome kids seem to have to teach themselves. Given pen and paper and a challenging task, they seem to be able to amuse themselves for hours, right into good marks.
My friend Peter is a mechanical engineer. He agreed to help me make a box to enable me to hook the 9-pin organ connector cable of my rotating Leslie speaker cabinet to a guitar amplifier instead of a vintage organ. On Saturday, preparing to hear if my Leslie sounded good or not, I bought a bunch of things from The Source (and also from an actually good, well-stocked electronics store called Advanced Electronics) had some pizza and then went and saw Get Him to the Greek. I am a big fan of Russell Brand's truthful and amusing depictions of how stupid stardom can be. I live for movies that I'm never sure quite where they're going. This was one of those.
Sunday was grey and off, as the weather has tended to be of late, changing dramatically and randomly from sun beating down humidity, to rain beating down liquid atmosphere. The common thread this year seems to be that it is unrelentingly humid. I cannot deal with humidity and heat the way I can deal with southern Ontario winter chill. I set off to go to Brockville where Peter lives in a house overlooking the St. Lawrence Seaway, stopping two towns over at my folks' house so I could use their working printer to print a schematic of my amp and a pin diagram for the Leslie.First we tried using butt connectors to hook up the wires temporaily to see if the thing worked. Peter is a mechanical, not an electrical engineer, and the first thing he noted when the thing hummed to life and we made the rotating speaker spin was that there was a mechanical problem with the bearing. It was a bit seized. Cool thing about a rotating speaker is that it spins. Trouble with a rotating speaker is that it spins. How do you hook the wires to something that's going to spin constantly? They use a bearing which enables the speaker to spin, and the wires to make contact, but lets the speaker spin around on the bearing merely making electrical contact without needing to be physically stuck to it. This one wasn't letting the wires stay put. It was twisting them.
How lucky that Peter was a mechanical engineer. He got the bearing out, applied penetrating oil and heat to it, and got it freed up somewhat, and got me a manufacturing code and company name from it to contact them about replacing it with an identical or similar one. There's a whole company that just makes bearings which in turn make electrical contact on things that spin. It's called Mercotac. (Email sent.) With the bearing freed up, I hooked up my new electric guitar, not taking the time to tune it, and we fired it up. The slow spin effect was very nice, making a constantly shifting, very stereo shimmery trippy effect. I thought "I never like overdone effects, so I don't expect I'll like the fast spin." While I was thinking this, Peter took the wire off the "slow spin/tremolo" contact and stuck it on the "fast spin/chorale" contact. My guitar suddenly started sounding exactly like the one in the Nirvana song "Come As You Are" or the one in "Black Hole Son" by Soundgarden. Cool.
Then we decided it was time to start work on the box so that Peter wouldn't have to stand there holding wires and touching contacts with them in order for my box to work. If it had been just me working alone, there would have been little or no measuring and a great deal of guessing. With Peter, the callipers and ruler and so on came out and the whole thing ended up looking professionally built, because it was. He even used grommets. Grommets, I say. ("But these are the wrong TROUSers!" I said in a bad British accent.) I also said "If we combine my 'Hey! Let's do this!' with your perfectionism, we'll really get somewhere!"
Peter did all the drilling and I did some of the soldering, and then when he was done, we started to solder together, with him holding the parts and me holding the soldering iron and trying not to burn his fingers or melt the plastic or anything. Went really well. Then I had a look at the on/off switch. I noticed that I'd kind of soldered it to short the whole thing out, rather than power it up. Oops. More of a self-destruct switch, rather than an on-off one. We'd never plugged the box in, but still. Good thing we didn't turn it on and plug it in (well, as it turned out, it wouldn't really have mattered, as you'll see, gentle reader).
The next-door neighbours had invited Peter and his lady over for supper, and they invited me too, so we had a great BBQ on the deck thing, with a deaf cat and another three-legged cat cozying up to our ankles, and I was loving the company, the food and the beer and the purring cats, but was also kind of itching to get back to the soldering before the dark and the mosquitoes made it impossible to continue. Good thing Steve, it turned out, is a guy who solders things all day long. He was easily enticed to come over and have a look, and the three of us got it all soldered up just as the full-on darkness descended and the mosquitoes did as well, in four or five droves. We hooked it all up and...it didn't work. And the mosquitoes were insufferable. And it started to rain. And Peter needed to get to bed. And I needed to drive home.
So, broken-hearted, we packed up all the stuff as the rain descended in earnest and I drove home, with rain coming down in sheets which at times entirely obscured the road.
Monday I then spent a day of making what I always feel are, of necessity, all-too-arbitrary, quick judgements of students' frequently half-hearted literary efforts. Lot of brilliant kids wrote stuff for me this year, and I mostly just nitpicked punctuation, grammar and spelling and gave some vague pointers, but it all ended up OK. I was a fair man. Cruel, but fair. Good spelling mistakes included "an autistic guitar come in and creates a gentle lullaby," "The worst even that occurred would have to be the Halifax Explosion because the number of people that died and were injured was very unremarkable." and "She could go to Alcoholics Ann ominous for her drinking problem."
After school (the weather was doing "sweltering" at that point) I picked up a multimeter to test what was wrong with my Big Black Box That Does Nothing. At the post office, my (seen to the left) had come in. I put them on my new black guitar, and then fired up the multimeter and got down to the taxing business of exhaustively testing all the contacts on the Box of Doom.
It turned out that the switch I'd bought to switch it from off to on (and back again) simply wasn't switching. Oh, it went click click alright, but it didn't work. So, with it mis-soldered (and not plugged in) even if we had plugged it in and flipped the switch, it would not after all, have functioned as a self-destruct switch as I'd thought. It would have done nothing and we'd have suspected my poor soldering choices of having burned out the switch or something.
Will have to go to the The Source by Circuit City store in our town and see what they have to say about using that switch for that purpose. I am resolved to beat this thing yet. My black box will certainly rise to prominence.
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