Month: August 2017

Since tearing down my home theater and parting ways with my beautiful CRT projector when I moved out of state. I began to think about projectors and though to myself, hey I only really dug deep into CRT projectors, I wonder what else is out there.

So I did what I do best and that is find every single book I could find on projectors and begin to read about all the different types of projectors and how they function both optically and electrically as well as blending multiple projectors. I read about the latest laser projection technologies and tracked down a theater to see it in person. Personally I am excited about laser projection because it brings us back towards what CRT did best and that was a great film quality and fantastic contrast ratio. If I build another theater I am so on board to find a broken laser projector from a theater and fix it.

During this time I also found a few projectors to tear into and ended up fixing several and either selling or giving them away.

One of the projectors I had to fix was a Dwin DLP projector to fix because I had a CRT projector made by them that I just could never fix, no matter how hard I tried.

This time I did not fail and even had to make a custom cable to get it working.

At first I used it to play movies and theme my office wall but then eventually turned it into a flight simulator when I found a scrap multiprocessing server. (I had a flight yoke and everything.) Office flight simulator!!

I played with projecting on objects and using video loops.

I also had pico projectors in my office.

For Halloween and Christmas I even had a projected fire complete with essential oils providing the smell of the fire.

Here is a video of my office during Halloween:

For a year I was completely consumed with learning everything I could about guitar pedals.

This included building my own effects pedals and modifying them.

I read everything I could find on effects pedal design and began collecting broken guitar pedals from ebay and fully repairing them. While repairing them I was studying how they were designed to understand how they worked.

I made an ad on craigslist offering my services and for a year I met all kinds of people and got to fix some incredibly rare and old guitar effects pedals. It was great, I made a few bucks and got to study the guts of some of the greatest pedals. I went to great lengths to find parts for some of the odd pedals, for example I had a tube distortion pedal that had a transformer go bad. I tracked down the manufacture of the of the transformer and discovered it was a custom part they had done for the manufacture. I was able to secure a sample from them and brought that pedal back to life.

I also learned a valuable lesson about obsolete parts and how hard it is to find them when they are popular. For one pedal I was fixing for a person from craigslist, it took a two months but I was able to locate the part and fix the pedal. To this day its the longest I have ever taken to repair a pedal. Fortunately the guy I was fixing it for was incredibly understanding given the rarity of the part. In the end it was a lot of fun doing this and a learned a bunch.

My Ad read as follows:

Guitar Effects Pedal Broken? I can fix it!!

Is your guitar effects pedal just sitting under your bed collecting dust or dangling over the trash can?

I can help you out.

Don’t let the music die!

If I can’t fix it, there is no charge.

Here are a very few images from my adventures in guitar pedals, including my drawer of pedals that I trimmed down the collection to.