The Roof, The Roof, The Roof Ain't On Fire

So it's about time I got a new roof. It's been leaking somewhat ever since I moved in, but the water wasn't damaging anything meaningful so I just let it slide until I felt like getting around with it. Given we've got the El Niño of the century aimed directly at us this winter, I figured now was the time.

First things first, it's off with the solar.

I can't very well replace the roof with all those panels in the way, after all. This part of the replacement did, however, turn into a bit of an ordeal because the panels were leased, and thus technically "not mine". The service company blessed by the leasing company wanted something like $12k to do a "remove and reset" to which I said "fuck you and your lease" and bought it out for around $10k. The roofers I hired only wanted $6k for the R&R part and now I no longer have a solar panel lease bill every month, so that turned out pretty sweet.

The panels got stashed in the back patio, along with the racking, though as it turned out they couldn't reuse the racking so it could have just gone straight in the bin, but whatever.

Next up, or down as the case may be, the roof came off.

I had originally thought there was only one layer of roofing, but curiously there was actually two layers, but when they added the second layer they removed the first layer over the eaves, which is why the water leaks never got inside but instead just rotted out the eave boards in the front. Weird.

This is, of course, why I painted a bunch of new v-groove previously. It's way, way easier to paint it when it's down on the ground vs when it's on the underside of an eave.

Anyway, it's time for some roofing materials, delivered to the roof.

The delivery guys got delayed and barely made it into the driveway before dark, and ended up unloading most of the material in pitch black. Thankfully they managed to avoid falling off and dying.

With the new sheathing and underlay up, things are starting to take shape.

And it's time for more materials, this time at a more decent hour.

And then you assemble the rest of the roof.

But the work isn't over yet (well, technically it is, as I took this picture after everything was done but never mind that). The gable boards need a coat of paint, since they've got brand new not-quite-white flashing on them, and brand new definitely-not-white trim boards replacing the old molding that would have looked weird under the new, larger flashing.

So some primer is in order for the flashing, at least the unprimed stuff around the flat roof.

And some trim paint to go on top. I tried the magic super duper life hack of putting painters tape on the rim while pouring.

And it worked!

Once, at least. The second time I tried it, the tape lifted and the whole rim got full of paint. Waste of tape, this is.

Anyway, the vessel I poured this paint into is my new painting bucket, which has a comfortable hand strap and a magnet to hold onto the ferrule of the brush.

So that makes the job a lot easier than hauling a gallon bucket up and down the ladder.

And the best part is that when you're done, you just pour the remaining paint back in the original paint can and then wait for the paint in the bucket to dry and peel it off, which definitely isn't a scam to get you to ruin the bucket by drying a layer of paint onto it that doesn't-

Oh, actually it does work. Ok.

Well, while I'm in a painting mood, one thing that's bothered me about my house is that the wall below the water table trim on the front of the car hole was painted the blue-grey instead of the two-tone red.

So, no better time than now to fix that, since I still have about half a bucket of the red accent paint.

Hmm, well, it's a good thing I have a paint mixer attachment for my drill.

There, good as new.

Coat number one goes on.

And no paint covers in one coat, so here's what it looks like after the requisite second.

Pretty snazzy, if you ask me. I know you didn't but I will opine regardless, and you'll just have to deal with it.

All told, this whole adventure cost me under $40k, and I'm pretty happy with the results.

An Ancient Tradition

So I was out in my back yard this evening looking at my retaining wall, as one does, when I happened to notice some lumps stuck to the cinder blocks. I'd noticed these lumps before and initially assumed that they were probably some tiny snails that had mucus-glued themselves to the concrete as they started to dry out, and then ended up stuck there forever once they shrivelled up and desiccated. I even recalled having tried to spray them off with my pressure washer at one point, to no avail.

But today I took a closer look at one, picked it off the wall, and finally realized what it was.

It's a lead airgun pellet, and not one of mine.

This made the peculiar clustering of them suddenly make a lot more sense.

This was clearly where a target had been set up at some point in the past.

It does make me wonder just how many squirrel carcasses had been buried in this yard before I got here.

Have You Played Bass Lately?

The Yamaha TX81Z is a rack mount sound module based on Yamaha's famous FM synthesis. It's much like the FB-01 that I have, but at little more advanced in some ways, particularly around which wave shapes can go into the FM modulator/carrier tree: the FB-01 is limited to just sine waves (like the DX7), but the TX81Z can use 8 different wave shapes. Interestingly, both modules are most well known for a bass patch, SolBass on the FB-01 and LatelyBass on the TX81Z, which sound fairly similar to each other, though the LatelyBass patch is generally considered superior if the two are being directly compared.

As per usual this one arrived on my doorstep in inoperable condition, and as per usual it didn't take much work to get it back up and running at 100% capacity.

The TX81Z represents the pinnacle of Yamaha's 4-operator FM synths, and it's only really bested by the SY99/SY77/TG77 which expand upon the TX81Z's capabilities by going back to 6 operators (like the original DX7), adding even more waveforms, and introducing the ability to use a sampled waveform in the operators. I think this module will be a great addition to my pile-o-synths.

808, 909, 110

When we last saw the trusty little Boss DR-110, it was suffering from some pretty nasty battery corrosion. With that fixed, the next item on the agenda was to fix the screen, which was suffering from low contrast and a degraded reflective polarizer. So let's get to that.

This was a very straightforward fix and easy to do, and the results look amazing. I still have one other modification planned for this unit, but that will wait for another day. In the meantime, I will enjoy what is perhaps the finest vintage 80s analog Roland drum machine.

Would You Like To Get Omni?

This right here is the Suzuki OmniChord OM-84.

Wait, hang on, this is the-

Ok, this is the-

THIS is the Suzuki OmniChord OM-84.

And it's also apparently a bit of a time capsule, as it managed to arrive at my doorstep with its original power supply, case, cleaning cloth, instructional overlay, instruction manual, and little plastic sheet that protects the top of the instrument in shipping. Kind of wild. Based on the dates on some of the chips inside, this thing comes to us from the year of our lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Seven.

Anyway, speaking of getting inside, I need to get inside this one as it is, as you might imagine, not entirely functional. So onto the bench it goes.

And with a few screws removed we get our first look at the guts inside.

Most of the circuitry here is a set of thirteen envelope generators for the strum pad, while the CPU in the middle does button scanning and drives the divide-down tone generator in the upper-middle. The green PCB in the back contains mostly the rhythm circuitry as well as various volume/mix controls.

We need to get both of these PCBs out, though, so the ribbon cable to the strum pad is the first thing to go. It just pulls straight out of the connector.

With the screws removed from this PCB, it can be slid towards the speaker to disconnect it from the other PCB, and then the chord button connectors can be popped out.

And that leaves just the grounding wire for the output amplifier, and let me tell you, it does not do a lot for keeping the noise floor down. I left it in place for this repair.

Anyway, after pulling the knobs off the front and the screws off the back, the second PCB can be lifted up so that the speaker and battery terminals can be disconnected.

And then the pair of PCBs can be lifted out.

Now we can repair the issue: some broken solder joints on the board-to-board connectors.

Which is not super easy to see on this side, but is pretty apparent on the other.

This is quite possibly the most common failure on these units, and it is the peril of using a rigid connector to join two boards in a not-entirely-rigid plastic enclosure. Thankfully it's very easy to fix by just reflowing the solder joints, which I did.

Anyway, while things are apart I'll also be cleaning off some battery corrosion, which is the second most common killer.

As usual, it's vinegar to the rescue.

It's not perfect, but it sure is better.

There's a nice wad of dried-on battery snot in the battery compartment.

I probably could have cleaned it off a bit more thoroughly but this will do.

The battery compartment was also actually wet, which is a bit weird. I suspect that the seller had grabbed some C-cells from their freezer and just jammed them in to test this thing out, frost and all.

It did come with 8 C-cells, but 4 of them were suspiciously light (probably low-capacity AA cells hiding in a C cell casing) and all of them were alkaline, so they have no business staying in my home, and definitely no business staying inside a device where they will explode and leak caustic schmoo all over everything.

Anyway, reassembly is just the same steps in reverse (or technically forwards, since I took all these photos in reverse order), and with it all back together I'm happy to say that it works perfectly. Or at least as perfectly as it did when it was new. You gotta set your expectations fairly low with these things.

The Spark of Life

So I've been a bit busy with things for the past, well, year I guess. I haven't really stretched my legs on the motorcycles in that time since I've been puttering around with home improvements and other more pressing tasks. Now that those things are largely behind me, though, I decided it was time to dust off the ol' iron aluminum steeds.

They'd be a bit less dusty if these black (yes, they started out jet black) motorcycle covers haven't been degrading in the sun and shedding bits of microplastics all over them.

That aside, it's uncommon for vehicles to be able to sit for almost a year and still retain enough juice in the batteries to crank over, so rather than jump starting them as I usually do, I figured I'd make use of my battery tender to more gently top up the charge.

Which is now a much more convenient task thanks to the electrical outlets I installed a while back when I did my irrigation overhaul.

But accessing the battery to clip on the charging leads is far from being the pinnacle of convenience, so I think it's high time I installed some quick-connect pigtails.

Step one, get to the battery.

And, oh, I guess there was already technically a pigtail on this one, though I have no idea what type of connector this is.

Well anyway, as per usual the negative lead comes off first, lest we weld our wrench to the frame.

Then the positive side can be safely unscrewed. Adding the new pigtail is just a matter of running those steps in reverse, making sure to reconnect the positive side first, of course.

The pigtail gets zip tied to a convenient spot on the frame, where it's easy to plug in the charger.

And easy to tuck up out of the way when not in use.

And now I just have to do that three more times.

Well it's a good thing I did this early in the morning, because it is smouldering hot this week. Speaking of the weather, though, it's a good idea to keep the weather off the charger. I think it's supposed to be at least water resistant, but I have no doubt that the UV exposure outside would crumble the membrane buttons in short order.

So the charger gets tucked away in an outdoor power strip box thing.

It's got some nice supple grommets to keep the rain out too when it's all closed up.

And when it's not in use, there's enough room inside to bundle up the charging cable and its extension.

And still leave room to spare for all the spiders that will take up residence in here as soon as I turn my back.