Crunchy Brown Bits

Recently I was lamenting that the tastiest part of my home cooked pot pies was the bit of sauce that bubbled over the top and crisped up on the baking sheet while it was cooking. The pot pies themselves were great too, but goodness those crunchy brown bits were divine.

This lead to wanting to figure out how to get more of that flavour inside of the pot pies. I already brown the meat to within an inch of its life before demummifying it with a long simmer, so that was already at 105% flavour capacity. Lacking inspiration for what to try next, I decided to ask the AI what flavour of glue I should add to the recipe.

It came back with a slightly peculiar recommendation, but it at least seemed like it would be more successful than trying to use pureed ham to frost a cake, so I decided to give it a try.

First up, I prepared the meat as per usual, as there was nothing left to optimize there. I also sweat up the veggie trio (celery, carrot and onion) as I normally do.

This makes a reasonably aromatic addition with some nice texture, but unlike the meat it has not been fully exploited for its maximum flavour potential, so let's get on with that.

Out comes 500g of the mix, and into my stick blender cup it goes.

As you might imagine, some stick blending comes next.

So I've now succeeded in making a pound of baby food. Ok. Next we need to concentrate and develop the flavours, so it gets spread out in an even layer in, very importantly, a non-stick oven-safe frying pan.

Spreading it out like this will help it dehydrate faster, which is a prerequisite for getting to browning temperature. The other prerequisite is being somewhere where it can get to browning temperature, so into the oven it goes, set to 450 freedom degrees, alongside the meat which is still browning.

An hour later, it comes out looking like this.

Now these big veggie-leather flakes aren't really all that useful as is, so they'll go in with the meat for the next step.

And that next step involves drowning in stock.

And spices.

Then the lid goes on and back into the oven it goes.

Some time later, quite a bit longer than usual because I accidentally bought pork loin instead of pork shoulder and simply refused to rehydrate properly, it comes out of the oven and gets hit with a potato masher to break it up. It also gets a quarter cup of flour mixed with some reserved pork fat to thicken it, and that's brought back to a boil and stirred well.

It is, at this point, unquestionably very brown. It's also done, so into the remaining veggies it goes.

And then into the pie shells.

Usually I end up with 425g or so of filling per pie, but because nearly 500g of water was boiled off during the veggie roasting stage, the filling is much more concentrated now, so splitting it amongst the 6 pies results in only about 315g per. (This also tends to vary a bit depending on what size package of meat I happen upon, how many veggies I load up with, etc)

On go the tops, and then a nice shiny coat of egg wash.

Then into the freezer as per usual. I cooked one up for lunch today and I have to say the result was fantastic.

The filling was very dark, rich and flavourful, and it no longer left me pining for the crunchy brown bits that escaped containment. So I guess chalk one up for the clanker, I seem to have survived its cooking advice.

Set It To Stun

Once again a few choice pieces of gear have fallen in my lap. This time I found a very nice deal on a nearly spotless Boss Micro Rack RPH-10.

This box applies a "phaser" effect to the sound, which basically mixes a bunch of slightly delayed copies of the signal with the original to cause phase cancellation across certain frequencies. It's hard to describe the sound of it in words, but when you hear it you'll know it.

It also came packed with some vintage packing material.

And just in case you forgot when that F5 tornado ripped through Oklahoma City, it was a few days before this.

And I guess the fellow who sold this got tired of keeping around this newspaper to remind them of that event. Idk.

In other news, I also got myself a Korg 01R/W, which was the successor to the legendary M1 (or technically the successor to the M1R, which was the rack version of the M1 keyboard, just as the 01R/W is the rack version of the 01/W keyboard).

I think this one was sold as "untested" but it works just fine, and even has an upgraded display (the originals tend to fail over time).

I hope it doesn't get in a fight with my Roland modules. In case you're wondering what it sounds like, you've heard it before.

So no dramatic hardware repairs in this instalment, but there's always next time.

Beep Beep I'm a JP

A while ago I took on the ownership of a rather ill Roland JP-8000 keyboard. I fixed it up with a bit of PCB surgery and got it running, but at the time I didn't replace the tact switches or clean the sliders. I was just concentrating on seeing if I could make it work and I didn't want to spend money on extra parts if it was going to be a lost cause.

Well, as we know, it was not a lost cause and the synth works great, but it still had some dodgy front panel switches and some scratchy sliders and potentiometers.

A few months ago I went at the sliders from the front, squirting in some contact cleaner and working them around. This cleared up the scratchiness and intermittent connectivity on all but the volume pot (which we'll get to later in this post), but the contact cleaner left some pale coloured stains on the plastic of the case that really frustrated me, so I put it aside and didn't bother replacing the switches right away.

Well, fast forward to earlier this week and I decided to take a closer look at those stains. They hadn't just magically disappeared as I hoped they might after the solvent evaporated, but mysteriously they did wipe away when I scrubbed at them with a microfiber towel soaked with Simple Green. I honestly don't know what the chemistry behind it is, but I'm glad it worked!

That success got me excited for this synth again, and gave me the motivation to replace the tact switches and get it over the finish line into being fully functional, so onto the bench it goes.

And while I'm in there, I'm definitely going to be dealing with the dust inside the display.

So off comes the back, since this synth is a bottom-loader.

To get to the front panel PCBs, the keybed needs to come out. You might think this would be a lot of fuss and bother but actually it just comes out with 5 screws.

And then a few more screws gets the main PCB and audio jack board out of the way.

A few more screws and yup, there's all that dust that was hiding inside the display.

Anyway, out comes the right-side front panel PCB, since it's a bit easier to remove than the other two.

Now I should say that my sense of frustration was only half of why I hadn't done this job already. The other half is that I kept buying just enough tact switches to repair this synth and then using them to repair other synths that use the same tact switches. So I finally did the smart thing and bought Enough Tact Switches.

A little desoldering and resoldering later and the first panel is done.

The middle and left panel PCBs are a bit trickier and it tends to work easiest if you remove both of them at once, so out they come.

And one is rebuttoned.

This is also the panel board with the main volume control pot. The rest of the control potentiometers have a little pinhole on the top surface that you can squirt contact cleaner into, but for whatever reason this stereo pot only has holes on the sides.

So I gave it some squirts now that I have access to it, and measuring the resistance as I rotated it showed that all the jumpiness had disappeared.

So that just leaves the left-side panel.

It went exactly like the others, and we can scoop up all the old switches to get a good look at the pile of e-waste.

I'm sure there's a whole host of sea creatures that are lining up to chew on these tasty morsels of soon to be ocean microplastics.

Speaking of things that are plastic becoming smaller things, a few spots on the control panel PCBs had some foam tape that was used to keep the component leads from, over time, sawing their way through some overlaid cables. As luck would have it, every single piece of tape managed to cover the leads of at least one tact switch, so I had to pick off the sticky foam, which had somehow turned into something resembling astronaut ice cream at some point over the past 30 years.

But that left the PCB exposed, with its razor sharp cable-shredding leads just itching to shred some leads. Luckily I happened to have some fabric wire harness tape handy, so I used that to armor things up.

So everything goes back inside, and we can flip it over to see how much cleaner the display... oh for the love of-

Ok, take two, flip it over and...

Yes, that's much better.

So with everything properly back together, the synth still works great, all the buttons now work, and the volume pot is as smooth as butter.

And now the only thing left to do is play it.

Plastic Squirts

So I picked up a "3D Printing Pen" this week.

It's basically a handheld version of a 3D printer extruder, and in this case powered via USB C. You shove 1.75mm filament up its poop chute and it vomits out a semiliquid version of it from the other end when you press the button. This then quickly hardens and, by manipulating the pen, you can shape this plastic into a variety of different forms.

I opted for the fancy version which incorporates a display on the side. A hilariously small display.

I wanted to make sure I had some decent control of the temperature, and experimenting with that without a display didn't seem like the most productive use of my time.

Speaking of unproductive uses of my time, I decided to give it a test run by "printing" a plastic YouTube play button, mostly because they included a play button shape printed on a pack-in card with the unit and it was easy to trace over.

This did mean that the top surface of the paper came up with the plastic, since apparently ASA sticks to coated paper fairly well I guess.

But the exercise did validate that the pen works, and I'm at least vaguely capable of manipulating it.

While most people use these for creative hobby projects, my goal for this is much more utilitarian: I'm planning on using it for rebuilding portions of broken plastic in my various synth repair adventures. Since this broken plastic is most commonly ABS, getting a pen that could melt ABS (or ASA in this case) reliably was an important factor, as many cheaper models only melt PLA. This pen seems to do that job fairly well, so I'm looking forward to putting it to work.

Prune Me Like Your French Lavender

But not like the Spanish Lavender, that would be different.

Following up on the rosemary pruning this week, I decided to give the french lavender a haircut since the flower stalks were basically done.

And you'd be able to see that in this photo if my camera hadn't decided to focus on the pea gravel in the background instead of the flower stalks in the foreground.

Well anyway, if you don't prune lavender it can get super leggy and weird looking, so let's give it a trim.

I actually pulled a few branches out of this one earlier that were dying back, so it's looking a bit peculiar. The other one is much more photogenic.

And much smaller than it was previously.

Go Into the Light

I picked up a small EL panel for a project that is coming up soon-ish, and it occurred to me that before I go ahead and install it, I should make sure that it works, and also figure out what side the light comes out of.

This sounds like something that should be an easy task, but it's actually a bit tricky because EL panels generally take a pretty high voltage and high frequency to actually turn on. Luckily I have a well equipped workshop.

So first things first: yes, the panel does work, and it emits light out of the white side, not the other side that looks a lot more like what light should come out of. Go figure.

To get things to glow (somewhat, at least), I used a multi-tapped 24v HVAC transformer, and fed a 400Hz sine wave into the low voltage side. In theory if I put 24v into it, I should get 240v out of the 240v tap.

Well, the first problem there is that my function generator can only put out 10v.

And the 10v is peak, not RMS.

And then on top of all that, most of the time these cheap transformers are over-wound so that the low voltage side actually puts out a fair bit more voltage than it's actually rated for, since the voltage tends to sag under load.

All this combined to make the output voltage only around 55v RMS, but it was apparently enough to still dimly illuminate the EL panel, so I guess in the end it did its job.