Back in Black

A while back I got a carbon steel frying pan, and it's been serving me quite well. However, when I initially seasoned it I ended up with some uneven spots, and having the seasoning go on a bit too thick in places tends to result in it flaking off in those spots later, and that's what's been happening.

I was hoping the season would build back up in those areas just from regular use, but that largely hasn't been the case. But it's not a big deal since we can just start over.

It's apparently common to boil vinegar in the pan to strip off an old layer of seasoning, so let's start with that.

Except actually that's slow as fuck so let's boil some borax and water to break up the old polymerized oil that forms the seasoning layer.

This just leaves a caked-on carbon soot behind which is easy to scrape off.

Some of the spots were a bit stubborn, but that's nothing that a little mechanical agitation can't loosen up.

Now that's a clean starting point!

As the final preparation step, we'll pour that vinegar back in that we started with and boil it up to etch the surface of the steel.

You can tell it's working because the vinegar dissolving the surface layer of iron will leave behind a haze of carbon soot that easily wipes away.

So now we're prepped and ready for re-seasoning.

This time I used the technique where you heat up the pan dry and then use a paper towel to brush on just the lightest coat of oil, and repeat the procedure a few times. This avoids the oil's natural tendency to withdraw into pools that dry too thick.

Now that's a nice even layer of seasoning!

Pushing My Buttons

In a previous post I mentioned that my Boss RRV-10 was missing some button caps, and I had obtained an RCL-10 to use for, amongst other things, a template to reproduce the missing caps.

The two on the front were missing, as was the one on the back.

Well with a little bit of cussing and cursing I managed to cook up a model in FreeCAD for the buttons, and printed them out on my 3D printer.

I even got the little ridges on the top of the smaller button, though the clear filament makes them a bit hard to see unless you're looking at it in profile.

For scale, this smaller button is about 1cm by 1cm. Ok, it's exactly 1cm by 1cm.

Now unfortunately 3D printers are good at rapid prototyping, not rapid getting it right the first time, and I had some tolerance and fit issues with the first attempt.

The larger buttons at the front were bulging out around the shaft, and the smaller one at the rear wouldn't even go on. On top of all this, the larger buttons were a bit flimsy on the sides due to the thin walls.

Thankfully this was an easy fix, and printing out a new set of buttons didn't take long.

And this time they fit flawlessly, and pushed in and out just like they should.

Both on the front, as you can see, and on the back.

The only shortcoming really is that the colours are very much not correct, but it doesn't bother me particularly much so I'll probably just leave it as is. I really don't want to have to buy two cans of spray paint just to almost-but-not-really match the original colours.

Drat and Darn

While doing laundry today I noticed that one of my dish towels was getting a bit threadbare in spots.

And it was also coming loose at the hem a little bit.

This of course won't do, so naturally to the sewing machine I went. First up, securing the hem.

And with that done, it's on to darning. Now unfortunately these holes are in a multi-coloured area of the weave, and doubly unfortunately the blue shade is one I don't have a matching thread for. Somewhat frustratingly, thread is most often sold in highly saturated colours, so a faded blue like this is much harder to come by.

Still, I did my best.

Now white, on the other hand, is pretty easy to find in threads, so filling in the stripes was a good deal easier.

Though unfortunately these stripes being a twill means that there's quite a bit less white on the back side, so the patch stands out a touch more there.

But such is life.

Stomp Around

To follow up on yesterday's pedal board post, I would like to announce that I got the patch cables and installed them.

That is all.

Clap, Hey

If you want to stomp, it helps to have a board to stomp on, and oh hey I wonder what's in this bag?

Well would you look at that, it's a pedal board.

And it's sized just right for my four pedals.

Now it's probably obvious from appearances, but a pedal board is designed to hold pedals, so that they generally stay put and so they're more easily transported from place to place.

They don't stay put on their own, though, which is where the velcro comes into play.

And now they're properly stuck.

Of course, pedals need power to do their thing, and luckily this pedal board comes equipped with a 4-way power supply.

So that should keep things juiced up.

I still need the patch cables so I can hook the pedals to each other, but in the meantime we can enjoy seeing how well they fit into the soft case.

Yup, looks like they're all ready for me to take them to a gig.

But I never will.

It Was Bound To Happen Eventually

I decided to make one (1) music. It's called "Title Screen Music From An Amiga Game Your Older Brother Used To Play" because it felt like a fitting name. It's nominally synthwave but there's probably some elements of other genres mixed in too.

This was done on my Yamaha QY100 and recorded on my Yamaha MT4X. I mostly made it to serve as elevator music during less interesting parts of my videos, which I did on my latest upload and I think it works well for that.

BBrraaiinnss

So it's that time again.

This JX-305 came up for sale with those four sweet words "For Parts or Repair".

The seller indicated that the synth stopped working after they had played a gig on a boat, in which they were forced to leave the synth out in some misty rain because they didn't have anything to cover it with. I was quite confident that the rain had nothing to do with the failure, so I made a bid and it arrived on my bench.

When I powered the synth on, it was indeed dead as a doornail.

The display was blank, none of the LEDs were lit other than the Beat light which was glowing orange (it's only ever supposed to be red or green in normal operation), and basically everything was unresponsive. Not a positive first step.

However, much like the MC-505, which this synth is based on, the CPU has a hard-coded bootloader that you can access by holding down the right keys when powering it on.

The magic combination is to hold down "Mute Ctrl" while powering the synth on, and then tap on "3/High Hat" a few seconds later.

Well that's looking better already. Let's see how far we can get with this.

Well, it's taking data, and...

Hmm, nope, no good. Well, that explains why the main processor isn't booting: if it can't write a firmware image it sure isn't going to be able to read it back either.

Having a peek inside, we can see some big flat-pack chips soldered down with our good friend lead-free solder.

This one in particular is the flash chip that holds the firmware, and I think it needs a little love. So, come along for the adventure and see where it takes me!

I promise it'll be fun. Or, well, it was for me at least.