stella amp

One thing I like about hand drills is that I can pause the action whenever I need to in order to take a picture:

This is one of the amps that I took with me to the Maker Faire.

Wow! I'm still amazed, and I'm not sure how to write about it. But it's been two weeks since the Minne Maker Faire and this post is getting long overdue!

My family and I are moving to a new place in a couple of weeks! It's exciting and stressful and too much work all at once but what can be done. The new place is awesome, we'll have a backyard for the kids, with a tree house and a slide, and the folks we are renting from seem great.

I gotta hand it to Fender, these new amplifier designs are amazing:

I wouldn't mind building one of those for myself.

Just posted a tutorial on how to mount the pots and the LED for a cigar box Stella amp build. Let me know what you think!

I just put up a quick page on how to mount a speaker to a cigar box if you are making a cigar box amplifier. All you need is a drill, a couple of bits, a screwdriver, and pliers.

But when I'm up visiting my mom for Thanksgiving, I can turn it up to 11:

[Backstory: Over on the Cigar Box Nation forums, one of the guys asked where he could buy radial volume labels for an amp he built. This is a slightly edited version of my reply to him.]

Why buy some when it's easy enough to make your own? You don't have to be good at graphics, you just have to know what to do.

Download Inkscape (you probably want the Windows installer) and install it on your machine.

Way back in the mists of time, Petey helped me beta test my kit and helped smooth out the rough edges with the instructions. I asked him to write up his results on the forum, and he did. Now that the forums are no longer in beta, I can give a link to his great build documentation! I love where he put the knobs, right on the front where the speaker is.