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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  24d ago (text post)   442 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 1, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Closing in on 130k words on my current story. Couple more months and I'll officially break 5 figures of income from writing fiction (Across 2 years). Pretty good for not having actually published anything yet, it's all been donations.

Has anyone here built an electric guitar or bass from parts before? I might take a crack at it and I wouldn't mind some pointers

This has been a hobby of mine for many years - I’ve built dozens of fender-shaped parts casters including selecting the bits, setups, fretwork, wiring, some woodwork/routing, and finish work. It’s generally not a value proposition if you care about resale value but you can really specialize. The tools are expensive and specialized but you can get by with a few basics to start. I’d start with a few questions. Are you a player? What kind of guitar project do you have in mind? What skills do you have or how involved, etc. glad to discuss what I’ve learned.

I play bass, and I'm looking at putting together a 4-string p bass tuned to BEAD.

I've done enough woodworking to have done some basic joinery, and as far as tools go, I'm not particularly concerned about that. I have a monthly "tools budget" that I can divert towards those purchases.

I'm mostly interested in a few things on the wood side, and a few things on the setup side.

On the wood side, I was thinking about getting a mahogany body, dyeing it black, then trying a Tru-oil finish. Have you done anything like that? I'd love some tips on the order for dye, grain filler, finish, and what sanding should happen at each step.

On the setup side, how do you make sure the bridge is properly aligned with the neck? That part scares the crap out of me. On the neck side, when do you shim it vs adjusting the truss rod?

Setup: neck relief is step 1. the truss rod is only for neck relief (curvature) once the bass is strung up and neck is under tension. Capo 1st fret, fret last fret, measure string to fret distance at 8th fret. A good machined fine measuring tool in 64ths helps here but you could use a feeler gauge or post it notes in a pinch. Off top of My head Fender recommends .015” in relief.

Once relief is set, adjust intonation by ear (12th fret should match 12th fret harmonic) or by measure (34” 1st strong and staggered back by string gauge - works well enough.)

Then adjust nut slot depth and bridge saddle height to set action. For a low B you might need to widen any stock nut. Good nut files help a lot but are $. Nut should be cut to about .01 inches above the height of the 1st fret to account for relief.

Shimming: You’d shim the neck at the heel of the saddles don’t adjust low enough for appt. 5/64” action measured at the 17th fret

Bridge setup - if your bass body doesn’t come with the standard 5-hole Fender pattern or piloted pickup mounting holes, you have to mount the neck and pickup to the body and go from there. A cheat/hint: if you’re using p bass parts, then a factory pick guard CAN be a good visual aid but don’t rely on it exclusively.

Bridge placement: The 1st string saddle (G or D in your case) should measure about 34” from the witness point of the nut, the other saddles staggered slightly away from the nut. So leave yourself room to use the intonation adjust screws to fine tune. For side/side positioning - use a string or elastic to mimic the string path on either side of the neck - easier to do than explain.

Notes on finish: I’ve done tru oil on walnut, ash, and a random 80’s Ibanez p-copy that I stripped.

I didn’t do a stain but you’d do that first. I’d probably hand rub it with a rag.

I also didn’t bother with filling the grain past a certain point on the walnut or ash - those are open grained and I like the look. That said you can fill the grain by sanding wet with the oil and wiping the residue away. TO is best applied gradually in small thin amounts.

I appreciate all the feedback.

It sounds like I can save a ton of effort buying a premade body over cutting it out on a CNC machine

Sorry for the slow reply.

you for sure will have a major head start and avoid a slew of potential headaches buying at least a basic formed body - the brodge/neck/pickup alignment is the key and MOST aftermarket is based on Fender specs, so even a rather unfinished body will get you there and allow you to experiment with the finish. Of course you can also buy a fully finished or paint ready body or one parted out from a factory guitar. If you’re in the States/North America, there’s an eBay seller called Tone Bomb that does good basic shaping and they’re inexpensive. Warmoth, Allparts, and WD all make finished and unfinished bodies at various prices, etc.

I have gotten away from too much sanding and finishing, in the interest of spending more time on the wiring and setup and to avoid the dust and fumes, but it was an invaluable experience to start from a rougher stage for sure.

I’d be interested in hearing what parts you are thinking about - pickups and wiring options and such. even with simple circuit like on a P bass there a lot of options depending on your preference and price. I’ve had fun and good results working on everything from $200 Indonesian Squiers to fancy American Fender stuff, the main suggestion I’d make here is to not mix spec quality too much.

I'd be interested in hearing what parts you are thinking about - pickups and wiring options and such.

The current plan is to do a fully passive setup with Seymour Duncan Antiquity II split coil pickups (or some custom wrapped pickups with similar response) connected to a tone and volume knob. To be honest, I've even considered skipping the knobs entirely and using a pair of fixed resisters that leave both tone and volume wide open. That's how I tend to play a P anyway.

My goal is to create the warmest, darkest tone I can manage with a prominent fundamental. Concepts like "sustain" or "resonance" are distant secondary concerns. In conjunction with the BEAD tuning, I want this thing to sound like a hammer on a coffin nail.

In terms of comparable tone, think JPJ and not John Entwhistle.

Based on everything I've played previously, my current plan is the following:

  • eBay mahogany body, with walnut as a backup choice
  • Bridge with brass saddles
  • SD Antiquity II or similar pickups at the neck
  • No bridge pickup
  • Flats (obviously) - either GHS or labella

For the neck, I'm probably just going to bite the bullet and shell out for a warmoth model in flame roasted maple with the graphite stiffeners and a tusq nut, unless you have any other suggestions.

Love this plan overall.

For wiring - for a kind of best of all worlds scheme that’s not too complicated: Standard V/T controls with a .68 or 1.0 microfarad capacitor (dark) and a push-pull to bypass the tone completely/or have different cap values (bright switch) or use a no load pot for the tone so it’s completely out of the mix when dimed.

Pickups: Duncans are great. I built a very vintage-sounding P with an SPB-1 and GHS precision flats (and a foam mute over steel threaded saddles). Not crazy high output but it has that thud and is warm and dark for sure. I would guess AII’s are a bit more 60’s voiced than the SPB-1, but we are not talking modern here in any case.

My favorite boutique P pickup is the Arcane 65, and I’ve had good luck with a few others too, Fralin and Fender vintage ‘63 come to mind. Any of these and more will get there. Pickups are a matter of personal taste and voodoo guitar parts synergy anyway. The right flatwounds are most of it probably.

Necks: I usually buy a Fender neck unless I need something specific. For example, I play fretless and I hate lined fretboards, so I have used Warmoth fretless bass necks almost exclusively. I’ve got one that’s about 30y old and one that’s about 5Y old. they’re consistent and high quality.

Oh, invest in lightweight tuners :)

Hipshots all the way, baby!

I finally got the arcade machine that I've been working on complete!

https://imgur.com/a/ISiu0nH

It's built around a MiSTer FPGA plugged into a JAMMIX card that gives me a standard arcade connector. The cabinet is of my own design that I mostly built over a long vacation in December. It looks decent enough, but I know everything I would do differently if I were to built something like this again. The good thing is it's easy enough to service if I ever need to do anything to it.

At some point I might go and mask around the screen, but I'm really not offended by the way it looks right now.

Ah, how did I ever live without modern AI. Especially the ones with massive context windows where you can throw in absurd amounts of text.

I recently decided to do a case presentation on a very complex patient. As I'm congenitally lazy, I opted for throwing large amounts of (anonymized) clinical encounter records into Gemini 2.5 Pro, and then asked it to turn it into a coherent case summary. It did a bang-up job, no hallucinations whatsoever. I put no effort into categorizing anything, as models these days are capable of figuring out user intent. (While I'm perfectly capable of doing this myself, and was familiar with the case, I believe in better living through technology)

That's nice enough, but what I really enjoyed was the ability to simply ask it to come up with the kind of thorny questions that a senior clinician might throw my way, to put me on the spot. This is an act that, for reasons unclear to me, is known as "pimping". It's a favorite pastime of many a consultant, aiming to pop the ballooning hopes and dreams of med students and residents alike. It did excellent, coming up with all kinds of interesting lines of questioning, asking me to justify my own suggestions about future management decisions. (Something I did myself, for example, I'd noted unusually rapid decreases in benzo dosage, my other boss is rubbish at this, especially given that he asked me for my suggestions on that front in a different case)

Ah. Feels good. So much scut-work saved.

The actual case presentation went great. My supervisor didn't ask me anything remotely as difficult as the worst-cases I'd prepared for.

Do you not feel an issue with context lengths? I have not used Gemini but with Claude I don't feel the context length is that amazing for my purposes which is programming documentation.

I love the idea of massive context but in actuality I have to manage this quite actively.

Gemini has an enormous context length. I think 2.0 Pro could accept 2 million tokens, and 2.5 Pro is a regression back to a million. That's still way ahead of the competition.

There's very little I personally need to do that requires CLs that long. I think the most I've ever used in a natural manner was when I was translating a novel and used up 250k tokens. I've used more for the hell of it, but never actually maxed it out before I got bored.

Models are also getting better at making good use of the additional context, but there's still performance degradation that's not captured by benchmarks like needle in a haystack tests.

Give Gemini a go, preferably through AI Studio. I think it'll do much better than Claude. I know some documentation in programming can be enormous, but probably not 400k words enormous? You could alternatively enable search if the docs are publicly available on the web.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Have I been doing? I've been dadmaxxing. Even more so than hitherto. The previous deal where my wife and daughter are with grandma during weekdays is off because they not only fail such basic tasks as getting her to kindergarten but even manage to neglect her at home to the point where she has a breakdown and cries that nobody loves her. So I took over kindergarten duties (which means 2h of driving, daily, plus getting the kid ready in the morning) in addition to full-time work and all tasks that involve leaving the house. I don't know whether to pity my wife or wish that lightning strike her. I alternate between sleeping 12 hours a night and not sleeping at all. Something's gotta give, but for some reason I have "persevere" as the entirety of my OS. So that's what I've been doing.

So I see "dadmaxxing" and think "that's hecking wholesome", and then I read the rest of the comment, what a ride. Hang in there, bro.

It is kinda wholesome tbh. I enjoy the extra time with the little one, who is actually 100% cooperative when she's alone with me. As opposed to the screaming obstruction she turns into in her mother's hands. According to my wife that's because with her she's not afraid of being honest, whereas with me she's terrified into obedience. Screw that view. Conservative parenting fucking works, and to hell with self-sabotaging housewives. As if a kid being turned into a dissolute, undisciplined third-generation depressive whose only aspirations in life are sugar and screentime were somehow preferable because it means nobody has to ever buckle down and do anything they don't like.

We spend pretty much the entire weekend at the playground, and are looking forward to summer, which we intend to spend entirely at the pool, like we did last year. Anyone who tells me that this is somehow worse than keeping her locked up indoors and telling her to let the adults stare at their phones is full of shit.

Finally back on my feet!

Most of the incremental changes I was talking about in the past weeks were about crawling websites. I suppose it makes sense, but I was surprised how many anti-bot measures there are, and then even more surprised how many of them you can make go away, if you just say "bro, I'm just using CURL, can you please let me something about your website".

Last week I was working on navigating through Twitter, so loading older tweets from a profile, and loading replies to a selected Tweet. Went pretty smooth and I think I should be able to start working on the UI soon, which is when I'll finally be able to show something off.

I've been sick since the 19th so haven't made much progress on my NaNoWriMo project (the organisation itself is now shutting down, so I completed it just in the nick of time). This afternoon was the first time I've done any writing in two weeks, and I crossed the 80k mark at lunchtime. I'm sick of the sight of this thing, and just want to finish a first draft ASAP so it won't be hanging over me every waking minute.

It's funny you mentioned this. Today was the first time I thought about the novel I wrote in 2010's edition of this thing. I was talking to a friend about it today telling her I should get around to editing the dang thing already.

The weird thing is I have very little recollection of the story I wrote back then -- the whole thing was a blur! I asked AI to give me some suggestions today and it's talking about stuff that, again, I wrote myself, I have no memory of. Maybe I should just read it first. lol

I'm sad to see it go... I'm aware of the controversy, but the idea itself is cool

Is your novel 50,000 words long, or longer?

Yes it is! But just barely. 50,099 counts.

Post editing, I'm sure it's going to gain some weight.

If you're looking for beta readers, feel free to shoot me a DM.

I appreciate it... Let me take a pass through it again first. While I don't think AI is the be-all end-all, I agree with the conclusions it has on my manuscript:

  1. Restructure Act 1 to introduce the main conflict earlier
  2. Deepen Francis' character with clearer goals and internal conflict
  3. Develop the foundation for Francis and Laily's relationship more gradually
  4. Expand the climax and resolution for a more satisfying conclusion
  5. Create more complex, three-dimensional antagonists

And this is just what it considered "highest priority."

Of course this is what you get when you get a non-writer like me writing something. I didn't even have a full plot in my head before I started writing. I only got a vague idea about the actual ending in the last week. So all the criticism I got from the machine is warranted in my eyes.

I'm having precisely the opposite problem, this shit is way too fucking long.

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