NYC Journal

[Calzone]

I forgot to mention that I went with the oversized CBS sized headstock. In 1966 CBS bought Fender and made the headstock oversized on a Strat. Think Jimi Hendrix Strats.

The idea here is to emulate Jazz archtops that have heavy large headstocks for sustain and for treble dampening.

The Sperzel locking tuners I will be using also are heavier than vintage tuners also.

Remember that this will be a Jazz-Strat.

Cal

 

[DownUnder]

You can have all the squirrels you want from my yard. Just be ready to have your car wiring destroyed, your home insulation demolished, and your garden eaten down to the roots. Here in the open parts of NM, we have ground-dwelling Rock Squirrels, big fellas the size of a small cat. Rangers in the parks say they're the most dangerous species there, in terms of attacks upon, and injuries to, humans. This is also in bear and cougar country, so do the math! Sure you want some?
The species Cal refers to is the Albertson's Squirrel. They live in the forests at slightly higher elevations. They do have those big ear tufts, and a local color morph or maybe sub-species in the Sandia Mts. is all black. They look a bit demonic, and many folks call them "devil squirrels". They don't bother anyone, however. Much better manners than our Rock Squirrels.

Killer squirrels, who wudda thunk it?!? Fortunately, our Canadian lot were peaceniks, tho' they could and often did much of the damage you described. My grandparents lived on a farm in the country in New Brunswick (in Canada, not New Jersey) and had them along with racoons nesting in the rafters of the barn, the loft of the carriage house and the attics of the two sheds behind the house, even now and then in the upper part of the main residence itself. Getting them out was a nightmare as my grandmother was against killing native wildlife so they had to be enticed out with treats, sprays of noxious liquids or even in utter desperation, brooms.

I doubt squirrels exported to Australia would have much impact on our already badly damaged bush environment. They would surely complement the European trees in the southern capital cities like Melbourne, Adelaide and Hobart where the climate has close approximations to all four seasons of the northern hemisphere. The locals could go to the urban parks on weekends and feed them nuts and trail mix. But then I suspect our local possums which can be quite aggressive would quickly make an end of them. So maybe it's best that you keep yours in their own habitat.

But then I could make you a sporting bet. A dozen squirrels of yours for the same number of our Aussie possums. And I could maybe donate a free Canadian wolverine, which would truly be throwing a fox into a chicken coop.

Cal, we have side-tracked your thread again. Enough said, we had better return to your guitars, greatly more of your readers' interest than our problems with squirrels.

 

[Calzone]

This is our space, and I enjoy diversion.

I did a lot of assembly yesterday. I could do some wiring and soldering on the Thinline to prep it for a neck. Pretty much I await parts. Oh-well…

BTW on a bike, especially a mountain bike, my style of riding was considered “squirrelly.” This term likely came about because of the radical jumpy maneuvers I made. Riders liked to follow me as an exciting form of entertainment to try and follow my wheel.

Knew a girl named “Squirrel.” Don’t know her real name. Maybe she got the name because she was very petite and small.

Where I grew up our neighborhood had black squirrels. They were really grey squirrels.

Cal

 

[Calzone]

Had a good day yesterday. A nice distraction assembling guitar bodies.

Hoping for my surgical approval today to move forward. As usual, unusual blood work right on the limits of normal.

I’m excited about mostly the two custom color guitars. They are kinda more out of the box for me. Alder, very pretty, and just different. Kinda like a new girlfriend or new toys.

Looks like the futures are predicting a further sell-off. Bond yields went higher, so now the markets are thinking inflation is entrenched. Expect mortgage rates to stay high or even increase. The next headline to expect is an increase in the FED rates.

The shoe is dropping, and anyone with big debt load will get crushed. I’m talking record levels of debt, I’m talking big increased interest rates that compound, and people living beyond their means.

For some their end is near…

Cal

 

[Calzone]

Now I have a bunch of guitars that play and respond well to my style. I’m able to pull a tone that is kinda my signature, that is me. This is a kinda big deal to have that distinction coming from my hands.

Jeff Beck played without a pick. Pretty much such a novel player. Another was Roy Buchanan the guitar slinger. What great hands these players had.

The level of tweaking and tuning has evolved to the highest levels to make most of my guitars “Great-Guitars.” These are instruments that inspire you to play more and practice harder. They kinda open up the performance envelope leading to the next level.

It is kinda crazy that there is no favorite.

I do think it just is the matter of achieving the right balance and combination to tailor what I want.

On the single pickup Cabronita, I think the neck is not well suited. Perhaps not the ideal neck for that alder body. Meanwhile the two pickup Cabronita, also with an alder body just sings and almost plays itself. In theory they should be the same, but they are not.

There is a difference though: one is a plain maple neck; and the two pickup Cabronita has a fat roasted maple neck.

The roasting drives off moisture, stiffens, and strengthens the neck. The added girth also I think compounds the stiffness and strength. I think the roasted maple neck would make a better weapon for sure.

I think the roasted maple adds resonance and sustain. The single pickup Cabronita still is a good guitar, but it is not great like the two pickup version.

So now the two custom necks that are incoming are both roasted maple. Let’s see if my thinking is valid. I hope I am right.

On a retro swamp ash Tele, I paid a premium to have the plain maple neck made from “Quarter Sawn” wood. This wood has the grain aligned directly against the pull of the strings. Pretty much stiffer and also more stable. This guitar also sings.

I have a long career working in research institutions, so experimenting, testing, and building prototypes is my for-TAY. I find it playful and fun. Also my experience building, assembling, and setting up thousands of guitars is great training. I know what to do to get the most out of an instrument.

This is both fun and challenging. Maximizing what I have on hand.

Cal

 

[Nokton48]

Morning Devil Cal,

Endless Invention and Endless Adaptation. That's what I like about what I do. Same as you, different toys. Everywhere I look I see possibilities. Things are going to be getting real ugly real soon. Look out below. Pay down your debts people. Resist spending $$$
LOL. Buy No-Money and live large.

So when are you opening Calzone Guitars? Buy and Sell. Good Side Hustle.

 

[Calzone]

Devil Dan,

My ambition is to be a lazy slacker.

I like day dreaming, costs nothing, and living in the realm of possibility.

I talk a lot of crap here. Many things though are possible, and I like doing crazy things as a challenge. So in a way I’m goal oriented.

So your idea of a detached studio I still am keen on. That 400 square foot studio built over the two-car garage for me is mighty cool. A second story deck would enhance the million dollar view of the marsh, hillside and forest.

Andrew and Joan’s home in Reynold’s Hills is one level and around 1100 square feet all built on one level. Our home has a hallway, stairs and an upstairs hallway. The point is if you take away the wasted space of hallways and stairs pretty much the two homes have the same amount of living space.

I figure if I subtract our wasted space that the two homes are the same size as far as living space.

So there is another benefit, one level living future proofs our living space as we age in place.

So I’m loving the idea of a detached separate workspace, unless I can find a small cottage with a massive basement like someone I know. LOL.

Have to say, you and I know how to build bunkers. I could downsize slightly, kill my mortgage, and live smaller, but then be able to build out a studio.

Understand that we lived in a 650 square foot “luxury” apartment in Madhattan for over a decade. Point is we have lived small before, and this is not new to us.

Sadly, I feel there is a lot of doom and gloom ahead. Many people will get crushed when the shoe drops. Things will get mighty ugly. Living on credit is a mucho bad idea. Payback is a bitch. For many it will be the end.

Anyways I figure I will worm into something good. Not moving ever still is attractive to me. Less work. LOL.

Cal

 

[Calzone]

An oil delivery and an $802.00 bill.

Ouch…

Last year I calculated our heating bill and hot water cost about $3200.00. Actually not bad for an old house with essentially no attic insulation that was built in 1912.

Cal

 

[Calzone]

A relief is that I passed my surgical pre-screening. I’ll go under the robotic knife Wednesday as scheduled. So I got a third opinion from my PCP.

My abnormalities were taken into consideration, and pretty much I’m a low risk patient. The surgery though is considered moderate risk though. The procedure will take about 3 hours, and only requires an overnight stay. Should be pretty straightforward.

Good-news, and happy-happy.

Cal

 

[Calzone]

The DOW defies gravity. Meanwhile the NasDaq and S&P indexes are in the red.

What gives?

So now the Trump Bump on the S&P is fully removed.

Went to Home Cheapo after my PCP visit, and the bank to get some cash. Bought some 0000 steel wool and a wooden dowel to dress some frets and plug some holes.

Now I have something to occupy and keep me busy.

There was no Co-Pay on the PCP visit, and I take this as a good omen. Us not so religious types kinda believe in luck and superstitions. Today is the 13th and 13 is my lucky number. Most people do not embrace change, and don’t like change. 13 in numerology is a number about change.

Change is a lifestyle. Devil Dan and I embrace it. We are not “extra-medium.”

I wonder if Devil Dan also has the trait of annoying people and upsetting them?

I wonder if his individuality offends controlling people.

BTW I know I annoy “Maggie.”

BTW being spiritual is very different than being religious. To me being spiritual is more of an individual thing, while religion is more like an organization.

So later today we have to babysit the grand kids.

Had the opportunity to go over all my abnormalities on the lab tests. Many were just over or under the thresholds of normal.

The third opinion laid out the trade-offs between avoiding surgery as the alternative that would involve an oncologist using Chemo and radiation. For me Chemo introduces a higher risk of other Cancers as it messes up your immune system. Taking into account the possibility of annoying people for many decades forward surgery and the fem-out is a better choice.

Anyways everyone is different…

My thinking though is for the long-term…

That one-piece vintage Tele body made of alder is a very modern looking guitar that breaks many traditions. I reversed the control plate, so the volume and tone knobs are conducive to volume swells and tone sweeps that are like a way-way peddle.

I went counter-intuitive and am going to use just a 3-way switch for rapid and accurate pickup switching. I’ll use a push-pull volume to actuate a tone bypass. The tone knob will also be a push-pull to introduce a bleed cap for a chopped high effect to simulate a cocked way sound.

Mick Ronson, the guitarist from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust years used this cocked way sound a lot. Makes a guitar sound very vocal.

I’ll still have switchable pre-sets, but accessing them will be in a different manner. On other guitars (Tele’s) I utilize a 5-way switch for presets.

Cheap Fender Custom shop bridge pickup for brightness, and a Fralin Blues Special neck, with an open chromed cover for the neck for a boost in the lows and mids.

Understand that alder promotes a kinda even response when compared to swamp ash. There is less “pop” in alder, but the mids are not scooped as with swamp ash. A different vibe and a different sound.

I looked through my stockpiles, and since I need a 5-way for the Strat, I’m recycling this 5-way that is called the “Mega-Switch.” There is a way to wire a Strat so that the middle position is both the bridge and neck pickup together. This is what a three-way switch does on a Tele. For me this is better than just the middle pickup on a Strat alone.

So I problem solved and came up with a very cool solution that suits me well and is tailored for me because I’m basically a Tele player.

Mighty clever.

The middle pickup gets used in positions 2&4 with either in combination with either the bridge or neck pickup. This is for that famous “quack” sound due to phase cancellation when two pickups are merged as the output. The loss of highs is the most in this phase cancellation, and that is how that quack sound is made. It is a kinda percussive rhythm sound.

Anyways another nerdy rant.

Cal

 

[Nokton48]

Broncolor Hazylight Suspended Finally by Nokton48, on Flickr

I guess some people who are judgmental have been annoved LOL.

The Hazylight is finally suspended, it is about what I have imagined. I'll leave this set up all the time, it's over my FOBA Sweep Table. Actually, things are becoming more well stored so I can find things. My 8x10 Norma Overhead Camera is getting a new to me 8x10 Back so that completes my second 8x10 Norma. Space is tight but things are improving.

 

[Calzone]

Devil Dan,

That long bellows to the right makes be think you are building a linac (Linear Accelerator). Your basement is getting to look like some of the nuclear labs I have inhabited.

Please take care that the NSA does not target your home by mistake with a bunker buster. LOL.

True story. NYPD helicopters detected a source of radiation on East 68th Street, so they sent out the Men-In-Black, thinking there might be a dirty bomb there or someone assembling one. This is a Tactical Anti Terrorism Force of bad boys.

Basically they stormed Sloan-Kettering the Cancer Hospital.

How dumb is that?

Cal

 

[Calzone]

A new Tele mod I gleened off of U-Tube is only use the tone know on the bridge pickup.

A Telecaster is a strange beast. The bridge pickup is mighty bright, while the neck pickup is mucho mellow.

Pretty much this You-Tuber suggests that the tone knob goes unused when the neck pickup is used, Anyways a very simple mod, but mucho clever. I’m annoyed I didn’t think of that because it is mighty clever.

Pretty much the only pickup that needs the treble to be turned down is the bridge pickup.

Cal

 

[Calzone]

The Treasury yield is approaching 5% which is about where yields fell during the financial crisis.

Very scary.

What is going on here? Something is very wrong…

Cal

 

[Calzone]

Do a search on “RHIC” then click on the Flicker link.

RHIC is the abbreviation for Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. This is a 2.7 mile collider ring at Brookhaven National Labs.

A linac feeds a booster ring and then a synclotron which is fed then in turn into the two rings that are the collider.

It is said that the collider ring is big enough to see with the naked eye from space.

So there are some pretty crazy photography of the detectors that are basically massive mass spectrometers.

Anyways worked on this project for bout a year and a half.

I’m just providing this as an example or perhaps an exaggeration of Devil Dan’s basement.

I know crazy when I see it. Remember it takes one to know one, and crazy is good in my book.

Also note what physic nerds look like.

BTW built with your tax money and mucho crazy expensive.

Pretty much the RHIC can only be turned on in the winter because the energy demand is so vast that it would drain the grid.

The amount of Compton Radiation, meaning X-rays created by acceleration charged particles is enough to drop you and kill you kinda instantly. Pretty much you would die from cell damage. This was explained to me by a physicist and pretty much where I learned the expression, enough “to kill you twice.”

Pretty much instant death with no chance of survival.

We would ride bikes through the tunnel to make sure it was clear and lock and secure gates behind us to ensure no one was in the tunnel.

One time though this guy Charles was in between the rings working and the red lights flashed that beam was imminent, and luckily Charles hit a kill/ scram button to cease the possibility of getting killed twice.

Anyways this flicker site shows a lot of things that are hard to imagine and on a large scale that is hard to really understand the scope of the project. Tell me that the control room does not look like something at NASA.

Cal

 

[Retro-Grouch]

Broncolor Hazylight Suspended Finally by Nokton48, on Flickr

I guess some people who are judgmental have been annoved LOL.

The Hazylight is finally suspended, it is about what I have imagined. I'll leave this set up all the time, it's over my FOBA Sweep Table. Actually, things are becoming more well stored so I can find things. My 8x10 Norma Overhead Camera is getting a new to me 8x10 Back so that completes my second 8x10 Norma. Space is tight but things are improving.

"Space is tight"? You are a master of understatement!

 

[Retro-Grouch]

My ambition is to be a lazy slacker.

From what I read in this thread, you're failing miserably! I get exhausted just reading about all of your shenanigans....

 

[Calzone]

My Strat Jazz pickups are out for delivery today. So I have at least one project. The 6-10 weeks was a bit of marketing hype, so I drank the cool aid, but these pickups are kinda novel and will do exactly what I want. Pretty much a dream come true. As if I was in a focus group and they made exactly what I recommended.

Like designing a Leica SL2 to my spec.

At Brookhaven National Labs, my boss wrote in a review that I was “like a small army of technicians.”

Don’t forget I was also mistakenly diagnosed as Manic Depressive around this time. Pretty much it was all anxiety driven my hyper activity.

So now I am old and calmer. I was a scary guy, and people were mucho afraid of me.

The markets seem to be stabilizing, and perhaps this is a bounce. Debt has to be paid, and pretty much this has to be still addressed. The markets in my book are still displaying robustness, and they are still thinking a Trump economy will be good.

The goose that laid the golden egg is the American Consumer who has too much debt, that is 70% of the economy.

As Trump policies favor business over households the usual public will get further squeezed and milked. The money has to come from somewhere, and it will be squeezed out of people that are in no condition to do any heavy lifting.

Something has to give…

Cal

 

[DownUnder]

An oil delivery and an $802.00 bill.

Ouch…

Last year I calculated our heating bill and hot water cost about $3200.00. Actually not bad for an old house with essentially no attic insulation that was built in 1912.

Cal

Memories here. My last oil bill for heating in Toronto, way back in 1973-1974, was CDN$ 3200 for five months. It was a big house and I was heating the upstairs which I had rented out.

This was one (of several) big reason why I decided to leave Canada for water climes, and eventually ended up in Australia. Last year our heating for three months - two split systems in a five room fortunately well insulated wood house built in 1922 - cost a whopping' $30 a week to keep us all in comfort. A big difference.

Fortunately for me our Australian winters are relatively mild anyway, altho' most Aussies will surely disagree with me. I was born in Canada so I must have some Eskimo blood in me, ha! What ruffles me up most about our winters is the short daylight hours, in late June-early July sunset is before 5.00 PM which rather restricts my outdoor wanderings.


our home water heating is from a separate gas system but we have a direct circulation unit, so no tank needed, to heat the water we want when we need it. Works fine but gas is hyper expensive in Australia, annoying as the country exports a lot of natural gas overseas but charges us International prices for our local supply. One of the big downers of having stupidly let governments privatise utilities suppliers.

 

[Calzone]

The Woodstock Center For Photography finalized it’s relocation to the City of Kingston about an hour’s drive north along the Hudson River.

Kinda like having a Hudson Valley version of ICP but upstate and in a river city. Peekskill somehow lacks a DIA, or similar art hub to really cement and become a bonafide art community. “Maggie” and I see this big need of an art anchor of sorts.

Fact is that an art anchoring might never happen. Oh-well.

Perhaps not happening is a good thing, do we want the tourists and day trippers from NYC? We left the city for a reason: to have some peace and quiet, to avoid traffic, mob scenes, and crowds. We wanted a slower pace, and a higher quality of life.

Anyways, WCP is in an old factory building and is kinda really comparable to ICP. Hmmm.

Similarly they have classes… Hmmm…

Cal