I recently made a visit to Al Lasher's Electronics, an establishment that has been in Berkeley for over 50 years and has virtually *everything* an electronics DIYer needs. While I was there I picked up some four-foot long strips of heat shrink tubing, and figured I should buy spools of wire to match the colors. Until recently, I'd been storing my wire spools on a rope hung from a hook on my workshop wall, but it wasn't an ideal situation. The spools would come undone and often become a tangled mess. This spurred me to make a simple wire spool holder out of just some scrap wood and wooden dowel. One end of the side wall has a hole to receive the dowel. And the other end has a slot to make the dowel removable. I made the slot by running a spade bit through the wood a few times, then chiseled out the excess bits. Works like a charm so far. It's always a good thing to put some work in to streamline the building process.

A while back a friend of mine gave me a bass that had a split headstock. The crack was so bad that it wasn't repairable. I decided to lop off the headstock and remount the tuning machines on the bottom of the bass. The results were great. See the accompanying article and build process at Make Magazine.

After months of reliable use, the external hardware on my homegrown 12 V power supply started loosening up. Perhaps it was in my haste to finish it that I didn't screw those nuts in tightly enough, but here I stood with a dilemma. How to open a case that had been hot-glued shut. Well, some careful work with a razor blade fixed that, and I was able to tighten the hardware. But what if I needed to open it again? The solution was to mount three steel angle brackets to the casing, allowing me to open it by loosening just six screws. Plus it makes the unit look totally bad-ass. While I was there I replaced the old knob with a vintage radio dial for a cooler look and easier tuning.

So the folks at MAKE did an awesome profile of me and my Magnetotron, plus I just found out that Hackaday featured it as well. Very excited here in NYC.

BTW, if anyone's interested in the Magnetotron, I'm accepting offers for its sale. Email me - colombo.michael [at] gmail.com