PROJECTS

One of my pretty durable hobbies—I’m pretty sure I’ll keep doing it as long as my body holds out—is music, for which I have acquired a fine set of instruments and other tools. I have such good taste that the two instruments I’ve sold to my favorite music shop in Berkeley were immediately sold to the same guy—the first one while I was still in the store. Not particularly expensive taste, but very good, and I love buying instruments so much that I get really excited about helping other people buy instruments, because I only buy what I think I’ll play, and I (eventually) get rid of whatever I don’t.

But, with ADHD brain, I often want to use a bunch of instruments in sequence: guitars or mandolins or fiddles or whatever. Occasionally I have non-ADHD desires to hear how something will sound on a different fiddle, but mostly it’s ADHD. Similarly, getting things out of their cases takes up a lot of space and means I don’t play them as much; that, plus the fact they’re pretty, are why we have a house full of display cases. But for sitting down and playing, I want instruments right there, without taking up the square footage needed for all the cases. Just the guitar stand and music stand take up a ton of floor space.

…I can just build something. I’m all certified for the woodshop tools at the local makerspace. I’d used, and often owned, everything except the jointer, planer, and router. It had been a minute since I used a table saw, and they’re more hazardous than I remember—although they have a SawStop, an absolutely incredible safety innovation. Few things focus my attention like sharp objects, and the more dangerous, the greater the focus. They have a simple logic to them that makes for straightforward rules:

• It can’t cut anything it’s not touching.
• Edges can only cut along one axis.
• Blades attached to motors are more dangerous.

So you can roll out corollaries like:

• Keep everything about yourself as far away from the cutting action of the blade as you possibly can.

Anyway. I own a bunch of tools, and have access to a bunch more, and I can probably manage to knock together a stable, rolling furniture…thing. Cubbyholes to safely hold violins. Pegs or a flat drawer for bows. Sheet music storage. Some kind of music stand facility that is not a music stand.

This is a thing that has to be designed, so I went and measured the violins and viola. The 5-string I got over the summer is a beast: the older one is the same length and width (620mm x 220mm), but the height on the newer one is 120mm to the old one’s 90mm. It’s basically a small viola, which is of course why the C string is so delightful. I have a single regular 4-string violin, and it is absolutely adorably tiny by comparison.

I’m also working on a mute for 5-strings, since such a thing doesn’t exist. Not that it can’t be done, it’s just been waiting for someone who both plays 5-strings and also knows how to shape metal. Or me, at any rate. I made a dodgy mute years ago by taking two double-stacks of dime-sized magnets, assembled with gaffer’s tape, one on each side of the bridge, and the mass dampens the bridge vibrations. It’s not great to mess around with your bridge if you don’t have to, though, and it’s just so…inelegant. "Crufty," we would say in software development. Sure, it works, but it’s far from the best idea and not exactly something you want to put your name on.

This is my favorite mass-damper design:

Besides the charming wood camouflage, it’s identical halves, bolted together. There are a few ways to go about fabricating it, but probably roughing it out on the bandsaw is fastest, drill the holes, then cut the fingers with a mill. I have a 4"x4" brick of aluminum that’s just been waiting for a project, and I can prototype in aluminum with my tools at home, even as neglected and unaligned as they are.

Whenever I get motivated to learn 3D modeling, I can share the design out and people can finally make their own…