Category Archives: project

Banjo Case







I picked up a Deering Goodtime banjo over the summer, it’s a very affordable instrument but the $250 hardshell case was a deal breaker. I was able to re-task a les paul case with a destroyed liner I had purchased a few years ago. I created a paper template and used shop scraps to block out interior support.

The next step will be to pad the supports and add a fabric covering.

Leather Carving 101

I never got the chance to carve my initials into a key fob blank in some heavily serifed county font at summer camp, i suppose its finally catching up with me. I got a basic tool kit from Tandy leather. This is the start of a chain wallet, I decided to sketch my own nautical theme as the oak leaf scroll was a little generic. Looking back a 50’s rocket ship would have looked great curled in a tentacle.









The GA-120 rocks again!

A friend from forever ago working at Abell Audio took my ailing amp to his bench and diagnosed and repaired a dead fet, voltage regulator, and had an amazing stroke of luck found an fairly unique replacement reverb tank in stock! AMAZING! Chris asked the question “so what are you going to do with this thing?”, a great question. I’ve been really happy playing the baby will head and 2×12 cab. To this point I was just happy knowing that I had saved a unique piece of audio gear from the dump. I set up the amp in the living room (a bit of a treat, the room has a great tone, and my wife usually banishes audio gear to my office or workshop) I had my tele and acoustic set out to leave for practice the next day, the tele sounded fantastic clean with bridge pu, i really like the eq function to tone back the tele honk just a bit. I usually plug my acoustic di to pa but since the ga sounded so great clean I tried the acoustic and was blown away, it sounds awesome.

GA lineup from the 1979 Roland Catalog

CE-2 Noise Issues

Tracking down some info on a noisy chorus pedal:

Maybe a cap job for the CE-2?Yes, that’s almost certainly the problem – a
failing de-coupling electrolytic cap between the oscillator and the audio
circuit. Electrolytic caps degrade with age and can also fail suddenly – old
Boss pedals are getting into the age range where this happens, and I’ve come
across several. The main DC filtering one may be on the way out too, which could
explain why it needs more voltage to light the LED.If you can’t easily trace the
one(s) you need to change, just replace all the electrolytic caps (there aren’t
many, and they aren’t expensive) and it will probably fix it and make it good
for the next 20 years.

1978 Roland GA-120

Solid state vintage….
I’m a sucker, I found a 1978 Roland GA-120 on craigslist, DOA. $40 and I was hauling it out of a store room in the Newport Music hall (sold by the house sound guy). This is a solid state amp that was the predecessor to the Roland JC-120. I ordered a service manual from stereomanuals.com. I tore it down when I got home at cleaned it up a bit. It’s now sitting in my office waiting for some troubleshooting. The first photo shows the cabinet with grill, chassis, and speakers pulled.

Pre Cleaning detail

Tolex is a vinyl product and pledge applied with a toothbrush worked wonders.

The only publicly available reference I found was the users manual in Japanese.

Post tolex cleaning, I think I’ll hit the ply wood with some spray paint before it’s back together.