Performing sort and compression tactics on the mass of stuff. The target is to have less of a hoard and more of a functional space.

Conducive to the process is letting myself be bothered by say, the minutia of stray LEDs in a container of disc capacitors..

..while not being bothered by sifting anything not immediately electronic to a random hardware box that will itself be sifted later.

It's like panning for gold..

..only instead of gold you find rusty paperclips (pro-tip: throw this sort of stuff away).

Winter, with its cooler temperatures, has chased me away from the uninsulated hell hole that is supposed to be my bench. I picked up an open frame server rack earlier this week, allowing vertical orientation of junk in the utility room (a welcome change).


With the inclusion of my scope, I can proceed with a bit more power in some of these piled up projects. However, with something in the neighborhood of 100 pounds hanging 24 inches out the ass end of this piece of equipment, my attempt at an installation pictured here has become little more than a mock-up. I need to tear this down and fortify the base (which is being helped on the balancing act by tube amps and bungee cords) in order to reach a comfortable level of structural integrity.

Atop the dual beam scope (each "side" being loaded with dual trace preamps for four simultaneous traces on the screen) are a General Radio 1192 and a Heathkit IB-1101 frequency counters. I look forward to deploying real tools again, and hope this will fertilize these chronicles.

I built a shelving unit today. I'm sure this seems like a boring topic, so let me reiterate how absolutely excited I am about this. Here's a before picture of my bench, as of this afternoon:


This essentially depicts the conditions of my dedicated workshop, and for the past couple months the nearest thing to a bench I've had is the living room or laundry room floor. This must end. Of course, it entailed erecting a framework in conditions similar to what you see on the bench.


This shot reveals the sort of narrow passage I'm faced with between the workbench and what will be the actual audio laboratory. Evidenced by this picture is a heap of lost floor space. I should add that the used shelving unit I procured is 12 feet tall, in addition to being 8 feet wide and 2 deep, the 12 foot aspect pushed me up into the rafter space.


I've situated the uppermost shelf rather close to the (imaginary) ceiling plane, which will result in an out of the way staging area for miscellaneous junk and chassis that I don't want totally buried, but absolutely do want out of the way. It's almost embarrassing how much shit I have that falls into this category.


Fast and dirty prestaging. The lower space is designed to be tall enough to allow passage of my rolling racks, allowing extraction for live shows.


The bench, while far from being usable, is already looking a lot more inviting.