Building the Longneck Squared Eel Banjo

I spent three years teaching English to Chinese children. These kids are smart and driven (mostly by their parents). I once had to do a phonics intensive version of See-Saw Margery Daw so I put down the puppets and ran and grabbed my Squared Eel to play along. The kids are fascinated by my home-built Mike Gregory classic.

I owe a lot to Michael. He single-handledly restored me to the company of active banjo players.  I lost two banjos and two guitars in moving to Washington State with my wife. She went on ahead. We were broke and family invited us to come up and "help" with a sick relative. We were supposedly never going to have to worry about a place to live again. We arrived on a wing and a prayer. We paid my wife's entire disability check for rent and she did all the housework and I did the cooking. That arrangement lasted a year until the friction between the alpha dog and myself (a junkyard dog that isn't impressed by authority figures) became too stressful. We crammed our worldly goods in a storage unit and embarked on a month-long sojourn as homeless people.

God helped us find a place and we settled in. It wasn't long before I began trying to figure out how to get my hands on another banjo. Like the proverbial white knight, in rode Michael Gregory in his top hat and soon I received a package of parts from him which purported to contain almost everything I needed to make a genuine Squared Eel as demonstrated here by Johnny Button. My heart leaped for joy! The parts (below) looked decidedly unsophisticated, but wonderful things often come in simple clothing.

Mike suggested an alternative head material in the note he sent with it - a plastic soda bottle. That started me on a whole chain of fun modifications to the basic Squared Eel. Briefly my modifications included the soda bottle head, made by cutting apart a 3 liter soda bottle into the largest flat piece possible (by removing the top and bottom). I followed Mike's instruction for assembling the neck, head and base. I stretched the pop bottle plastic over the rectangular head space, put down some powerful glue pressed down the plastic and then proceeded to secure the edges by hammering gold decorative tacks at regular intervals around the head. Then, following directions, I applied a hair dryer to the head and was tickled to see the head stretch taut over the frame. Not only that but after I trimmed the excess plastic it looked marvelous.

One problem!  I set the neck a little too low and with the bridge at standard height over the head was too high over what was to be my fretboard. Mike has this nifty design using old windshield wiper blades for frets, It became clear however I was going to have to add a fretboard material over it. Then I got a Stewart McDonald catalog in the mail and low and behold I found I could get a standard guitar fretboard for about 20 bucks. So I ordered one. Along with it I got a nice bridge and nut precut for a five string banjo. As you can tell from the picture the cut of the pieces is pretty simple and glue up is something you can do with hide glue bungee cords and rubber bands.

The basic structure looks like this. It's ready for the tuners, fretboard and head.

When the fretboard arrived I found that if I pushed the top of the fretboard up against the nut, I had some gap space at the bottom of the neck between the board and the pot.  The measurement for the bridge put the bridge a little high on the pot. So I measured what the length needed to be to make it into a longneck banjo and lo' and behold, the neck was long enough. Sooooooo, I downloaded a template for a longneck fretboard from the Internet and moved the guitar fretboard so that the top of the fretboard lined up with the third fret mark from the nut. Then I added a thin piece of hardwood the same thickness as the fretboard between the nut and my commercial fretboard and glued it to the top of the neck.

I clamped the ears together and attached them
to the end of the neck instead of the sides as
Mike does, thus creating a longneck banjo.

Here's where Mikes wire windshield wiper core frets came in handy. You can also buy fret wire from Stew-Mac if you'd rather. I sawed the fret kerfs into the upper fretboard and tapped the wire into the grooves. I clipped the ends of the fret wire and rounded the rough edges on the ends with my trusty Dremel Moto-Tool. I may one day stain the upper section to match the lower fretboard but at the time I was more interested in finishing the project.  Instead of a tailpiece, I used screws and looped the ends over those. I had to fiddle with the bridge a little to get the strings to the right height. I wound up shortening the bridge and deepening the grooves on the nut, but I wound up with a satisfactory action when I was done.

You may wonder about the width of the guitar fretboard. That worked out to be a surprising bonus deal for a longneck banjo of the sort I wanted. The overlap where the sixth string goes hangs over the top edge of the neck. Once I put in the block for the fifth string, I discovered that the resulting lip allowed me to use a small plastic furniture clamp as a fifth string capo. Best one I ever had!  With a longneck, your capo gets a real workout and this feature allowed me to avoid retuning the fifth string when I went for the lower or higher frets from standard.

Clamped the heel of the pot, glued
and bungeed the headstock to get
the level fretboard and angle the
headstock.

One other thing I did, was beef up the headstock by drilling a hole as shown and both gluing and screwing the headstock into place. I made one modification after I took this photo.  I removed the headstock and cut the end of the neck at a slight angle and reglued and rescrewed it into place. The headstock as you can see in the finished photos, is canted back a little bit which gives the strings more purchase against the nut and seems to reduce detuning when you play. You can see the tuners installed in this view.

I next stuck a screw eye on the front edge of the pot and looped an old leather belt and attached the ends to the eye. It made a dandy banjo strap. The final product makes a nice little banjo with a funky soft sound. To ease stress on the neck I used nylon classical guitar strings with an extra e-string for the fifth string. MIke uses fishing line, but I actually had an extra set of classical string in a drawer, so I used those. The tuners were simple standard banjo tuners. The ones I used were nice tuners and don't require a lot of retuning when you're playing it.

I had so much fun making this banjo and I've played it for church services so it sounds pretty good and is easy to play. Here's a video of me playing my new Squared Eel after a four year hiatus from banjo playing. It ain't great, but it's recognizable as Cripple Creek.

 

Here you can see the basic Squared Eel ready for the fretboard and the finished head attached to the pot. I stained and varnished the wood and put wood button plugs into the screw holes to give the pot a finished look. You can see two of the buttons on the butt end of the pot.

Here you can see down the length of the neck of the finished longneck version of the Eel. You can see where the fretboard overhangs the neck under the fifth string allowing you to use a small furniture clamp to capo the fifth string. You can also see where the commercial fretboard and the add-on fretboard I made. I got some experience installing frets doing that little bit. It was satisfying discovering that I could install frets accurately.

You can see the headstock and the top 3 frets more clearly here.

Even if you have a store-bought banjo, this thing is a bunch of fun to build and Michael sells the kit pretty cheaply. Thanks Mike. You're the man!

- Tom

 

 

 

 

 

 Here's me playing the beast.

Why Your Integrated Laptop Camera Won't Work

The keys you need!

 

The camera on my Lenovo T-410 kept going off. I use it with Skype and Movie Maker and Facebook so it's inconvenient when the thing isn't working. I couldn't figure out why it quit on me. At first, I figured that the camera was broken, but then it unexpectedly came back on. Then it went off again. 

I looked up the laptop and found the original drivers and reinstalled them. The camera came right back up. Next time I shut the laptop off, the camera didn't come back up when I booted up the laptop again. Here's how I fixed the problem.

I did a Google search on how to turn the laptop on and off. Bingo!  I discovered that there is a not very well described and not very intuitive way to turn the camera on and off. Apparently I've been accidentally turning it on and off.  On the Lenovo T-410 there is a function key in the lower left corner of the keyboard. To turn the camera off and on, hold down the function key (Fn) and simultaneously press the F6 key. It turns the camera on and off.

Solved my problem immediately.  So, if you have an onboard laptop camera I recommend two steps.

1. Look up how to turn your particular laptop integrated camera on and off. Try it and see if it works.
   
2. If that doesn't work, look up the integrated camera driver software for your particular camera and install the software.
3. Then, try step 1 again and see if it works.

If that doesn't work, you probably have a busted camera. Get yourself a USB camera and plug it in. It's too expensive to try and replace the onboard camera.

Hope this helps. I read through a lot of ways to fix a camera that doesn't work, but these steps were the only ones that worked. If your camera is on, The camera will work when you fire up the software that uses it.

© 2021 by Tom King

How I Fixed My Printer After a Paper Jam Left It Printing Double

FIXING MY CANON PIXMA MG3620 - THE SURPRISINGLY SIMPLE SOLUTION:

I have a Pixma MG3620 that I bought for my home office a couple of years ago. It recently started eating paper. Finally, I had a nasty paper jam where the paper was sucked up inside and I couldn't reach up inside the machine to pull it out. 

I almost dismantled the thing with a hammer, until (God bless YouTube) someone showed me how to open the back to get inside. Once I figured out how to open the transport cover in the back (push down toward the arrow- see photo), I was able to extricate the paper. 

Turn the printer on its side
& press down to release
the transport mechanism cover

When I tried to print again, my printer started eating paper and no matter how many times I cleared it, it wouldn't stop eating the paper.  On a hunch I shined my flashlight down into the mechanism and spied something shiny. I made a hook out of a paper clip (see photo for how the engineering for the hook was done). I reached in, snagged the plastic thing and pulled out a small plastic bag of extra earbud covers that had apparently taken a ride up inside the printer on one of my print jobs. 

I had been so frustrated I was looking for a new printer last night. The turning point was finding out how to open the transport cover which turned out to be very very easy. They even embedded an arrow in the  cover to show which way to push it to open the paper transport mechanism.

I felt a bit stupid after I saw how it was done. So glad I don't have to buy a new printer. I'd have had to pay twice as much to replace it with the same one, Inflation has doubled the cost of the same 3 year old printer. How's that for a green new deal?

 

Where the baggie was hiding.

Once the printer is open, check here (see arrows) for paper or trash. In this photo I've got the paper transport mechanism cleared of paper but down in there where this arrow is pointing there was a glint of plastic when I aimed my flashlight at it. The trouble was now, how do I get it out of that narrow space. My fingers are too fat to fit in there.

Sooooooo, I had to fashion a highly technical tool to retrieve the bit of plastic stuck in the paper path. I did this by bending a hook into the end of a large paperclip using a pair of needle-nosed pliers I keep in my pencil box for just such emergency repair tasks (I tend to drop things down into tight places). You can see here my elaborately fashioned hook and the plastic bag of earbud bud-covers that somehow got itself sucked up inside my printer. The wife says it's an object lesson about keeping my desk clean that God had sent to me. I do not argue about these sorts of things with her. Besides, she may be right!

 

You can see the stray letters and the doubling of the text. It was all due to
smudges on the encoding strip. Not something I'd have expected.

 

Once it got to where it would print, it started printing double and throwing out random lines of characters. Here's what it looked like (above). I then printed up a test print (left). It's supposed to line all those line segments up in a straight column. It did anything but straight columns as you can see. This would never do. I began scouring the Internet to find out what might be wrong. I had more time than money for a new printer at the time, so there was sense of desperation to my search. Finally, I stumbled upon the answer.

Here's how I fixed it.

1. Unplug the printer.
2. Open the front of the printer. Shine your flashlight inside.
   
3. Find the clear plastic encoder strip. It's above and parallel to the metal bar the printer carriage rides on. It's really hard to see. You'll need a strong flashlight.
   
4. Clean the encoder strip. If the printing is wacky and aligning the print heads doesn't work, you've got smudges on the encoder strip. Use a long wet Q-tip (I didn't have one so I put a soft wet linen cloth over the end of a ruler). GENTLY rub the smudges off the plastic strip. It's these smudges, likely from your earlier efforts to dislodge the paper jam, that are distorting your image.
5. When the strip is clear, you're done. Don't press hard. Gentle back and forth wiping works. Don't go up and down. You could break it. Breaking the encoder strip, as inconsequential as it looks, will turn your $120 MG3620 into a big plastic brick.
6. Time for some housekeeping. You might while you are in there, plug the unit back in and turn it on. Have your trusty Q-tip at the ready. When the rollers spin up, use your Q-tip to clean off the dirt and ink so the rollers grab the paper better. You can also go down to the paper tray and clean the rollers in the center that grab the paper by the sheets.
7. Print a test page. Everything should look good after that.
8. If it's still a little dodgy follow the instructions for aligning the print heads. You probably did that first, but do it again. You may have bumped the printer carriage or something It's pretty easy to fix once you know what's wrong. Cleaning that plastic strip should get you fixed right up.
9. A little more housekeeping while you're at it. My wife always makes me dust things whenever I'm back there fixing connections and replacing parts. I go ahead and do it because when she can't stand it anymore, she dusts back there and then I have to spend the next couple of hours reconnecting all the wires that fell out while she was cleaning.
   

Here's the smudged encoder strip.

I had no idea a few finger smudges could mess up the printing like that. Before I started, I didn't even know printers had an encoder strip that looked like very thin strip of Scotch tape. DON'T FORGET! Be VERY, VERY gentle when you're wiping it off. Breaking that delicate strip of plastic tape will assassinate your nice printer. Given the number of printers I've worn out, I could have built a brick printer wall out of them all. I still have most of them in the forlorn hope that one day I'll fix them. Not bloody likely given how fast Windows' new versions make my lovely old printers go obsolete, but I hate to throw the old warriors out on the heap. Notice, I tend to anthropomorphize my technology. You should NOT do that unless you have a lot of storage space for old electronics..

Have a lovely day and hopefully a better one than this one started out to be. Ah, but then it ended up pretty good. There's nothing quite as satisfying as kicking a problem in its fuzzy buttocks.

© 2021 - Tom King

 P.S.

Here is the highly technical paper jam retrieval tool I made.
Above it is the baggie of buds I retrieved with it.

 

 

 

2021 - Facebook Hides Newsfeed Controls....Again!

How to Reset Your Facebook Newsfeed to See All Your Friends Uncensored.

Facebook really doesn't want to let all that research they did with the US government back in the Obama administration go to waste. There was a study Zuckerberg et al were caught doing some years back in which they screened the posts that Facebook members were receiving. The idea was to find out whether screening out angry conservative posts from members, made the more passive and receptive to the calming and enlightened progressive messages they put in their place. 

First Facebook rigged their newsfeed setting so that every two days or so, everybody's newsfeed switched back to the "Top Stories" setting.  If you will notice, your more provocative (and entertaining) friends get censored in favor of more progressive content and screens out more stimulating conservative content. And very recently, they changed the procedure for switching your newsfeed back to "Most Recent" so that most people have a hard time figuring out how to get back to where they see their friends' posts again. Facebook is clearly using this quiet resetting of your newsfeed to calm you down and manipulate your emotions and make you more peaceful and receptive to the message Mr. Zuckerberg thinks you ought to be seeing.

The "Top Stories" setting on Facebook is simply private corporate censorship and since Facebook is clearly a left-leaning corporate entity, it's also, in essence, censorship if content not approved by the Democrat Party. Fortunately, you can still switch your newsfeed so that you can once again get those posts from your grandpa complaining about how Joe Biden and that Pelosi woman are ruining the country. To be fair, Facebook also does censor ax murderers, the more open sorts of terrorists and most pornography. They don't trust their members to unfriend such people and, of course, conservatives like me get lumped in with pedophiles, serial killers, mass murderers and Ted Cruz and screened out of my friends' newsfeeds.

I on the other hand, live on the hidden island of the "Most Recent" Facebook newsfeed where I see the whole glorious flood of posts by my thousand some-odd friends. And you can too!  There are two ways to fix it so you see everyone and at the same time confound Facebook's Department of Acceptable Content Moderation.

#1.  The Easy Way - To make sure Facebook doesn't switch you to their heavily censored "Top Stories" newsfeed setting, download an app that Facebook doesn't like called "Facebook Purity". Just click on the link I just gave you and download the app. Once installed you can just click on FBP icon the program places at the top of your Facebook pages and you have control over Facebook at your fingertips. You'll have to update it a few times a year as Facebook generally eliminates FBP's access every time they update. Fortunately, the developer is never far behind in updating the app so you get it back in short order. I toss the guy a few bucks once in a while to support his efforts.

#2  The Hard Way - The Newsfeed link in the left column on the Home newsfeed page is now disabled. The other links work, but you can't click on Newsfeed like you used to and change the setting. You have to follow a more convoluted and distinctly unintuitive process. And frankly, I can't find anyone on the Internet who has figured out the new system for changing your newsfeed back to Most Recent. Using Facebook these days is like revisiting the Soviet Union or George Orwell's fictional Oceania where control over the proletariat is maintained by eliminating or redefining words, rewriting history or making it impossible to do things that might stimulate actual thinking which might lead to discontent which might lead to a revolt against the oligarchy.

I found a December 2020 article in Distractify that  explained how to reset your newsfeed after the 2020 "update' of Facebook. After 'splaining how to reset the newsfeed, the author noted, "...If you're finding yourself unable to find the option on the next update, chances are, following the same above steps will bring you back to the function. The order may change, and the icon, but hopefully, it won't ever disappear for good." Well in Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a dystopian social media future, hopefully didn't happen. The December procedure doesn't work anymore. Apparently it was too intuitive and people could still figure out how to get uncensored content.

So for now, see #1, because since the last time I changed my newsfeed manually, they eliminated the button that does so and substituted a button that doesn't work. For now FBP is the only way to reset your newsfeed.

One thing nice about having to use Facebook Purity is that it gives you some other great controls for managing what Facebook tosses across your screen. You can block things, improve the looks of your page and other fun stuff. So for now, until someone finds the secret door to changing your newsfeed, downloading FBP seems to be our only solution.

You know, Orwell's 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual for America's would-be oligarchy.

© 2021 by Tom King