Every time I recognize that we should be doing an update, I never feel like that there's anything that's been particularly interesting. I think I've admitted this before. The truth is that we've actually been doing a lot of work. It's just not immediately obvious on the front page of this site. The long and the short of it is that we've still been collecting amps, and pedals, and PCBs and kits for pedals.

We don't believe anyone wants to read, "Look! I just bought this (thing)!" We don't care about reading others posting, "Look what we bought!". At the end of the day, it's what you DO, create, or share with the new things that come into your life and create that's important. Mere acquisition of things is not a particularly interesting activity.

Sometimes it's really only possible to recognize an earlier victory that you've captured only after you've put a whole lot more hard work in. Going through this slog was pretty tough. And it was only after starting to go through it that I'd realized the possible mess I'd gotten myself into.

Here's a view of the carnage after the fact (what we'd won)...

It was an auction site that was new to us, and a slightly new way of bidding, so there was some discomfort, naturally. But the site and the auctioneer also made available something I'd never been able to do before on eBay: Actually go look at the real, physical items I would be bidding on!

When I first started writing this article, I thought I was going to be rehashing some old material about Gibson (under owner Henry Juszkiewicz) and one particular completely crappy business practice: "The Bumblebee Capacitors".

But while doing research for that article (the bumblebee capacitors debacle is still a pretty interesting and an instructive case study), I was lead to a whole lot of other things: namely the information that is now this article. Most notably that there was a whole chain of events, playing out across several years, under Juszkiewicz's leadership that caused the failure of Gibson, and the forced sale that threw "Henry J" out, and that brought in new investors and new company leadership. Early last month, it had been a year since Gibson went through that ownership and leadership change.

Henry Juszkiewicz acquired Gibson in 1986 for $5m. 5 Million Dollars. That's it. Now, 1986 is quite a bit different from 2019 in terms of how much inflation has devalued the dollar, but $5 million still seems a pittance given the storied Gibson name...

Like many drummers, I’ve not given a lot of thought to drum sizes other than small drums have a higher pitch and large drums have a lower pitch. I bought my last kit because its made of Birch and did not pay much attention to the tom tom diameters. After all, It has a small tom, a medium tom and a large tom. What else do I need to know? I’ve looked at some of the big drum companies to see how they dimension their drums. I’d like to make my drums similar to the industry standards. It turns out there are a few different sizing schemes in use by the big manufacturers.

Being a woodworker of sorts, I have been itching lately to make my own drum kit. There are several options for making your own kit. You can buy shells already made and add the hardware and finish or you can attempt to make the shells yourself.
A few months ago, I decided to order the shells already made from a drum making supply company. Of course, they still have not arrived and I'm not sure if they actually will arrive. Custom drum stuff seems to take a ridiculously long time. I ordered a custom floor tom from Pearl years ago and it took about 7 months to get it.

Here's the 2nd half of our "how to make an instrument work pad from warped plywood" article. Candidly, we think it's a little boring, but we also think the information that's provided in the article, should you retain it(!) will help with your possible future musical performance endeavors. Dealing with warped/bowed plywood is likely going to be something you may have to deal with more than you thought you might... It's happened to us!

Here's the first article if you're coming into this halfway...

The impetus for this article came about from a scrap piece of shag carpet that I'd collected and the happenstance of some pieces of plywood that were slightly bent but that were workable and that came my way in the past 30 days or so.

"Huh?", is what I hear you saying in your head right now.

Let's take a step back. In the process of building a business that mostly centers around renting out older tube amps, it follows that we also work on our own personal electric instruments. At the end of the day, we don't just love heavy music, we love playing it.

Every once in a while something comes along - something strange and beautiful - something unexpected. "The Deacy" is just such an amplifier. Now, as you well know, this site is about vacuum-tube or "valve" (as the Brits say it) amplifiers. We love everything tube. We love the sound, we love feel, we love the interactivity and we love the loudness. We also love the renaissance that's occurring with both vacuum tube amps and older style out-of-manufacture pedals where the older schematics and parts are being rediscovered and re-purposed into new, and powerful, heavy music.

This is where the pedigree of the Deacy is wonderfully esoteric. The electronics come from a country that no longer exists: Southern Rhodesia.

The parts that John had scrounged that night came from a radio built and manufactured in Southern Rhodesia in Africa. Today that country is called Zimbabwe. In the post-colonial era, Britain still had ties and influence in Southern Rhodesia. In fact, Southern Rhodesia remained a self-governed colony of Britain until 1980 when the last vestiges of British rule were thrown off and Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.

So we've been doing a lot of work to put information into the wiki here on the site. We've completed the catalog of all the pedals we have. This doesn't include just the brand-name already-assembled pedals by larger manufacturers. We actually also undertook a lot of work scanning different websites and companies that offer more than just the run-of-the-mill pedals and found ourselves drawn into kit pedals and pcb-only pedals. Now, of course this site is about tube amps, and tube amps alone, while they take us to the promised land of heavy music, they won't alone keep it interesting.

We've been meaning to post something about our encounter with Lace Pickups a couple of weeks ago, but just saw this from Brian Wampler's YouTube channel. It just was posted today on YouTube: