jnewman

Is that the Jet JDP-17MF? I have one of them that I bought maybe a year ago and it has been good to me so far. I wasn't going to get quite that expensive a drill press but I got it on sale at Rockler plus some extra off from a card I had.

Actually, when you touch the strings, YOU get grounded - if the bridge isn't grounded, you don't act as a path to ground, you act as an antenna. If you're not touching something conductive that is grounded and don't have bare feet in the wet dirt, you are not grounded and can't provide a path to ground for anything.

Sorry, just realized my post doesn't help you at all.

It's pretty sweet - I sure like mine .

Naw, there was a Fender Texas Special guitar that came with a pearly gates + humbucker in the bridge and two texas special single coils. As to the diagrams the OP asked for, no idea. I think the one inductance/two inductance thing may mean one coil/two coils.

Probably the reason that you haven't seen Steel City around in your searches is that they are a brand new company, founded if I recall correctly by a group of people who left Delta.

I build a through-neck stratocaster with mostly walnut and some maple stripes through the center and a rosewood fretboard. It was a pretty dark sounding guitar. I would not say that walnut behaves at all like maple in a guitarbuilding context. Walnut is also much easier to work than maple as it's a lot softer. Hard maple can be significantly heavier than walnut, also. Soft maple can be pretty close to the same density as walnut.

If you haven't tried it, Woodcraft sells Timberwolf blades in many of the standard bandsaw blade sizes. There are a couple of "rules of thumb" for bandsaw blades. One is that you should always have at least 3 teeth in the material you're cutting. If you're doing resaw, I've heard you pretty much need a skip tooth blade (more room to carry out sawdust). Then, also, different blade widths can cut different curves. The minimum curve radius for a 1/4" blade is 1". For a 3/8" blade it's 1 1/2". For a 1/2" blade it's 2 1/2". (All estimates) A good "general use" blade is a 1/4" or 3/8" 6 TPI regular or skip tooth blade. For resawing you probably want a 1/2" or wider 3-4TPI skip tooth blade. If you want to learn all about bandsaws, I recently purchased a book, "The New Complete Guide to the Band Saw" by Mark Duginske. It's a very good book with great explanations. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about bandsaws. Some of it only really applies to the bigger machines, but a lot of it applies across the board.

I actually did check a few of them with a machinist's square (best straight reference I have available at home). If I were buying something for the purpose, I'd probably buy a piece of float glass first, or a toleranced granite surface plate (as you recommend) - and in fact I do have a piece of float glass with a bunch of pieces of silicon carbide sandpaper on it for tool sharpening. I just think that if you have easy access to some polished granite tiles they're worth checking out.

My recent experience with granite tiles matches Setch's - my mother just redid her kitchen with nice granite countertops and granite tile backsplash (it's not actually granite as it's black, but it's similar enough in general properties that the people who sell it call it that. I have a friend who is a geologist who told me what it actually is, but I can't remember now). If I had an extra one of those tiles or a piece of the countertop I wouldn't hesitate to use it for anything that required a flat surface. I would be very surprised if the surfaces had more than a thousandth or two of variance from flat over a tile or over a foot of countertop. They are as near to dead flat as I can measure. The tile surfaces on the backsplash are not all perfectly coplanar, there is variance of as much as 1/32" or so on a couple of tiles on the backsplash, but the individual tiles are flat as anything.

Bandsaws usually have a thrust bearing behind the blade (which keeps the blade from being pushed back as you cut. Sometimes this is a block type guide. The side guides can be either bearings or a "block" type guide. Bearings are nice - they don't wear down (at least not quickly), they support the blade pretty well, they're easy to set up, etc. - but they're more expensive and they don't work well with very narrow blades (less than 1/4"). Traditionally, the "block" type guides (which are usually rectangular but are sometimes cylindrical) were made from steel. These last a good while but the problem with this was the blade needed to have a fair bit of clearance from the guides or the guides would wear the blade and heat it up. More recently, they started making the guides out of ceramic, which also wear very slowly and have a lot less friction so that they don't heat the blade up as much. These are a pretty good compromise for block-guide bandsaws. Finally, and most recently, are the "cool block" type of guides. These are basically graphite impregnated phenolic plastic. They're so slick they're pretty close to frictionless, which is where their name comes from - you can actually set the guides touching the blade without heating the blade up or damaging it. This makes them ideal for very narrow blades (although they do work very well for wider blades, too). The only real problem with them is that they wear down fairly quickly and have to be reset (and occasionally replaced). A lot of people prefer ceramic or cool block guides to bearings. A lot of people prefer bearings. This is just what I have gathered from my reading.

That Hitachi set actually has gotten quite good reviews from every magazine I've seen that's reviewed it. I think Fine Woodworking gave it the "Best Value" award for 2-ish HP routers in their 2007 tool guide.

Many semiconductor and IC companies have a free sample program. Usually the sample program is for educational institutional use or for commercial prototyping and/or product evaluation for production use. Using samples for personal projects can be honest (and legal) or dishonest (and possibly illegal). It depends primarily on the company you're dealing with and your behavior. If the company just says they'll hand out samples to anyone who wants them, and you ask and they're happy to send you some, then you're just fine. If the company explicitly states that the samples are only available for commercial evaluation purposes, then you're borderline - if you ask for a sample and say that you're not using it for commercial purposes, and they send it to you, then that's probably acceptable - you've acknowledged their policy and the company has chosen to go against it. If the company has the policy described above and either states that samples are only for commercial evaluation and you just order a sample, or if you give the whole spiel about how you're evaluating this part for use in a production of some large number of products per year, etc. etc., then you're lying, it's dishonest, and it's illegal. I have talked to people who do this, and mostly they come up with all kinds of excuses for why it's ok, but it's not. It's wrong. As to any risks that you face using a sample program - if you're honest about your purposes, and they send you a sample, there's probably not anything to worry about. If you misrepresent yourself and your reasons for requesting a sample, then you could potentially face legal action - although I doubt it would happen.

You can sidestep a few of the reasons for having a variac by making a current limiting box. The way to do this is you build a box which plugs into the wall. Said box also has an outlet in it that you plug your amp into. The hot wire from the plug goes through a normal incandescent light bulb to the outlet. If everything's fine, the light bulb will glow dimly and the amp will run a little bit brown (lower power). If you have a short or other problem that would cause the amp to draw a lot of current, then the light bulb will light up at more or less full light bulb brightness, the amp will have its current limited and you will know something is wrong.

I think that all the active pickup companies are trying to keep their exact construction methods a secret. (Actually I was serious there... it wouldn't be the first time something was done that way). Plus, I mean, they don't want the little preamp bits wobbling around, and there's not nearly as much wire as a passive pickup and the magnets are different, so they'd look very different.