Molluscs and Monsters

I need a glass container to heat up hide glue in, via hot water method, so I decided to inventory the saved glass jars I have, and it's... slightly mysterious.

There's a medium sized spice jar with a metal lid that I don't remember saving, but the three with the black plastic caps I do remember saving aren't there. There's a stray cap for a type of jar I stopped saving and cleared out because they're an awkward shape, and a white plastic cap that goes to who knows what. In addition to the two jam jars with lids that I remember putting aside, there's one with no lid that I don't remember. And one of the little spice jars is missing a lid, but there's an extra shaker cap (the plastic bit with the holes that snaps over the top).

The obvious and most likely explanation is that I'm very disorganized and forgetful, and things get lost, but still.

Oh yeah, I haven't done a Garbage Guitar update in a while.

I stained the sides with a mixture of WATCO "natural" Danish oil and phthalo blue and green oil paint, and I'm pretty happy with how that turned out. I'm putting veneer on the front and back, partly for appearances, but I wouldn't have bothered if I wasn't hoping it'd help me fill in/add a *little* more strength to that part of the back I scorched so badly. I applied a mix of sawdust and hide glue to the tearout in the bridgeplate, and will hopefully learn soon whether that was a good idea or a terrible idea.

EDIT: Wait. I've... never made a Garbage Guitar post here, it looks like? Whoops. Uh, long story short, I found a guitar in the garbage! And I've been trying to fix/customize it. it started out looking like this:




the acrylic paint it was coated in was so drippy and thick that I could pull a decent bit of it off with my fingernails. Underneath, it appeared to have been painted white (still in craft paint, and there's nothing wrong with that if you're not planning to play it I guess) and doodled on with marker/pencil. It was kind of neat to uncover, like an archaeology dig.

Under THAT, the professional paint job it apparently had originally was Girl Assigned Pink, that ugly mid-saturated pink toy companies use to designate something is For Girls.







It's a real steel string guitar though, apparently a cheap one for kids to learn on. Honestly once I'd gotten all the paint off the hardware and out of the bridge, made a makeshift saddle from a piece of thick plastic, and gotten some strings and pins, it was playable... but it was still Girl Assigned Pink. Also, there was some damage to the bridgeplate, and some paint still stuck in the bridge, both of which made the pins sit unevenly and somewhat precariously.







After a lot of sanding, scraping, and a heat gun, I did get all the factory paint job off, but I accidentally scorched part of the back pretty badly because I'd never used a heat gun before. Researching fixes led to researching woodworking in general, and veneers, and fancy things you could do with stains... aaand long story short I added a lot of technically unnecessary complications to my project.

I mixed up my own blue-green wood stain with alkyd oil paint and WATCO danish oil. I think it came out nice, personally. I also found a fancy type of wood veneer, bird's eye maple, for cheap, and I'm applying that to the front and back. There's something I'd like to do with a small piece of burled walnut to help with that scorched corner and generally look cool, but I lucked out with the maple veneer; fancy veneer is usually pretty expensive, and I don't know if I can afford to get the burled walnut. I've already spent more money on this project than I really should be spending on anything in my current financial situation, tbh, though most of it has been tools I'll almost certainly get plenty of use out of in the future.

And that's the Garbage Guitar! I hope it was interesting, or will be interesting in the future.

Background: So I play Splatoon 2. My housemate had a switch and a copy she never played, so I got pretty into it for a bit, even though I'm not very good. I find the setting interesting, so naturally I started making OCs, and one of them was this lil guy:



His name is Argo, and he's an octotrooper who fled the Octarian Empire and now sells fruits, vegetables, and the occasional fruit juice flavored shaved ice. I'm very fond of him.

I like making figurines out of polymer clay and decided I wanted to make a little sculpt of him. However, his design in and of itself just isn't that interesting. He's usually green instead of red, but otherwise he's just a standard octotrooper. It's his produce cart that has all the expressive little details. So, obviously, I had to make the cart too.

This has turned out to require slightly more engineering than I might have initially expected.




Most recently I've been having trouble with something I didn't really expect to be a huge issue: the door hinges. Curling the metal from the can directly into hinges is awkward and terrible. I can make very nice, neat hinges from paperclips, but they're difficult to attach. I've given up on soldering them and am now trying epoxy putty. The real thing will hopefully not be so sloppy. At this point I just want to see if it actually holds them and the door actually swings open.




That's about it for today. Not a very exciting inaugural post, but hopefully future updates will be more interesting.