24 March 2025
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Looking Down on the Back Garden – March 2025

This is the back garden, taken yesterday morning. Jane has been doing some work on the bed by the polytunnel, making it narrower but deeper. Looking out from the dining room, it is amazing how much a small change increases the perceived width of the garden.

I’ve also looked back at photos from previous years. March is a month where I remembered to take pictures in 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021. If that shows anything, it is how much things vary from year to year. For example, look at the Photinia (Red Robin) on the left. This year there is a lovely display of red and green, even though we cut it back quite hard last year. However, the red was much stronger in 2024 and 2022. I will have to wait to next year to find out if that runs on a two year cycle.

23 March 2025
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Damper Capo

Over the last week, I’ve been trying to design something to run off on my 3D printer that will help dampen the vibration of the strings on my wall of guitars. I have been using bits of foam under the strings but they don’t hold up very well to being put on and off the instruments and I’ve reached the point where replacements are needed. That has led to this:

I’d tried a block to fit under the strings but it functioned more like a new nut because the hard plastic just changed the point the strings resonated from. Partway through the week I watched a video of 3D printed guitar accessories which had nothing in the way of string dampening devices but it did feature a printed capo that didn’t work very well. The plastic hinge wasn’t enough to properly hold down the strings on the opposite side of the neck. However, what if it wasn’t a capo to clamp the strings down but a customised clip to hold a piece of material?

That is what my new design does. I can enter parameters like the neck width and radius and create custom ones for each instrument. The material I’ve used here is a bit of old T shirt, which can also be used to wipe the strings down after playing. As well as the clip to hold the material against the neck, there is a second, smaller clip which is enough to hold the folded material onto the “capo”.

I’ve just done one electroacoustic bass so far but I’ve got another several more instruments to attend to so I expect to be doing some measuring and printing over the next couple of weeks to equip them all.

22 March 2025
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Saturday Sing Around – 22 March 2025

I decided to travel light and took my ukulele and banjo along to this afternoon’s session. Two instruments but still lighter than either electric or upright bass!

My first offering was a medley of Ain’t She Sweet, Five Foot Two and Yes Sir, That’s My Baby. All three work well on ukulele and I wanted to get them in early as another regular attendee sometimes pulls out one or more of them. Mind you, someone else then performed another song I had laid up – Wayfaring Stranger – so I guess that serves me right!

When it came round to me again, I’d switched to the banjo for a loosey-goosey version of Larry Norman’s Twelve Good Men. I took that down to D (I’ve normally played it in E on other instruments) and that gave me a chance for a proper road test of a small banjo 5th string capo I downloaded and printed last month. I’d posted about the idea but found someone else had already done one. The first version wasn’t perfect but they quickly responded to my comments and their revised (higher and wider) edition meant I could quickly and reliably switch the thumb string from G to A to fit the key.

My final contribution was another old favourite on the ukulele but tried out on the banjo (back to regular G tuning): Enjoy Yourself. As another 3 chord song, it is an easy one to join in with and my fellow players did so with gusto.

21 March 2025
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House of David

Since I’m enjoying another month of ‘trial’ membership of Amazon Prime (I imagine that enough people forget to cancel that they cover the costs of those who have learned the game of signing up every now and then), I am watching their new series, House of David. I don’t think it would be too far off to say that it is like The Chosen, except for being set about 1,000 years earlier. It does include lots of material from the Bible but it doesn’t necessarily shy away from adjusting timing, adding more detail and making it flow much more like a 21st century drama.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing and they are very upfront about that, with a notice displayed at the start of every episode. If anything, I would say that, so far, it follows the biblical story more closely than The Chosen although (a) that isn’t a high bar and (b) The Chosen has four gospel accounts to weave together rather than the single core narrative of 1 Samuel. One thing that has puzzled me, though, is the suggestion that David was an illegitimate child of Jesse.

The Bible doesn’t hint at this but it turns out that some Jewish traditions get partway there. Mind you, the Jewish traditions also have David’s father, Jesse, as one of the greatest scholars and purest men of day and suggest that his great-grandfather, Boaz, died the day after marrying Ruth. I’m not sure they are necessarily any more historical than British legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood.

One thing that definitely doesn’t fit is the idea that David’s mother died when he was young – in 1 Samuel 22 he asks the King of Moab to look after his mother and his father (at risk from King Saul). So far (I’m up to the end of episode 3), House of David has only covered chapter 15 and about half of 16 and Jesse has already been a widower for many years. As with any historical drama, it is important to remember that script writers rarely let facts get in the way of a good story!

20 March 2025
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The Radius of Arcs

Today I have been revising how to calculate the radius of an arc. I’m working on a design for a printable widget that I can use to damp the strings of the various instruments hanging on my wall. I’ve had some foam jammed between the strings and the fretboard, which has worked well, but the foam is beginning to tear apart on the ones I use more often.

One thing I spotted after my first version was that instruments typically have a radiused fingerboard. Rather than being completely flat, the fretboard is like a small section (or arc) of a much larger circle. That is good for playability but makes for another factor to consider in the design. Given the width of the fretboard and height of the centre compared to the edges, it can be calculated with the formula h/2 + w^2 / (h*8) (as it is written in OpenSCAD). The revision was to remind myself of how that is derived – easy to look up online but worth spending a little while to understand.

Mind you, having printed a second test piece, I still haven’t nailed the fretboard radius of the electroacoustic bass in question. It isn’t entirely straightforward to measure the height element, even with vernier calipers. As another step, I’ve downloaded some radius gauges which I’m partway through printing. Of course, if they work, I won’t need to go the measure and calculate route directly although the maths will still come in useful. Even if I can gauge the radius by feel, I’ll still need to work out the height of the arc for the fretboard width in order to position things properly on my model.

19 March 2025
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Tomato Germination

I normally do pretty well with tomato germination but I can’t remember hitting 100% germination or getting those results in less than a week before. I think the difference has been the hot bath idea. That includes some seeds that were two or three years old. There is still a long way before they get the chance to become productive plants but it has been a positive start and I got all 32 seedlings potted up today – the next test is to see how they do now they have been moved from the heated area to a well lit spot (although still inside the house at this stage).

18 March 2025
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Too Tall?

I got a bit side-tracked in 3D design this morning, trying to work out some trays to hold seedlings. I had the bright idea of seeing I could make them tall enough to stack like modules on top of each other. The trouble was that trying to reinforce the top mean support material was called for (a waste of filament) and, going back to flat sides (no support required) was going to use a lot of material and take hours to print.

I think I might just go back to smaller, lower trays. Stacking up also has potential issues like reducing light at the lower levels or knocking over the stack. It was interesting to spend some time exploring but sometimes a bright idea isn’t the same as a good idea!

17 March 2025
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Why Lazarus?

The name Lazarus turns up in two places in the Bible. One is a friend of Jesus, who lived at Bethany and was the brother of Martha and Mary. We read about him in John 11 and 12 – he is the one who dies but then called forth from the tomb. The other is a character in a story Jesus told in Luke 16, about an unnamed rich man and a beggar called Lazarus. Actually, the rich man is sometimes called Dives but that is from the Latin translation and is simply the Latin for ‘wealthy’; in modern English, perhaps we should call him Rich! Lazarus, or ‘Lazaros’ in the original Greek text, is believed to come from the Hebrew name Eleazar, which means ‘God has helped’. Old Rich certainly didn’t extend any help in that direction but, when they die, Lazarus finds himself comforted by Abraham while Rich is in torment.

In the Bible study we attended this afternoon, we pondered the question of why the beggar character was called Lazarus. Further research online says it was a common name in 1st century Judea but that argument is typically backed up by citing the friend of Jesus and the fictional beggar. I can believe names like Mary or Simon were common, because we find multiple real people called by them in the New Testament, but I’m less convinced about Lazarus and I can’t lay my hands on sources outside the Bible to take that further.

I wonder if the character was named because Jesus had a friend called Lazarus? The story probably comes before that Lazarus was raised (the latter not long before the ‘triumphal entry’, which we find in John 12 and Luke 19) so there could be an element of divine foreknowledge? It is certainly true that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the truth of the words spoken by Abraham (yes, definitely that Abraham although still as a character in a story) that those blinded by wealth wouldn’t believe even if they saw someone raised from the dead. Luke’s account shows that Jesus was telling the story to Pharisees who sneered at him and loved money more than the history of Moses and the prophets that they should have been experts in!

16 March 2025
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Wicked Madness

We had a couple of new songs at the Charnwood Symphonic Wind Orchestra rehearsal tonight. One was a medley of tunes from the band Madness. There is a fair amount of syncopation but it was a fairly easy read, probably helped by the fact that the pieces included were all “Top of the Pops” hits when I was at school and paying attention to the pop charts.

On the other hand, the medley of tunes from the musical Wicked was a bit tougher to follow and it definitely needs some homework from me. Possibly it is a bit more complicated but I suspect not knowing the tunes is also part of it so looking those up is the first thing I need to do.

15 March 2025
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Tuba Bits Holder

Last month I mentioned that I was working on a 3D design for something to hold the pipes and valves of my tuba so they can dry out but with less chance of mixing them up. The valves in particular will fit in the wrong slots but then you can’t blow through the instrument. Here is the finished result:

I don’t have a multicolour printer and, at the time I ran it off, I didn’t even have PLA filament in any colour other than black, so it was printed in that. It has worked well but the numbers were a little hard to read. Last night I applied some white acrylic paint and this morning I used Dremel-like tool to tidy it up, making them much clearer. The pieces have been designed to tessellate, with the large end having two spikes for the pipe extensions, a valve holder in the middle and then a spike to hold a spring at the other end.

Once the parts have finished drying, I’ll check the lubrication and then pop them back on the tuba, ready for some more practise.

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