DIY HiFi Surround, picturama

Once again i’ve been tinkering on small a broadband system to be used as my surround front/rear speakers. I’ve chosen a simple (and cheap!) design very similar to the CT 242, the only thing i’ve changed is the bass-reflex tuning. Once again, as i’m quite new to all this i’d rather refrain from giving instructions on how to do this and that here.

Custom Figure Display, Part 2

Heyyas there,

here comes part two of the “custom modelkit/figure display” series (or whatever you’d call it). A custom display for figures, modelkits, whatever – you name it! It’s a crossover between a glass-case/cabinet and a shelf. It combines the idea of hanging it on the wall with a glass-case so the figures/GKs don’t collect too much dust. This time – unfortuneatly – i don’t have pictures of the quality and detail of the other tutorials, but i will try to describe the working parts as good as possible.

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Tenshi Hinanai 1/8 Sakura Zensen

Although the ones who collect PVCs are constantly enraged by the release of a few kits per year which are *really* outstanding and kit only (no PVC version), it makes a kit builder proud to own those. This one is such a kit, a very light and still dynamic pose and also a very impressive one despite the scale (because of the sword and the extraordinary base).

My third kit (okay, technically the fourth) and I feel I still have lots to learn. She’s a very fragile one, when assembled and it is one of those things I still have no idea how to do it better: how to glue on those crystals or small ribbons you can’t pin and make it STABLE. My painting has improved with a more bold approach to highlights and shadows (I used the awesome prototype pictures of Sakura Zensen as reference), an attempt to manipulating different gloss levels for different parts (with which I’m very pleased) and my first time being confronted with clear parts.

I got new tools this time around too (so still not there to having everything for building kits). new wire, a clear plexiglas base that won’t distract from the figure (you can’t see it because of the “clouds” but it’s pretty) and beautiful colored inks which work wonderful on clears. Thus, I am still furiously writing on the article for a full garage kit building tutorial but it lacks pictures and well, I’m not done yet. Time to tackle another kit! I bet there are still many mistakes to make and to avoid.

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Custom Figure-Displays, Part I: Rakka Picture Frame

There are days where you just have to do some handicraft to finish the day in a nice way – so was today (and yesterday, but yesterday nothing worked, so fu yesterday, today worked out nice!). What we did is a – specifically our first – custom figure display. Its a kind of picture frame for a Rakka which lies cozily on a feather-bed.

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Alto II – DIY HiFi getting more serious!

After i managed to write up the guide/documentation for the cheapo-tenöre yesterday i today want to post more of DIY speaker sweetness – a “Alto II (Variation)” – again a self-developed speaker by a HiFi-Forum member. It is – as you can see – a large floorstander with two Visaton chassis and the second speaker i ever built.

This is – by the way – not going to be a guide, as there are people who can do this far better than me with those more advanced speakers. Time comes, maybe sometime i’ll develop nice speakers myself 🙂 At least thats the plan. But for a picture-documentation – please read on!

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“HiFi” on the cheaps, DIY Speakers for few euros…

As a friend and myself built me a pair of quite nice – not to say wowzie – speakers for music production and DJing a few years ago i was now eager to try myself. To get the basic idea of craftsmenship and woodworking i started not by developing the speakers myself – as it was done by my friend for me back then – but go for a well known design by a guy from the german Hifi-Forum: The TenÖre Transmissionline Broadband-speaker. The name comes from german dialect/puns and roughly means “10-euro thingy”. A perfect object to train the techniques needed for more complicated work…

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Mahjongg madness, DIY Mahjongg table

Okay, so what do we have here? As you may know from previous posts or the tag-cloud we are quite into the game of Mahjongg, playing Riichi rules. What we’ve been missing all the time was a fantastic automatic mahjongg table. Of course it is much too expensive and huge – on top of that those beasts of machanics engeneering need frequend service – which isn’t available in Europe (it seems like this one was a rumor and is not true for the ones linked above…). So we set out to build one Ourselves (of course no automatic one as we are no team of engeneers with a fully equipped work shop). Read on for details and building instructions.

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Alice Margatroid 1/6 (T’s System)

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The kit that got me into building GKs, it’s such a cute one 🙂 (especially with her dolls Shanghai and Hourai). T’s System has a lovely Touhou GK line and they’re still releasing more. Most of the painting is done with the airbrush, details were hand-brushed (I love doing details!).

She’s on display for quite a while now, I forgot when I actually finished her but she had been the reason for much frustration and headache. Every part of her decided to break off spontaneously until I had enough and pinned everything I could! One should still be careful with the dolls but other than that I think she shouldn’t be prone to falling apart anymore.

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Kawaii gifts, n-th round: Bath-Towel

“A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy writes

Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta;  use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat;

Or so it goes on…

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

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