Category: Interests

Guild Pickup Wiring

GAD 8 Comments

I’ve owned many Guild guitars, and due to the fact that I have a soldering iron and I’m not afraid to use it, I’ve learned a fair bit about various Guild pickups and their wiring. Since there seems to be little information on the Internet about this topic, I decided to write up what I have discovered.

Though I’ve covered the cosmetic and size differences of the various full-sized Guild HB1 pickups in my article entitled Guild Full-Sized HB1 and SD1 Pickup Variations, this article will cover the wiring of the pickups as opposed to the means of identifying them.

There are many different Guild guitars, and there are almost as many wiring schemes. Instead of covering each scheme here, I’ll describe the pickups themselves, and how they might be wired into any guitar. Other articles, such as The Fascinating Guild S-200 Thunderbird and Replacing Pickups in a Guild Nightbird will cover wiring specific to those guitars. (more…)

The Fascinating Guild S-200 Thunderbird

GAD 14 Comments

I’ve never been a huge fan of the Guild S-200 Thunderbird because (hang on to your hats Guild fans), I think they’re goofy looking. They’re nicknamed “Gumby” for a reason, after all. I’m not without my fair share of curiosity, and I’m always willing to be proven wrong, so when a fellow LetsTalkGuild member asked me to work on his, I jumped at the chance. This particular specimen was certainly not mint, but it was structurally sound and played fine with one minor problem – two of the control pots were either dirty or had failed. Since I apparently have a reputation of caring about my work and not being “just some guy”, I was given the opportunity to fix a guitar that was nearly as old as me. My price? The ability to fondle the guitar and write this article based on my discoveries. Read on to discover how my opinion of this Guild classic went from goofy to fascinating.

If you’re looking for the Newark St. S200 T-Bird, check out my review here.

(more…)

Image of a Hero

GAD 2 Comments

This picture is of my friend, Mike Stevens. Mike has worked tirelessly for decades as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). He has regaled me with stories both heartwarming and horrifying over the years, but somehow when I saw this picture on Facebook, I got a sudden, clear image of what it must be like to be a first responder with a big heart.

This is a tragic tale, told here, of a fire that devastated the lives of an already disrupted family. The story is heartbreaking in every sense, and the sadness must be overwhelming for everyone involved. In the midst of the fire, the heroics, and the drama, the image of a man trying to resuscitate a little dog stands out. Mike has saved countless lives in his career as an EMT, and has no doubt seen many fade away as well. The image of him trying to save this little dog, though, really shows what kind of man he is. (more…)

Lessons from Hurricane Sandy

GAD 1 Comment

In November of 2012, New Jersey was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. Places like the Jersey Shore and parts of Long Island, New York were destroyed utterly. Many people in these areas were keeping watch with shotguns while their families slept. There was looting, a National Guard presence, and countless people lived on the brink of a societal collapse. It was literally that bad in many places.

We live about sixty miles inland, and though we did not suffer the ravages that plagued the coast, we were among the last of the towns left standing to get our power back. From the day the storm hit until the day we were “back to normal”, we spent 14 days and nights without power. Like many homes, no power means no TV, no computers, no Internet, and of more importantly in the cold of a New Jersey November, no heat. But that wasn’t the worst of it for us.

We thought that we were prepared, and we were for a few days, after which things changed in unexpected ways. My hope is that someone will benefit from the lessons we learned from this event. There is a lot of information here, so I’ve split the original 6000 word essay up into smaller chunks. An index of these posts appears below. (more…)

Hurricane Lessons: Shelter and Warmth

GAD Leave a comment

Shelter

Shelter is one of those things that many of us take for granted. You need to be safe from the winds, the rain, the storms, and whatever else nature can throw at you.  If 70 mile-per-hour winds knock a tree into your bedroom, you’ve suddenly got a compromised shelter. If your shelter is compromised, take steps to find new shelter, fix what you have, or both. Many survival schools teach students to make a shelter before even starting a fire when lost in the woods. In our case, our house was thankfully unscathed, but there were many people sleeping in church, firehouse, and Red Cross shelters in our state. Don’t be afraid to use such services if you need them.

Warmth

With shelter taken care of, the next immediate need in the winter is warmth. This is one category where I thought we were prepared, and we weren’t. We have a wood-burning insert in our fireplace which keeps almost the entire house warm when the power is out. We had some wood, and I had bought some kiln-dried firewood just in case we ran out. I had figured on a few days without power, and that’s how long the wood lasted. Since we were burning wood on a 24×7 basis, we went through it at an alarming rate. (more…)

Hurricane Lessons: Water

GAD Leave a comment

Water

Since we live in a very rural area, we have a well, and the well pump runs on electricity. While many people complained about not having any hot water, like most of our neighbors, we had no water. A lack of hot water means being unable to take a comforting, hot shower. No running water means no flushing toilets.

The average person can survive for about three to five days without water. We have Poland Spring water delivered to our house, and we always have at least four five-gallon jugs of clean, drinkable water available. With four of us and two dogs, in a worst-case scenario of one gallon each per day, we have water for 3.3 days. None of us consumed one gallon per day, especially at the beginning when we still had bottles of other things to drink. We went through about one 5-gallon jug per week, and that included giving the dogs water. Note that we only use this water for drinking, possibly cooking, giving the dogs water, and things like brushing our teeth. The bigger issue by far was the water consumed every time a toilet was flushed. (more…)

Hurricane Lessons: Tools

GAD Leave a comment

Tools

OK, Tools shouldn’t be listed before food, but for us, water has one serious drawback: it’s heavy. At 8.3 pounds per gallon, each of those jugs weighs over 40 pounds when full. Here’s a picture of me hauling four jugs with the tractor last year. Looks like fun right? This time we had prepared the cars for the storm, but I’d totally forgotten about the tractor, so naturally it wouldn’t start when I needed it. Without it, had the firehouse not been available, we would have had to haul water from the woods by hand, in forty pound jugs, in the freezing cold.

Lesson learned: Make sure any power tools you may rely on are operational before the big storm hits. That includes tractors, generators, chainsaws, and anything else you might need. (more…)

Hurricane Lessons: Food

GAD Leave a comment

Food

Imagine that you’re at the center of a 100-mile wide circle where there is no power. In other words, there are no stores open for 50 miles in any direction. You can’t just go to the supermarket when they’re all without power. After about 10 days, stores started to open, but the shelves and coolers were largely empty of things like bread and milk.

You can’t go out to eat when no one has power. A couple of enterprising local eateries had thought ahead, stocked their coolers, bought the proper generators, and were able to make pizzas in an otherwise dark world. They made a LOT of pizzas. They even donated many pizzas to the local shelters. That’s great, but pizza every day, three meals a day gets old fast, and it’s not the best source of nutrition, either. Better to stock up before hand. (more…)

Hurricane Lessons: Power

GAD 2 Comments

Power

I like to think that I can live in a cave without all of the modern conveniences. IPads, Laptops, cell phones – they’re all just distractions and we can do without them, right? The truth is that we made multiple trips to a generator-powered friend’s house in order to charge our many “necessities.” Based on frequency, keeping these devices charged was seemingly more important than taking a shower. Harumph. To be fair, I can charge a laptop in my car. It is admittedly difficult to take a shower in there.

On day 12 of our 14-day adventure, I woke up to a house that was only 46 degrees Fahrenheit. That was the point that I said, “Screw this!”, and went out to buy a generator. Believe it or not, I found one too. I even got the transfer switch so that it could be properly wired into our service panel. We will never have to go through such an extended outage again. Or will we?

The generator is great. It runs for 10-12 hours on a tank of gas, is quieter than most of the generators out there, and it powers about 90% of our house. It rocks. It also has a six-gallon gas tank, which means while I’m used to buying two cans of gas every summer, those same two cans of gas would last only 16 hours while using the generator. Damn. (more…)

Hurricane Lessons: Morale

GAD 1 Comment

Morale

One of the biggest things I’d never considered in a disaster-type scenario was morale. Certainly our problems were minuscule compared to those who had lost everything, but we were not without some negative emotion creeping into our lives.

Information flow

We had no cell phone coverage for three days. Now I’ve always maintained that cell phones are a luxury, and that most people are far too dependent on them, but what I learned is that we all have come to assume that they pretty much always work. Many people (us included), keep them charged because they’re a great way of communicating in an emergency. Well, here we were in an (admittedly mild) emergency, and the cell phones were out. This made us all feel very isolated in a way that was unexpected. With no TV, no Internet, and no cell phones, we had no source of news. That may sound ridiculous, but remember that I’m a survivalist at heart, so I pulled out the AM/FM transistor radios, only to find that all of the local radio stations we normally listened to were off the air. We felt like we were in a zombie movie, but without the entertaining distraction of being able to snipe rogue walkers of the undead persuasion. (more…)