Buying a Home? Get an Inspection Camera

When you’re looking into purchasing a new house there are many things to consider. It is easy to miss the little things, such as inspecting the house. Sure a professional will come and do your home inspection for you. Keep in mind that these professionals can make mistakes as well, that’s why it is important to do your due diligence beforehand. To do a complete home inspection  you will need a tool that is incredibly helpful, that tool is the inspection camera.

Inspection cameras are used in a number of assorted applications, from automotive to forensic evidence. Now you’re probably thinking of the multiple ways you could use an inspection camera around the house. Has the cat lost his favorite toy? Use the inspection camera to check under the couch to locate the toy. On a more serious note, inspection cameras can be very useful for deciding if the price on the house is accurate.

Inspecting the pipes in a home is no easy task, they are often buried or located behind walls. There is a tool that can help you see these, that’s right, an inspection camera. The camera can view the outside of the pipes that are located behind walls. The camera can even go down into the drains to get a good view of what is happening inside. Making sure the pipes are working properly can save a buyer thousands of dollars in the end.

Lets face it, many of use are not going to be able to crawl through the ventilation system to see what type of shape it is in. An inspection camera can though. Vents can be long, which means an inspection camera extension may be something you will benefit from. These easily connect and disconnect from other inspection cameras making seeing deeper or farther quite easy.

Replacing Your Guitar’s Tone Pot

A common issue electric guitarists face is a tone potentiometer (hereafter tone pot) that, when turned, makes scratching and hissing noisesl. You should first try to clean a problematic tone pot with contact cleaner and, if that doesn’t fix the problem, chances are you have a bad tone pot that needs to be replaced.

Tone pots fine-tune your guitar’s tone by sharpening or deadening the output signal and over time wear, tear, and corrosion can damage the pot’s contacts, causing it to malfunction (i.e. causing scratching or other unwanted noises). On the bright side, replacing your tone pot is quite easy and straightforward, requiring only around fifteen minutes with your soldering iron or soldering station.

Step One

Disconnect your guitar from your amplifier and remove the cable. If your guitar has any active components, remove the batteries. You should never work on your electric guitar when the instrument is powered on because it can damage or ruin the guitar’s components. Remove the screws holding on the guitar’s back plate and then remove the plate.

Step Two

Remove the tone pot’s knob. Loosen the tone pot’s retaining nut with an adjustable wrench and unscrew the nut by hand, removing the nut and lock washer.

Step Three

Remove the tone pot from the guitar. Use a small piece of masking tape to protect each wire leading from the pot. It’s a good idea to write where each wire is soldered to the tone pot on these pieces of tape.

Step Four

Use wire cutters to cut the wire as close as possible to the old tone pot’s pins and remove the pot. Strip insulation from the end of each wire, twist the wire ends, and wrap them around the new tone pot’s pins using the notes you wrote on the masking tape in the previous step.

Step Five

Use your soldering iron or soldering station to solder the wires to the new tone pot’s pins, making sure to let the solder cool completely. Insert the new pot into your guitar and make sure your pot’s post fits and sits correctly and comes out the front of the guitar at the right angle.

Step Six

Next you’ll place the lock washer and retaining on the tone pot’s post’s threads and tighten the nut by hand. Finish by tightening the nut with the adjustable wrench.

Step Seven

Replace the knob on the tone pot’s post and secure the back plate back on the guitar and test out your new, noise-free tone pot.

A Figurative Battle Royale in Stompbox Prototyping

Let’s discuss perfboard versus PCB versus stripboard (a.k.a. Veroboard) when you’re ready to transfer a stompbox circuit design — which should done on breadboard since it is reusable and easy to modify — to something more permanent to be enclosed in an effects pedal. (If you’ve got the parts to spare it’s a good idea to leave your design on the breadboard for visual reference and in order to take measurements with a digital multimeter if the permanent design requires troubleshooting.)

PCB Versus Perfboard

Nowadays the majority of stompboxes and amplifiers are assembled on printed circuit boards (PCBs), which are a piece of fiberboard or plastic on which all components are connected by internal conductive traces — you simply solder the components into their holes and the connections are good to go. If you’ve ever bought a stompbox kit, chances are it came with a PCB and a bag of parts, which is a quick and easy way to build an effects pedal.

The real benefit of using perfboard in our context is that you’ll develop a greater understanding of how circuits come together and work and you’ll make turning a simple schematic into a working circuit in future designs much, much easier. Perfboard consists of tiny, copper-lined holes in rows and, when designing circuits using perfboard, you’ll manually manually make all the circuit’s connections on the back of the board. Yes, perfboard is slower and more tedious than using a (so to speak) ready-made PCB, but the understanding you’ll gain by doing everything yourself will be invaluable in your subsequent stompbox designs.

Perfboard Versus Stripboard (Veroboard)

Stripboard, another alternative to PCB,  is similar to your average breadboard in that all the holes in a row are already connected. Designing a stompbox circuit with stripboard is also a great way to gain knowledge regarding the way circuits work during design. However, perfboard is more desirable than stripboard for novice stompbox builders because it’s considerably easier to find and a little more demanding and time-consuming, which will lead to a more thorough understanding of stompbox design that will lodge itself in the back of your brain as you build your next effects pedal.

Note that the preferability of perfboard over stripboard or PCB is aimed at novice pedal builders who may not have an established grasp of/experience in circuitry. When it comes to newbie stompbox designers, perfboard is the hands down winner of the figurative battle royale in stompbox prototyping due to the greater understanding of circuit designs it affords.

Stompbox Design with Solderless Breadboards

Let’s say you’ve come up with a novel new circuit for the next Tubescreamer, Ibanez AD-80 delay, etc. that you just know guitarists around the globe will be lining up for one day. You thoughtfully and carefully design your pedal, build it with the finest NOS components from some abandoned Soviet warehouse, meticulously solder your circuit with your high-dollar solder iron or soldering station, and you fire it up for the first time . . . and it doesn’t work, or it doesn’t sound quite how you expected it to.

That’s why solderless breadboards (henceforward called SoBs) are invaluable to stompbox builders: they allow you to quickly and easily design, tweak, and test a circuit without committing to a permanent, finalized design. SoBs come in barebones versions as well as more complex units with built-in power supplies and digital multimeters and mounting brackets and the kitchen sink.

How SoBs Work

Each hole in the SoB’s plastic rail contains a spring-loaded contact that grips the inserted component’s lead while letting you easily remove it. Each column of five holes is internally connected. You can test this by inserting short lengths of 22 or 24 AWG wire into any two holes in a column and measuring between the wires with your digital multimeter in the continuity position (or the lowest resistance scale if your DMM doesn’t have the continuity position).

SoBs have busses, which are a row of horizontally-connected holes that provide a common ground and allow you to distribute power to the necessary points in the circuit. Some SoBs have busses that are connected all the way across, while other are split in the middle — meaning you’ll have to connect the halves for full-length continuity.

If you’re a stompbox builder, do yourself a favor and get yourself an SoB; in addition to being reusable, they’ll really speed up stompbox circuit design, testing, and tweaking before you put time and money and elbow grease into your prototype pedal.