I have done some things. I've signed up for the school's holiday fair so that means getting my stock back in shape. I'm just finishing up with five new necklaces and eight pairs of earrings. I spent (mostly wasted) several hours trying to print my own two-sided business cards. Avery supposedly has made this easy. Avery has succeeded in making me feel like an idiot. The first three batches printed poorly spaced on the cards. Not usable. I tried, unsuccessfully, to use the 'alignment' tool that Avery provides in the print set up. Didn't work well. I ended up printing 60, one-sided cards with no border so that the slight misalignment isn't evident.
I'm back to work on restoring my player piano. It's driving me nuts. It's very temperamental. I'm in the process of testing one 'deck' at a time, isolating problems and attempting to correct them. It seems that I can fix these problems without too much difficulty...until I put it all together again and they reappear. I just don't get it. It's definitely punishing me for some unknown reason!
Here's a picture of the little set up that I have for testing the player mechanism. The box contains a vacuum motor. It has a dimmer switch in line so that I can regulate the vacuum applied to the player action.
This is a photo of one of the decks being tested. I'll scream at it some more tomorrow.This morning I had a church tuning job. Thankfully, it wasn't too far from home as when I arrived to "the door will be unlocked", I discovered it wasn't.
Naturally.
Just to prove to myself (and Avery) that I'm not a complete idiot, I had brought a contact phone number. Made the call and waited 10+ minutes for the key toting person to arrive. I love church tunings. No interruptions and usually some fine visuals. I must remember to bring my camera along next time. I did wonder about the pipe organ and checked it's name. A Stevens & Jewett if memory serves me correctly at the moment. Made in Boston.
Finished off Saturday with some errand running. Sunday is forecast to be rainy and cool so that should make me feel worse!
5 comments:
As a friend of mine would say, "get well suddenly!" I think I'd rather be full-on sick and take to bed for a day or two than deal with that kind of lingering nastiness....
Church organ tunings are fun, too. Nice to work in an empty room, though one has to watch one's language (hard for the organ-tuners I've worked with) when things go wrong!
Player pianos remain a mystery to me. The original designers resorted to some ingenious but frustrating monkey-motion devices to do what modern technology makes easy (if not as interesting).
Sorry to find you "out of sorts" so to speak. If I don't feel well or if I feel angry about something, I find any job that I attempt will end up as a "cock-up" and that will make matters even worse. At times like that I just end up going for a walk.
After all... you can't make a mess of that, can you?......can you?
Thanks, Scribbs and K-D for the well wishes. Maybe I'm on the mend...I slept really well last night. Oh yeah, I took a Benadryl, no wonder, lol.
Scribbs, at least with the old mechanical stuff there is some hope of restoration. 'A's DVD recorder went wacko last night. Now how am I going to fix that? I'll read the manual today without much hope.
K-D, when I read your comment this morning, I thought, wow, a nice walk sounds great. Then I looked out the window to pouring rain. Drat. Tomorrow is supposed to be warm and sunny and I have to work retail the entire day. Anyway, just so you know, I haven't managed to make a mess of a walk...............yet.
Deb -- as you might know, lots of modern electronic components are finding their way into pipe organs, too, usually as replacements for original electro-pneumatic systems.
Frankly, that angers me. In part, because I like to keep original things original, and in part because the old systems, when properly restored and maintained, are reliable and simple to fix if anything goes wrong.
I have seen concerts canceled when computer-controlled components fail completely. Never happens with the old systems!
Oh, there would be a lot of cancellations around here today!
What should be the easy fix, my player, is still giving me grief. I've been working on it most of the morning (off and on) and I've only fixed one non playing note (knock on wood that it stays fixed). I've moved on to two that play all the time (I think it's a bit of crud on the secondary valve facings). That's just deck one. Deck two still to go.
Then there's 'A's VHS/DVD recorder/player. Per the norm, the user manual is useless. Still getting restore codes but no functions. I give up. I have promised to check out Panasonic's web site to see if Help (yes with a capital H) is available.
Bleck!
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