Category: Machines

The Peel Sessions

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Peeling 30-year-old tape off 40+ feet of boat (both sides and the stern) is an onerous, tedious task, and the temptation is always there to use something to make it go more quickly, even if that something could damage the surface under the tape.

I didn’t go there. Not worth it. But I did manage to make some progress on the red pinstripe above the rub rail. The tip about using a heat gun to soften the glue and return some flexibility to the tape was dead on: Every so often, I’d get a nice long strip of old tape … Read the rest

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Prostar 190!

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Since I knew what they were, I’ve wanted one of these. I learned to ski behind two different family fish-and-ski boats, each with just about enough horsepower to pull a skinny kid out of the water on two skis, and then with some difficulty, one big wooden ski found in the garage of our then-new home in Michigan. At one point, I graduated to a 1974 Jolly Roger with a 125hp Johnson outboard, a low-slung runabout purpose-built for hooning away the day on the lake with beer, friends, and Lynyrd Skynyrd on the 8-track.

The Jolly Roger was capable of … Read the rest

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Zynthian: Fun with Dexed

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Over the weekend, I had a wild hair up my ass to buy some kind of FM synth off of Reverb.com, because I needed a multitimbral sound source to get some use out of the 8 MIDI tracks of my Octatrack, which I powered up after a long work-filled hiatus. I wanted the FM sounds of the early 80’s

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s we had a Yamaha TG33, which was a multitimbral, digital FM synthesizer with a joystick for doing vector-based modulation. Like its cousins of the time, the TX81z, the TG55, SY77 et al, it … Read the rest

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