I spent most of yesterday trying to fix a problem with the tremolo arm on my BMG Special Guitar, which uses an excellent 'Wilkinson Knife Edge Tremolo'. It has no thread which is great, this is a key feature of the guitar, but it tends to pull out when playing. The website advises tightening a tiny screw to grip the arm (it is loose and spins around if you simply insert it). This works, but over time the arm still rides its way up and slowly out of the hole during normal play.
My solution was to try to work out where it is gripped and what grips it. This is surprisingly difficult. I made a wooden stick of exactly the right dimensions, hoping that a bush or screw inside the hole would mark it; it didn't. I drew whiteboard marker on the metal bar itself, hoping that this would be wiped off at the point where the screw or bush touches, but the pen was generally all wiped off just by inserting it into the hole. Now, I think I could use Polymorph. Being a tough, yet soft, plastic, it could be impressed like a key into putty. It's a bit late now for that unless I remove it all again, which I don't feel like doing.
Anyway, I took a guess and used a pipe cutter to cut a recessed ring around the arm. This is about 1mm wide and about 1mm deep (if that). I did this at about 11.5mm down from the top, which made it level with the screw, but the arm still seemed to ride up, so I cut a few more bands, three more covering a 5mm zone, going down a little. It messed up the nice look of my gold arm (of course, the messed part is internal, and I wondered if I'd merely ruined the bar and possibly damaged the screw or internal bush too - but it does now seem that the arm is held firmly (when the screw it tightened) and it doesn't come out, so time will tell if this works.
It's really a design flaw. The bar needs a recess or notch cut into it for this very purpose. It's an oddly shaped arm, it seems further out to the side than a Stratocaster arm, making playing individual notes with vibrato (what I think of as 'Shadows style') quite difficult as you have to basically pick in the fret-board area. Of course, you can buy new arms.
This still episode took all of yesterday. Today I'm illustrating a new poetry book for Deborah. I am so very out of practice with visual art, this is my first this year.
I'm unhappy with almost everything I'm making at the moment and must push all the harder to meet a good standard. Beethoven talked about battling fate and I strongly resonate with his words. Most of what I do now is only for my own sake, yet not what I want to do, I constantly must push myself to do things I don't want to or don't enjoy, to try to do my best. Everything I've done before feels shoddy and bad (even the tremolo arm is an example) and I want to clear a new page and do everything perfectly and brilliantly. This is a target which I must try to attain.
