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"Melts in your ears, not in your mouth!"

I've seen the springs get bent a bit when someone used a hammer not realizing it was an automatic punch (it was a college robotics lab). If you loosened the tension a lot it still kinda worked but I usually just tore it apart and used the hardened steel tip and a hammer as a regular punch whenever I needed it.

Maybe try stretching the spring out a bit if messing with the tension doesn't do it?

Not sure if you've checked it out but I'm loving https://www.bigcartel.com . Super easy and pretty cheap ($10 a month for <=25 products). I'm on the free tier (<=5 products) but it's still pretty fully featured.

Just my two cents on a complex subject

I tried moving the wires around and it helped a tiny bit but the ticking is still there. Would a closed 1/4 in jack do the trick? Would someone mind sending me a link for some shielded cable and explain how to wire it? Thanks

I think the key is to make the wires between your input jack and the board shorter and farther away from the oscillator. Right now, they are a little long and act as an antenna, picking up a lot of noise.

Closed jack won't make much, if any, difference at all.

Smallbear carries shielded wire if rewiring doesn't get rid of the noise. Just wire ground to the outer shield and the input through the center wire.

What about wiring the bypass switch to ground input and output?

Grounding the input while bypassed is good practice for other reasons but I don't think it will affect this issue.

Zoinks!

Looks like a Hakko 936 knock-off, most of which have a super common tip size. You should be able to purchase any tip that fits a Hakko 936 (900M tip) or 888 (T18 tip, a drop in replacement for the 900M). Hakko sells tips on Amazon and there are also a bunch of off-brand tips out there as well. I like the genuine Hakko tips personally (feel like they last longer and heat better than the cheap ones) but there's a whole bunch of options out there.

If you still have issues, try the ADE Series Epoxy Screen Ink. It's made mainly for metal and glass. Used it to screen print a powdercoated box and it worked beautifully. Pain in the ass to work with because it's a two-part ink but I'm pretty sure it will stick to anything.

The higher voltage drop is the emitter. The doping of the base-collector PN junction makes for a slightly lower voltage drop. This is pretty easy to test with most multimeters, that setting that we normally use as a continuity check usually will also measure the voltage drop across a diode.

If you decide you want technical help, they do make hearing aids that mount in your good ear and pass signals to the non-functioning ear.

I actually worked with a guy that used one of these devices. Seemed to work well for him and I honestly didn't notice it for the first couple of months working with him. It was a warehouse job and he was management so I can only assume his ability to localize the source of a noise was pretty good

I'm really curious how localization would work since it's effectively a mono signal.  With unilateral hearing, you still get cues from the pinna, but with both ears getting the same clues, I am not sure how the brain would interpret location.

I'm not saying anything definite here.  More curious than anything.

I did take part in a localization test a number of years ago where you put foam tips in your ears that had tubes in them.  The tubes moved the sound pickup outside the pinna of the ear.  Side to side localization was OK, but front back could get screwed up.

It was probably more of a result of how long he had worked there TBH. It wasn't really ever something he brought up so IDK. I'm not up on how the tech works, just figured I'd throw in an anecdote.

If I had to guess, the brain probably builds a 'reverb map' of its surrounds and when it gets a 'known signal' it can still somewhat pinpoint where the sound came from. In addition, the structure of the ear acts like a filter and has a pretty big effect on deciding front or back with a normal binaural signal (probably why the tube test came out like it did) so I could see the brain adapting that to an extend. I'm mostly talking out my ass from some random wiki-walks over the years but brain plasticity is a really interesting thing.

If you decide you want technical help, they do make hearing aids that mount in your good ear and pass signals to the non-functioning ear.

I actually worked with a guy that used one of these devices. Seemed to work well for him and I honestly didn't notice it for the first couple of months working with him. It was a warehouse job and he was management so I can only assume his ability to localize the source of a noise was pretty good

Not super new gear but the best tuner I've ever used (and currently own) is the Sonic Research ST-300. It's something like 99.98% accurate (+/-.02 cents) and I find the stroboscope is much easier and faster to dial in than the bar style or needle style tuners everyone else tends to use.

I've played with the polytune clip ons above as well and they are SUPER nice for a clip on tuner (accurate to +/- 1 cent), definitely the best clip on out there, but I'll stick with my turbo tuner

who are we to point the clone finger.

Good point

I still say it would make a great little steampunk style mantle piece though. Couldn't imagine trying to actually use the thing. Studio use would be bad enough but live? Fahgettaboudit.

sodium hydroxide (NaOH)

Yep, that's the one I was thinking of that everyone uses...somehow got linked with muriatic in my head.

Definitely a outside thing if you decided to try muriatic though.

I've tried muriatic acid once or twice, had some left over from cleaning a concrete floor. I don't do a lot of etching these days but that stuff will plow through metal at a terrifying rate. Think we've got a few chemists on here that can weigh in better but a lot of the super nice etches I've seen lately tend to be done with muriatic.

One of the things on my bucket list is to visit an anechoic chamber, which are the quietest places that exist on the planet. Supposedly, the silence is enough to literally drive a person mad. Not sure I believe that but interesting anecdote nonetheless.

A problem is that if the room you are in is quiet enough, you will start to hear the noises your body makes. Not just stuff like a gurgling belly or a heartbeat either but stuff like your bones and muscles creaking and your blood flowing.

Still, pretty cool stuff.