When I was a kid I loved to take things apart, like the family car or our Betamax player. These days I don't work with hardware much, so when I needed to modify a pair of tiny portable amplifiers for my performance in Dax Tran-Caffee's mobile street puppet show "The Museum Proper" in May, it was a refreshing experience.

While taking something apart is fun, my childhood reminds me that doing so can render the object useless. So, although the goal was simple, it was made much less scary by my friend Roger Young, who shared his very useful advice and equipment with me. Many thanks, Roger!

The problem I had is that my tiny portable Supro amps, in their factory state, are always turned on when an instrument cable is plugged in. Since I was going to be using them for several consecutive hours, I didn't want to drain the batteries more than necessary, and repeatedly unplugging and plugging in the cables would be cumbersome. The best solution I could come up with in my limited time was to interrupt the power flow with an on/off switch. Then the cables could stay plugged in -- which was handy because I'd be walking around strapped into a cigarette box the whole time -- and power could be saved by using the accessible switches.

Check out the photos below for my rough documentation of the process. Completion was quite satisfying, and reminded me why I loved electronics so much as a kid. If I ever get the time, I'd like to do more with hardware, like build a tone generator.

By the way, The Museum Proper was a freaky awesome show with scary cardboard puppets, and loads of fun to participate in. Here's the official website, where you can find pictures of the puppets and links to some performance footage:

http://www.museumproper.com/