Lately I've been getting back into the DIY trigger spirit. Dusting off the toolbench and trying to complete the project I started last year.

The triggers I'm building right now are of the cross-bar variety and one of the frustrating aspects of these is getting the height of the trigger cone just right. I utilize rubber grommets and nylon spacers in my design to reduce vibration and increase isolation between the head and rim sensors. Finding the right size spacers can be a pain and even more than that, can quickly run into money as most hardware stores insist on selling them individually and at a premium.

Well today by happenstance I stumbled on a spool of polyethylene tubing in the plumbing asile and the heavens opened. This stuff when cut to length is vitually indistinguishable from nylon spacers. It handles being compressed like a champ, I can cut it to exactly the length I need and best of all it's damn cheap. If you're using plastic spacers in your designs you should do yourself a favor and pick some up. Why continue buying milk when you can have the cow!

Started work on converting the 13" snare from the Chameleon kit. I don't anticipate running into any major problems with this one, seems pretty cut and dry. I am however looking forward to applying some of the lessons learned from my first attempt, with the 10" tom.

Here are some pics of the snare before I started:

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Throw a bunch of actuators on an acoustic kit and now you don't even need a live drummer to play em... neat.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=19395558

Would sure be a lot of fun to set one of these kits up on stage and then use a zendrum to slave it. Sort of a remote controlled drumset. shweet.

I've finally begun work on the electronic conversion of the kit I purchased a while back. I'm starting with the high tom (10") since it should be the easiest to convert.

Here are some pictures of the procedure.

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One of the more pointlessly time-consuming aspects of setting up an electronic kit is plugging everything into the module. For trigger inputs alone there are 16 cables that you need to plug in for a Roland TD-20. Digging around in a bundle of 16 jacks and plugging them all in can be a major drag, worse still, if you should mix two up and don't have enough time for a sound-check so that you can discover the mix-up, you're gonna be in for an interesting show.

Enter the Kable Keeper!

My loving wife put these together to help me out.

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