You can find video after video of people changing guitar strings with all kinds of advice but several pieces of advice stood out.

1. By putting a small bend in the end of the string with the bushing, you can get it to slide past the end of your bridge pin easier.
2. Change one string at a time
3. Leave the right amount of slack in the string to leave between 2 and 4 wraps on the tuner peg when the string is tight.

The last piece of advice was the one that I thought could be a little clearer. Lots of comments like, “you’ll just get used to knowing how much slack to leave” weren’t all that helpful. Frankly, I really doubt I would have “got used to it”, because I change strings so infrequently. Isn’t there something more substantial I can use as a gauge?

Yes, there is. Taylor guitars has a video of technicians installing new strings and that provided the information I needed. Essentially you want the slack to be equal to the length from the string’s tuner peg to the next tuner peg. So for the low and high E strings, you would want the strings to reach the tuner pegs for strings A, and B respectively when pulled taught. Instead of cutting them at this length, I just grabbed the string at the length I wanted and pushed it back through the peg to provide the “right amount of slack”, bent the string up and out of my way and then I started to wind the tuner peg. For the D and G strings you will need to just eyeball the length based on the distance between the previous tuner pegs.

Make sure that your string comes up the inside of the tuner peg and that the windings head towards the head stock and not towards the end of the pin. Trim strings as close to the tuner peg as possible and you are done. Stretching your strings several times will prevent new strings from going out of tune.

From the Osh Kosh web site:

“Like you, we’ve been touched by the plight of the thousands of children who have been affected by the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. We wanted to find a way to empower kids to help children in need by using their creativity.

In Japanese culture, cranes are a powerful symbol of health and well-wishes. In fact, the Japanese people believe that anyone who makes 1,000 origami cranes will have a wish granted. While we can’t grant every wish, we can make a difference.

Through April 25, we’ll be collecting the paper cranes that you and your children create and sending them to our OshKosh stores in Japan to show them the support and caring of their friends in the United States. OshKosh will donate up to 50,000 articles of clothing.

Please help the children of Japan by spreading the word!”

Cranes for Kids

I especially like this method. Your purchase results in a downloaded PDF document that you can keep tucked away on your computer. This allows you to reprint your license should it become wet or unreadable. The purchase process isn’t the smoothest I have seen and I did have problems going through the web site with Firefox 4. It would redirect continually to an empty shopping cart. I had no problems in Internet Explorer.

The new online application can be found on the DNR web site.

Have a great week.

Have a great week.

Have a great week.

One Monday of this week, we listed our favorite deals of the week at our local grocery stores. In that article, we listed multiple detergents and multiple sizes, even though we normally would only list one product that was our favorite deal. So what was the best deal? Let’s look

Tide 150oz  $17.99 , $0.19 / load
Tide 2x  $5.99, $0.19/ load
Tide 100oz  $12.99, $0.20/ load
All  $3.50, $0.11/ load
All Mighty $3.75, $0.12/ load

The normal version of All came out on top. When comparing prices, you really only care about how many loads of laundry you can wash. Brand loyalty aside and assuming no coupons, we can simply divide the price by the number of loads in each bottle of detergent.  Be wary though if you are used to looking at the unit price like any good shopper should. In the case of detergents, the unit price sometimes lists price per ounce and others list the price per load. Here are some examples from three major detergent manufacturers. Happy shopping.

Have a great week.

Once again our favorite deal this week has to be Kroger’s save $5.00 when you buy 10 participating products. Just use tally marks to keep track of your items or just grab 10 Easy Mac cups for $0.50 a piece!

Have a great week.