Takings things apart and doing things to them

Bob The Monkey

Apologies for the woefully nondescript thread title, but my question's pretty general. I'd like to become handier with crafting physical objects: not necessarily building them from scratch, but knowing how to take them apart and learning how to sand them, paint them, varnish them, so on and so forth. The problem is, I have no idea what I need to learn or where to start learning.

The easiest way to do this is to list the kind of thing I'd like to do:
1) Take apart, repaint and reassemble my speakers, laptop, DS.
2) Dismantle and resolder a guitar: potentially repaint the body.
3) Become a better craftsmen. Potentially this could culminate in building my own effects pedals, guitars, creating custom cabinets for speakers, building a headphone amplifier, etcetera.

Where should I start? What tools will I need? halp me

Cycophant

It seems like most of things you want to do are electronic in nature, so I'd say your first step is learning how to solder properly, followed by learning the basics of electrical wiring and so on. Learning to solder is easy, just buy an iron and some solder, read up on it, and practice until you're decent.

Other than that, you seem to have an interest in basic carpentry as well. That kind of thing is a bit harder, and bit more expensive to "practice" at. Unless you know of a friend or family member with a nice woodshop/etc you can piddle around in, you're probably out of luck. Maybe look for some sort of carpentry night school courses?

blincoln

There are three main categories of work you're going to have to study:
- Woodworking
- Electronics
- I'm not sure what to call this last one. It's the one that involves painting things like laptops as opposed to wood. AFAIK this is generally done professionally with things like automotive paint.

I just got through a couple of "teach yourself electronics" books, so I will go ahead and recommend both of them:
Basic Electronics
Getting Started in Electronics
The former has a lot of theory (which means a fair amount of math in the early chapters, but it is mathless after about halfway through). The second is more focused on real-world implementations, and includes a bunch of example circuits at the end. I would definitely recommend both, because they both have their strengths and shortcomings.
Since you mentioned wanting to work on music-related electronics, I'll also mention this one, which I am going to pick up now that I have the basic foundation:
Electronic Projects for Musicians
Unfortunately it looks like only a handful of the boards for the projects are still available from PAiA, but you can still get some of them and you can always make your own or build them on perfboard or whatever.

Woodworking is something where I'd recommend having someone more experienced show you how to do it, or maybe take a wood shop type class at a community college. The reason is that woodworking power tools can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. The same apparently goes for working with automotive paint.

In general, you're going to need to practice taking things apart (easy) and putting them back together (harder). This will probably involve you breaking a bunch of the things you are working on, so consider going to a thrift store and buying some old electronics (portable stereos, etc) that you can practice on.