Humble Beginnings

I was a curious kid back in the day. When I could get my hands on something that I was allowed to take apart, I'd immediately begin disassembly to try to figure out what made it tick. This didn't go unnoticed - when my birthday or a holiday rolled around, I'd quite often be gifted science kits or equipment. I'm not sure what age I was when my uncle gifted me a RadioShack 28-280 "Electronics Learning Lab", but it really seeded an appreciation of electronics in my young mind. In fact, I still have it!

I'd return to that kit occasionally after the initial excitement wore off. I was a bit young to fully understand the theory behind what I was doing, but in the meantime, I remained a curious kid. In middle school, I'd experiment with things like hydrogen generation via electrolysis. But high school is when my electronics passion really picked up. My school offered various electronics classes, and I remember them fondly. It was here that I decided I'd combine my love of music (though I couldn't play an instrument) with electronics and go to university for electronics engineering with the hopes of getting hired at a company like Moog designing synthesizers or maybe a guitar pedal company.

Reality Check

University... didn't go as planned. Calculus kicked my butt, and I could not pass the class in spite of three tries. Facing defeat by calculus, I decided to transfer into tech college for an instrumentation degree. I had some hands-on electronics labs in the courses which was exciting, but the overall degree wasn't quite my speed. I did finish it, but never worked in the field outside of my internship.

Long Lead Electronics Is Born

Some time passed, and I worked and worked as I lived with my parents until I could afford a house. Finally, my own space! After settling in for a few years, I went to work converting the attic space into a small workshop area with a workbench. Upgrades came as I could afford them, but this space needed something - a name! I'm a person that struggles to keep a postive outlook, so I wanted something to remind me to stay postive which fits in nicely with electronics. It took but a moment to think of the long lead of capacitors and LEDs - the positive lead. And so I began drawing up the logo of the newly coined Long Lead Electronics workshop which sits happily in the header of this site. This was at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, around May 2020. Below are some drafts of the logo before I fully solidified the name.