rwillett

How much is it up for?

I did think about some mechansim to easily move it around, but came to the conclusion that since nobody else apepared to have done this other than Westone, I wasn't aware of the Gibson Grabber (until now). Just had a look at one here https://badlandsguitars.co.uk/products/gibson-grabber-bass-1975-all-original and can see what you mean. I'm not sure how to make that work for a quick release mechanism. You'd have to have a lever somewhere near the strings and that would interfere with playing, though probably not with my playing. Variously described as "crap" and "like a chimpanzee with mallets" by my kids, or that old one "Well you certainly play with enthusiasm" from my other half. A better idea (or a madder idea, take your pick), would be a simple NEMA stepper motor and two threaded rods that replace the CF rods. The stepper motor could easily move a pickup backwards and forwards. If you had two stepper motors, one could drive one rod and one pickup, and the other stepper motor the other pickup, Technically relatively simple, though you'd probably need: 1. A decent power source to drive the motors, Batteries rather than mains. 2. Somewhere to actually site the motors in the body of the guitar. There's only two places they can go, the bridge or next to the neck. 3. Electrical noise might be an issue. 4. Some means of controlling it, Bluetooth would be obvious answer. 5, Might need an opposing smooth rod for stability. Basically no different to a 3d printer Z axis mechansim. Rob

@JohnH89 You are my hero and role model. I was hoping this world wide IT outage would have killed the systems I work on, but no such luck. As I run my own business, if I don;t work, I don't get paid I have had a couple of meetings cancelled so am having a quick go at this setup. Anyway, I've put the bass back together. I've put a 2mm level shim under the neck and under the bridge. The pickups were close to the strings in their lowest position so, I had no ability to change the height, apart from making them even closer. Now I have a little bit of adjustment by rasing the bridge and neck by the same amount. Currently the strings are 5.5mm above the pickups. I've tuned it as best I can to get some tension on the neck, but since the strings are lying across the frets at the moment, this is a little tricky There is 1mm at the twelfth fret and enormous amounrs of fret buzz. I will also now look through our PM's to see what you suggested last time. Thanks Rob

@JohnH89 Thanks very much for the offer of help, I'll have a look through the PM's we had. We have so many channels of communications now that I simply lost track of who told me what. The bass is back in pieces as I'm just putting some stuff back on. I'll look through our PM's and see what we said. I will be in touch, but have to do real and paid work today Thanks Rob

Strung up the guitar and as expected, the pickups are far too close to the strings. So am printing out shims to raise the neck and raise the bridge. These shims simply start to get the neck, bridge and pickups in the right place. The issue I have with all of the bass setup videos are that they assume you have a bass that has the correct parts on and you are looking to do the final setup. My setup is a lot more fundamental at the moment. I'll check my Fender Jazz and get the neck, pickup and bridge height the same as that to give me a fighting chance. I recall somebody offered some advice on this very first configure but I can't find it. Any advice welcomed Rob

I've read it once I read it twice, then I read it backwards, forwards again, I looked at with glasses and then took them off and squinted, but I am still no wiser apart from the bit about "balancing a marble on the top of a ball" I suspect this is what people may think about me when I talk about network designs and protocols I believe this is all very knowledgable and learned... My electric theory stops at 5V, a tiny amount of current, and a leading or trailing edge squarish wave for serial comms. Anything beyond that is black magic. I will follow this thread on the off chance a simple crumb of information will fall off the table that I understand... Rob

Here's a close up photo of the rails, the pickups and the sledge they sit on. I ended up printing out some new covers for the Wilkinson pickups as they were slightly the wrong size. This is all printed at 0.2mm layers and as fast as possible so the quality is rubbish. This just checks that it all fits and works. There's some bending in the photo as its taken very close up and I can't be bothered to straighten it out in Affinity Photo. The rails nicely act as a cable guide as well, that wasn't planned at all The square holes on the left side are for the pickguard. I print the nut for the hole separately and just glue it in. Saves me waiting for the printer to pause so I can insert a nut. This alone was a good enough reason to redesign the whole guitar, no getting up at 03:00 to put embedded nuts in anymore. Also I've solved the problem with the Prusa Mk4 out of filament not triggering an email response in Octoprint, I would loved to have said I developed all the Python for doing this, but that would be a complete lie as I did nothing whatsoever, as I do not know Python, but sponsored a developer. It wasn't particularly expensive but he had to get deep into the system with Ginna (the Octoprint developer) to get it working. If anybody does any 3D printing, Octoprint is a must have, 3d printing without Octoprint is like Morecombe without Wise, or cheese without port or anything else that floats your boat. I sponsor Octoprint anyway, but its great to know when the going gets tough, Ginna will help. This plugin is only needed for Prusa's running the Buddy firmware, so Pruas MK3.9's, Mini MK4's and XL's. It's still beta but works fine and can be found at https://github.com/jneilliii/OctoPrint-PrusaFilamentRunoutMonitor Need to take dog for walk and then open a bottle of white and start seeing it the strings line up on the bridge and the neck and how high they are above the pickups. Rob

Somebody else posting wrongly in this forum. Rob

Have we reached Godwins law yet?

^ This

I had to think about that for a while .....

@Hellzero This is the design for the pickups. I don't model the screws and springs that hold the yellow pickup plate to the green support. The blue posts attach to the aluminium backbone plate, the grey rods are the carbon fibre, the green supports slide left and right along the rods. It looks very Lego*(ish) *Other block building systems are available

Ooohh... I like ideas I've got a load of real and paid work on today. For some reason , no idea why, I make absolutely no money from doing these guitars, so I need to put the interesting and fun stuff off and do (looking at my list) 1. Sort out paperwork for onboarding two contractors. 2. Write reports, 3. Attend numerous MS Teams calls. I like these as 95% of the time, I'm just listening, so I can do an awful lot of work in the background and keep one ear alert to what's going on and if anybody mentions my name. 4. Chase people up to do the work I asked them to do a few days ago, listen to the excuses and ask them again 5. Repeat 2-4 Rob

You've posted in the wrong forum again 😊

@Hellzero Thats exactly what this is now. There's a plate under the pickup with glued nuts in. Those nuts line up to the pickup holes, so the neck pickup is 38mmx24mm and the bridge pickup is 40mmx24mm for hole spacing. The grey sides on each of the pickup slide along the CF rails, so it be easily adjusted. They are locked by the cross headed screw. The hexagon screw head adjusts the pickup up and down. The heads are different to stop me unscrewing the wrong one. Learnt that lesson. Technically the nuts are taped in at the moment as they are M2.5 half height nuts and they're not cheap. Once I have it right, I'll epoxy the nuts in (carefully). Just found out Gorilla super glue stains the PLA, so will experiment with epoxy. I'll post more pictures later. The downside to this flexibility is how to make a pickguard that is as flexible. As I change the pickups position, how do I make the pickguard pickup holes adapt? I can easily print a new pickguard each time, circa 2.5 hours but that's a brute force approach. Still thinkkng about split precision type pickups. I may have a solution but will experiment over the next few days. Rob

Thank John I really, really wanted the finish to be as good as I can make it. I also wanted to rethink the whole design and to simplify that as well. This meant going back to the very beginning and questioning every decision I'd previously made. This is why progress has been visually slow. It turns out that most of my decisions on earlier versions were, perhaps, sub-optimal 😊. Very subtle changes in the design often made big improvements. The longest amount of time was spent getting the side profile right. The is the profile that you look at from the rear of the guitar to the front. I wanted it far more sinous, more Strat than Telecaster. However the rounding of the side profile generated other problems, such as supports during printing, how to join it together, too much rounding meant that filleting (different type of rounding on edges) didn't work. That neccesitated going back to the very, very first sketch and checking dozens of tangent curves. I have now got the finish I was after without relying too much on printed supports. There are some subtle issues with 3d printing, corners that are tight, arcs and nozzle diameter that eluded me for weeks. I finally worked them out but did hundreds of prints to resolve it. Octoprint now congratulates you on your hundredth print which was nice. That's in less than three weeks. Simple changes at the start of the design had massive changes downstream. I must have gone through the time line in Fusion 360 many dozens of times step by step to work out what I meant to do. I really must go on a Fusion 360 course to learn how to use it properly. Anyway, I'll stop whinging, tomorrow night is where I plan to check the neck, strings, pickups and bridge to check it's all right. I suspect the neck and bridge are 1-2mm too low and will need to be heightened to allow enough adjustment on the pickups. You kindly helped me before, I may ask again 😊 Rob

This is the first version of the initial fit for the guitar. These are all the holes needed to make it all fit together. In the end I had to make four (count 'em, four) drill guides to do all the drilling and printing. Some were 2.04 holes that were tapped to 2.5mm, some were 2.5mm which were tapped for 3mm holes, some were countersunk, some weren't, though they needed deburring. I eventually got down to 45 holes, some of which needed 3-4 actions on them. This is without the pickup mounting holes if the rail system is not used. Thats another 20-24 holes to give some flexibility. Mmm... I might not do that This also has design features that went away, such as side mounting holes for the body pickguard, there is now a hole for the wiring as opposed to a slot for it to go through, this tidies up the top of the guitar. These got in the way of the carbon fibre pickup rails. The control panel now has a detachable back to allow access from the back through to the wiring. It also allows an active set of electrics to be fitted so a battery compartment can be used. The current weight is around 3.5Kg with strings, controls (no knobs, they seem to weigh about a kg each), I was targetting 3.9Kg so that's looking good. Lets see if I can get it under 8lbs which is 3.6kg. I suspect active controls will push above that simply due to the 2xPP9 batteries.

I've now worked out how to hang the pickups. Shooting is too good for them I have two carbon fibre rods running in the bay in the middle. The pickups sit in a sledge and can be adjusted along the CF rods as well as up and down, i.e. closer or further away from the strings using screws, so pretty much the same as normal, apart from the fact, the pickups can be located anywhere and most (but not all) pickups can be accommodated. Split pickups can't fit inside the rods. This is a deliberate design decision as it would make the middle section very, very wide. Split pickups can be used as they can screw into the base of the guitar, they just can't be adjusted along the middle of the guitar (yet). Different pickups that aren't 40mmx24mm or 28mmx24mm can be easily accommodated using a different sledge. The sledges work really well and are smooth, so delighted with that. Also the cabling fits very nicely along the side. The neck heal in black and all of the gray stuff outside the pickup rails is a quick print to check fit and will be discarded once I know everything fits together. The aluminium backbone will also be cut down once I know it all works. This is the material for the finished bass. This is Prusament PLA Galaxy Black, it has little speckles in it and looks great. The pictures make it look kindof rough but its really, really nice. The last month of fine tuning the printing has paid off as its very smooth, looks premium (whatever that means), doesn't require much finishing (circa 10-15 mins) per piece. This is the filament under the printers, a week or so ago, this was jammed full, but I've managed to use quite a lot. There's probably another 6-8 rolls in boxes elsewhere.

Pickups can (note the word can) pickup acoustic phenomena, this is an excellent test that somebody did with hard data as opposed to somebody listening and interpreting things. I thought that wax potting was to avoid the microphonic issues with earlier pickups. https://guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/8521/testing-microphonics-potted-paf-clone Now if shouting into the pickups can make them vibrate enough to cause magnetic variations that are then passed on, then that indicates that acoustic phenomena can impact the pickup. Its making the poles (or wiring) vibrate and therefore generating a current. Rob

I also would suggest a few decent amps to ensure that we are getting the very best out of these beasts. Perhaps an old 57 Bassman or Dumble would be good. I think I'm actually the right person to do this comparison as I'm not a very good musician. This means I can't hide any quality issues between the instruments and amps. A good musician would get around the differences whereas I can't. This makes sense to me. Thanks Rob

I wouldn't normally take a 54 Strat but just so we can progress this discussion, I am happy to take it for comparison purposes.

Conversely send your stuff to me to compare. A 59 Strat or 59 Les Paul or 56 Precision most welcome

As I'm in a provocative mood this morning, though to be fair that's my normal mood, I'm happy to lend my 3d printer six string with a plywood backbone, my Fender MIM necked 3d printed Jazz type bass with an aluminium backbone & my soon to be finished V2 headless bass with an aluminium backbone for testing out this theory. The body's of all these six and four strings are all 3d printed. 15mm plywood is simply not strong enough for a bass guitar unless you basically use it for the whole body. It's pretty simple to put whatever pickups you like in them, though I don't many at all. Electrics on the six string are from Home of Tone, the jazz electrics are from Kliogon (top man) and the headless bass are from me and I have to solder them up. Apart from 15mm plywood on the back of the six string, no wood at all. They sound great to me but I'm no expert. The bloke in the shop who helped me set the six string up loved it. He plugged it into a large Marshall stack and beat the hell out of the guitar (in a good way) and smiled a lot. The offer is there. Rob

Wow. That looks like it was soldered by a TIG welder who had no idea how to use TIG welder or how to solder. That can be cleaned up though, with some care and attention, two qualities apparently lacking to date. That assumes they haven't used a club hammer to put the nuts on the other side of the pot. Judging by this, I wouldn't make any assumptions at all.

The F2 was a proper camera. Many of the newspaper photographers used the F2, Canon started eating into that market with the Canon F1. A bloke tried to mug one of the photographers I knew for his F2. The snapper slugged him round the head with the F2 knocked him out and then took pictures for the newspaper and the police. Old school camera and one of the finest cameras ever made. Suspect your 72 has appreciated more as a mint F2 even with the 85mm f1.8 is around £600 now. Mind you that F2 will still be working long after termites and cockroaches have taken over the world.