rwillett

I do like the look of the Thunderbird pickup. Must resist....

Thansk for this. Will look at it, not so sure about the Vinyl Wrap. I originally thought the JPEG colour lookup table had exploded

Yours looks fantastic TBH. Quite jealous. I have the GSMR20, you think your body finish is bad, mine looks like its been used as a shovel (and might have been). However it plays well and I like it. What mods do people do on these Ibanez's? Thanks Rb

Lewis, Thanks for this. Replied back to you. Rob

or even postage, bloody lack of spell checker.

Lewis, I can't promise a good home, but definitely a bad home. These will help with the 3d printed bass I'm making. Happy to pay poatages Rob

Books turned up safe and well. No problems at all. Thanks Rob

There is a back cover on it, so perhaps the pickups are hidden. However I can't see any output socket either. Still an interesting guitar. Rob

No I can't see any pickups, I assumed they were black on a black background or underneath. If it's aluminium with real carbon fibre next to it, I hope he's isolated the layers, galvanic corrosion is real. The alumnium spacers butt onto CF, though they could be painted over on the ends. https://compositeenvisions.com/document/galvanic-corrosion-carbon-fiber-and-aluminum/ I found this out when checking out using CF for my bass guitar, CF is great but is not a miracle material that can replace everything. F1 commentators speak of it in hushed tones, its very light but has the same strength as aluminioum for it's size. Rob

That looks great, seen the style before. You can get away with Carbon Fibre here for the backbone and its not a problem at all as string tension is low compared to a bass. The engineering looks really good as well. I think thats a decent price for whats gone into it. Rob

Can you explain more for the unitiated, not doubting you, but intesested to learn for myself from the wise ones. The pictures look like they are taken with a potato and developed using potato juice. Difficult to image it being so difficult to get a decent picture in this day and age, but they managed it. Wonder why? Thanks Rob

Thanks The quality is a lot better, thats down to the Prusa Mk4. I can print at 0.1mm as opposed to 0.3 before as it simply took too long to print. This is all down to Input Shaping on the Prusa. Klipper also supports this. As this is now my fourth guitar, I am getting better at it, well I hope I am. There's lots of big lessons, but also small lessons, such as putting a small plastic dowel in at the edges of the guitar. Here you can see three 4mm holes The frame will be glued, but that small 4mm plastic dowel really does help it seat when clamped. The real lesson I learnt is to make all the plastioc dowel holes at 90 degrees so that it clamps easily, this is why there is a little outurn on the right hand edge. I'm sure wood workers know this sort of stuff, but I don't You can also see the pickguard mount top left. I can print it butting out but as there is a slope on the bottom thats greater than 45 degrees, it will support itself. Its a bit quciker to print and reduces weight. I think I've taken out over 600g of printing weight from the last version, which is quite a lot. I have printed some of the pieces at high quality and they are very good, the layer lines are almost gone. I may invest in a concrete slab underneath the printer as that may improve the quality even more. Rob

I've now printed a dummy version of the guitar to check fittings and how it assembles. None of the parts have any strength or are finished properly, but its to check how things fit and what I have missed in the design. The black in the centre will be a single metal plate, this is a plastic version to check different pickups. Also to check that the hole depths are correct, that I actually have holes where they are supposed to be and none where they aren't supposed to be. For instance there are holes missing the in the black plates. Whilst this can be done in Fusion 360, it's a lot easier to print it and visually check. What is clear is that the outer frame fits together well, ignore join lines, these parts are just laid down and not tightened up.

@T-Bay If you know CAD, that's a massive help going forward. The principles are very similar, though the interfaces and local usage changes. Some people like Fusion 360, others OnShape, There are lots of really, really free ones and most have free or cheap options. Fusion 360 offers a free option and doesn't seem to have that many limitations beyond only 10 files available for edit at a time. The key thing is to work out your workflow and stick to it. My workflow is: 1. Design in Fusion 360. 2. Export from Fusion 360 to PrusaSlicer, this is my slicing tool of choice as its very good and links directly to Octoprint. Another option for a Slicer is Cura, these are two common slicers and are as good (or bad) as most others. Slicers need careful use as slicing is more an an art as you get more complex models. Experience is key for complicated models. 3. I use OctoPrint as my main print server. This is a networked Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 that removes the need to copy files to SD Cards and plug them in to the printer. Octoprint also provides a mass of other useful features as well, but the scope of this is beyond this conversation. 4. Print and learn. basically head back to point 1 and re-define the model. The choice of printer is up to you, but feel free to ask for feedback and comments. I'd be careful about what you choose, all of Sam's points are perfectly valid to think about and consider. Costs nothing to ask Thanks Rob

Only some have phones in their hand. I suppose the ones without are desparately hoping nobody asks a question of them.

I'd buy an Ender 3 Pro or similar. get the latest version as it's cheap and does a good job for the price. They are between £200 and £300 depending on the version and the functionality. Get a magentic mat so you aren't messing around with glass beds for your first printer. Some people will argue that it teaches you about the basics of printing, so does winding your own bass strings, make it easy for yourself. If you can afford a printer with automatic bed levelling, thats the one to go for. Do not be fooled by adverts of bikini clad men and women (I'm not sexist) oozing about these incredible prints. They might not be telling the truth. Also do not be seduced by no name brands. Get a few rolls of the same brand of filament, preferably PLA or PLA+. Ignore PETG, ABS, TPU, CF and anything else. Some of these are difficult to print, some of these are very difficult to print and some of these are toxic to print with. get the same brand so you can learn what temperatures work. 3d printing is very temperature sensitive. My printign values in my house on my Prusa are going to be different to yours on a different printer and bed. Get the same brand as you have a fighting chance of doing the same print twice. Ask questions, ask lots of questions in this thread. I think this is the main thread for this sort of thing on Basschat unless I'm told otherwise. When you think you have asked far too many questions, keep asking. You can make a lot of simple mistakes doing all this, I know as I made most of all of them. I may have even invented some new mistakes all on my own. I'm good like that. Start small and learn. Learn how to bed level, learn about temperatures for PLA and PLA+, learn the workglow of going from a model to something printed. You will need a printer, a slice (new term, this takes a model and slices it into layers for your printer to print. Your printer is pretty dumb, until recently your microwave could probably outthink it. You dumb phone certainly could and your smartphone is at Einstein level. The slice takes a complex 3d model and converts this into information that your coffee machine can understand. (and thats more intelligent than your printer). Your slicer has to communicate with your printer so use an SD card that you know works. If you are lucky your new printer may have an Ethernet port or WiFi port. This makes life a little easier. Once you have a sliced model, you load it into your printer, tell it to print (you have read the instruction manual that appears to be written in something that looks and resembles English but isn't quite). Get another good book, something big and heavy and wait. And wait, and wait and wait. 3d printing is not for the impatient. Models take a long time to print, big models take the cube of a small model to print. 8-10 hours, a mere blink of an eye, 20-30 hours, thats not bad, 50-70 hours. Thats serious printing. Start small and stay small is my advice. Only go big when you need to. Ask questions, did I say that before? Ask and ask and ask and watch videos. 90% of the videos on 3d printing are self congratulatory middle aged bearded bankers (spelling mistake) showing you their latest Ironman mask. These are often recorded in a dark basement where they still live with their parents. These are badly filmed, unedited, an awful lot of bad facial hair, bad dress sense with bad 2000's black t-shirts advertising bands no one has ever heard of in Seattle, Wisconsin or Immingham. These are a waste of your life, 20 mins of watching somebody attempt to speak a cohrent sentence with 7 consecutive umms or ahh's, severe camera shake, that could be condensed to 45 seconds is 20 mins you will never get back. Choose your videos carefully, if they have less than 500 followers, go elsewhere. Learn to use a design package. There are loads of free ones. Good ones take time to learn. I am still learning Fusion 360 after nearly four years. In my defence this is not my primary job. Ask questions and put the time in. You do not need to be a programmer or devops to learn Fusion460 or OnShape or FreeCad or SCAD or whatever, you need to learn to think the way they think and sometimes thats hard. Keep trying, it will take time but you'll get there. Ask questions (I might have mentioned that) and keep trying things out. never stop learning, I haven't. Thanks Rob

I think for the cost of an accelerometer (£9 or so and a decent touch screen £40+) I can test all of this out and see how it works. I can actually do it for £250 but happy to try Klipper out and revert if needed. Rib

The taper of the body towards the end significantly reduces the body withd from 38mm down to around 25mm, but its easy to change (I think)

Also been testing out how strong PLA glues are. I have loads and loads and loads of test pieces so I thought I'd see how strong my preferred glue of choice, FloPlast is. Glued two flat bits together at right angles and put a lot of effort in to breaking the joint. The joint held and the plastic broke. Thats good, so I feel comfortable with using FloPlast as a glue. Just for information. Rob

After a lot of thinking, I have decided to keep the MK4. The issues I had/have are: 1. Display integration with Octoprint is a joke, but by putting a cheap TFT display and case on the Raspberry Pi, that replaces the MK4 display screen. I just don't look at the MK4 display now. Simple and cheap fix. Need to tidy desk as well 2. Using the TFT means I don't use PrusaLink which is not fit for purpose. 3. I still have problems with the filament sensor not detecting that I have removed the filament when it runs out. What actually happens is that the filament sensor is at the top of the extruder, it detects that the filament has finished, but there is still circa 10cm of filament past the sensor on the way to the hot end. This seems to work very well and I haven't had more than one problem. Once the sensor has detected no more filament, it moves the head to the bottom right corner and will retract the remaining filament, about 10cm, back out of the top of the extruder. This works fine. I then have to put new filament in, the sensor keeps saying that there is still filament in the extruder when its ejected it, I have to put in and pull out a strand of filament 5x to 50x before its acknowledges there is no filament actually there. It thinks there is but there isn't. Tried blowed compressed air and made sod all difference. It does work but it's annoying constantly pushing in the filament and taking it out. 4. The other issue, the BIG one, is that Prisa have not implemented the Gcode command to inform Octoprint that the filament is out. I have an Octoprint plugin that detects this command then emails me so I can having dinner downstairs and get a simple message to change filament. No need to keep my eyes glued to the printer. This is unacceptable from Prusa as it's just a firmware update. I'll be writing words to Josef Prusa on this. The upside to the Mk4 is the speed and quality. Its 2.6x faster than my MK3 due to the Input Shaping. I used the six pieces of my V3 headless as samples and used PrusaSlicer to work out how long each piece would take on a MK3S+, a MK4 (without Input Shaping) and a Mk4 with Input Shaping. So TR, Top Right, would take 794 mins, 766 mins and 295 mins below. The speed of the Mk4 without Input Shaping is pretty much the same as the MK3S+, its about 5-6% faster, which is not worth an upgrade. When you turn on Input Shaping, the difference is dramatic, it's all software (apart from a tiny accelerometer) and suddenly the MK4 is 2.6x faster, so an 88hr print (yep thats how long some things take, and I have done things that take even longer) now takes 33.5 hours. The quality is still excellent as well. A 50 hour timesaving is fantastic. I now time the long ones overnight and can do 2-3 pieces during a (long) day. When it took 88 hours, everything had to be perfect and I had to be around to change the parts, no longer. The other thing that I now know, thanks @SamIAm, is that I have a chance to upgrade my MK3S+ to use Input Shaping and possibly get the same speed up. Still investigating that one, but if so, it's a no brainer. Quality is also high, I am now printing at 0.1mm because it's so fast. Rob

Thanks, thats quite deep at a time when I've just made this bass a lot thinner To be honest it's no big deal, I'd change the taper on the bottom to be significantly shallower as its 32mm at the deepest down to 20mm at the shallowest. Not the worlds biggest problem, and probably less than an hours work. The configurable model works. Anyway, this is all hypothetical, I still need to finish off this bass. 1. Sort out pickguard mounting holes. Not quite as simple as it sounds. The new design makes it difficult but I have some thoughts. The original design was clunky and required you to take strings off or really loosen them to remove it. Bad design. 2. Work out the height of the bridge and top of neck. This is getting it right by about 0.5 or so mm. It makes setting up easier. 3. Work out how to put strap mounting on. The thinner design makes it a little tricky. Again, have thoughts, but need to test (again). 4. Print drill guides and make notes as to what happens where. There's a lot of tapped pickup mounting holes at M2.5 and a lot of untapped M3 holes. Some are holes to allow longer screws to fit. I have to get every single one right 😩 5. Work out what pickups to use and what electrics to use. The current headless has Wilkinson pickups and Amazon's cheapest control panel as it was Weds before the NW Bass bash and I ran out of time. The quality of the pots leave a lot to be desired, though the knobs are nice (though heavy).I love the idea of variety in the sound but is it really going to be much different, I note that @ossyrocks uses a single pickup precision and it seems to work well enough. Mmmm.... I'm printing off the six pieces now, have ordered some more aluminum plate and will spend the next week drilling and tapping

So the Boss pickup is the thin thing right next to the bridge, it has two small screw holes OR double sided tape holding it down. I'll read up on how it works and what it can do. What's the depth of the cutout in the Sei Flamboyant please? Looks awfully crowded in there 😊

@Richard R Now that's an interesting idea. How wide are the hex pickups? Currently the middle channel is 115mm, you can see that below. Which is good as thats what it's designed to be That accommodates just about all the pickups I've seen and checked, I have not looked at the Boss GK-B pickups though as they looked expensive, and TBH, I had no idea about them. Do they mount to the body or to the pickguard? The drill pattern below in the middle is for a Precision bass in the middle (split pickups) and also for a Jazz style setup either side. Its not a problem to add more or different drill patterns depending on size. The holes below are all M2.5 threaded (or they will be once I sit down and do them). Pickguard mounting systems are easier, I have designed a couple of adapters to make body fixing pickups work suspended from the pickguard. There's nothing to stop me making that 115mm channel wider or smaller. I've changed one parameter down to 110mm and get this. There's something not quite right with my parametric design as it should "just work", but I'll find out why its 0.56mm out, but not tonight. Also whats the size of the electronics that need to go in the guitar, if any? The chamber below can be made bigger left to right by changing the Voroni shape. It can't get much bigger top to bottom as it would look odd. The chamber is 33.8mm deep at the side closest to the bridge and 21mm deep at the bottom. These can be relatively easily changed and I suspect it's bigger than any mass production bass. Thanks Rob

Nah, they're all in the same room and might actually be, just possibly, talking to each other. None of the nerds I know talk to other people... Thats just uncool. Rob

I think you need two USB ports to do the job properly, one USB looks like it goes to the accelerometer, this apears to be mounted on the extruder head, no idea how, and the other USB to the newly flashed Klipper board. You *might* be able to drive the newly flashed Klipper board through the UART via the GPIO. One of the videos talks about that, Can you do this? Is a UART exposed via that way? My hardware knowledge here is extremely sketchy. Methinks, you're going to need another Pi.