rwillett

Pulled this out of the cardboard box from the last house move. It's a Raritan USB Switchman four port KVM. It's VGA only and I moved to HDMI some time ago. It doesn't have the PSU which is in a box somewhere but I can't find it. The PSU is 5V x 2.5A (which seems a lot). It needs a 5.5mm x 2.5mm tip. It is not a 2.1mm tip. heres the spec sheet https://www.daxten.com/uk/download/SwitchMan USB-eur.pdf It does work and will probably work without the PSU plugged in as it can take power from the signal. It works with 1920x1080 monitors and claims to got up to 2048x1536x85Hz (which AFAIK is a monitor resolution that I have never come across). It supports keyboard switching, e.g. Scroll Lock x 2 and then a port number. I ran it with a few Mac's and PC's for quite a long time and it was very reliable and switched quickly. The keyboard switching will NOT work with a Mac keyboard as Mac keyboards don't have scroll lock keys. You will not get that functionality working on a mac keyboard as I spent a long time talking to the keyboard manufacturers. None of us got it to work. The rest of the normal keys work fine. Multimedia keyboards will work but not the extra keys such as volume up and down etc etc. You can press the front buttons on the unit itself to change devices. Thats too slow for me as it means I take my fingers off the keyboard. It has three dedicated cables, these are all VGA cables with USB moulded in along with 3.5mm audio. The audio switching was rubbish so I wouldn't bother. There should be a fourth cable but thats probably run away to form a love nest with the PSU. I no longer need it, flogging it on ebay means I have to buy a PSU and to be honest I can't be arsed. However the unit does workk, but I can't test it as all my stuff is HDMI. Free to a good (or a bad) home. Packaging should be £5-£8, make an appropriate donation to North West Air Ambulance and I'll pay the postage to a UK address or if you happen to be passing Clapham in North Yorkshire, pick it up for free. Thanks Rob

Brought for a project. no longer needed. A medium blue on one side and grey on the other. Has hooks to hang it (coz shooting is too good for it). No stains, no rips, will need a good iron. Free to a good home, just cover the postage, circa £5 I suspect.

Now gone.

Well, funny you should mention these.... I do have a box of them. The issue is that they are twice the size of the choc blocks and space is a little tight. Thats why I used the blocks. I do like them though, but not sure yet if I should use them. The screwfix ones may be smaller though

The monster lives.... I've jury rigged pickup mounts for the neck and bridge and wired in some choc blocks and a nice Fender Jazz set of controls to see if the pickups work, do they work suspended and how they sound in this position. I could change the position but the pole spacing seems to indicate that this is where they need to go Blow me down with a feather but it actually sounds quite good. Nothing is held permanently in place, so I couldn't even pick the body up as the wiring would have fallen apart. It also looks crap in the photos but it doesn't look that bad in real life. I now know it works and it doesn;t sound bad. No copper lining so some hum, but not a great deal. I also couldn't remember which one of the wires went in which direction, so the pickups might be out of sync (well it worked for Peter Green). The aim here was to check: 1. The pickup cases held the pickups OK. - Seems OK 2. Suspending the pickups from the pick guard works. - No issues that I can see or hear. 3. The wiring works. - It works but no idea if it is in sync or out of sync. 4. The earthing strap to the bridge works - OK 5. I have a control panel that works - Seems OK. 6. Position of the pickups is right. - Given the pole positions, can't see any option to be honest. Now I now know it works (phew), I can focus on getting it finished for the NW and Scottish bass bash on May 18th. Next steps. 1. Reprint the bridge adapter base plate as the last one pulled a nut out, so only seven nuts are holding it on. 2. Reprint the neck module base plate as it has stuff in thats not needed and might vibrate. 3. Make a proper pickguard as opposed to the stuff above. 4. Design the control panel to hold the controls. I'll probably drop the chrome plate as it's a little too big for the space. I might leave the choc blocks as they make assembly a whole lot easier. Thanks Rob

Got his priorities right....

I have been trying to work out how to handle the pickups. I've managed to design a test pickup holder that hangs the pickups from the pickguard as opposed to screwing the pickup to the body. I'm still not sure the best way to go. The issue with the pickups are the height and the restricted space to work in. I did have 19mm from the floor to the top of the body, which isn't a lot as a bass pickup is about 20mm high. There needs to be a gap to the string of around 5.5mm (according to my Fender Jazz). The red ellipse is showing where the new pickup case I designed is separating due to spring tension. You solve one problem and then another pops up. [Now solved] The slots on the top allow me to play with the position. The three screws adjust the height ands angle. I'm going to reduce the top of the pickup case as I think I can save 0.5mm, yep its that tight This is the bottom of the pickup. It has to be a reasonable depth as the springs work against it.

My mum, sister, niece and nephew live Chesterfield. Also friends live Dronfield I'm sure I can prevail on one of them. I live North Yorkshire so that's a no go. Oddly enough, one of our friends has a significant other in Devom but he lives Chesterfield. Perhaps the stars might align. Rob

That's indicative that the market does have price sensitivity. Supply is limited, demand is supposedly high but that demand isn't enough to overcome prices. If the guitars were 10% of their price, would he have any left? That's not a comment either good or bad about Andys prices, more an economic argument

13 orders is not statistically significant for this. Given as other people have stated, prices will vary widely based on perceived rarity, condition,phases.of the moon or anything else.

This project isn't dead, just taking a little nap whilst 1. The sodding V1 bass gets finished 2. I play with an Ardunio R4

T'other has forced me to promise not to buy any more guitars. So I'm building them, she never stated anything about making my own, I should have been a lawyer I'll look at it but I really, really shouldn't.

I have the money, wish I had the skill 😩

Thanks for this, I've designed a casing with 38mm ear lugs and printed it off. Looks fine but will need some sanding down and spraying with glossy paint to match the glossy plastic cover of the others OR I could just buy one of eBay Lets see how mine goes first as I already have it printed. yet another thing I didn;t know was sold on ebay. Rob

Thats kinda what I'm doing. I'm working on 40mm x 23.5mm for the ear lugs at the bridge and 38mm x 23.5mm at the neck. Just revising the Fusion 360 so it fits OK. I've manged to break something in the Fusion 360 model so need to fix it <sigh> Rob

Thats just how I have it. I also use Mightier Amp app rather than the Mighty App as its better (or I think it is). Rob

I'm just working from what dimensions I can find on the Internet. The more I read, the more vague it becomes and the assumption that there are "standard measurements" seems to wrong. Fender seems to have changed things as they wanted and whilst many pickups have similarish ears, things like radii of corners, length, width and height are down to people's interpretation I'm going with 40mm x 23.5mm ear spacing for the bridge pickup and 38mm x 23.5mm spacing for the neck pickup.

Thanks for the reply. I'm just googling for dimensions and building a spreadsheet of what I've found. The length and width aren't a problem as I'm not roiting into wood, but fixing onto a slab, so what I'm after are the "ears" spacing. So far I have the stuff below (this is all ears spacing) which is actually coalessing around 1.5" <spit> neck and 1.56" bridge for the ears spacing and betweem 22.5mm and 23.5mm apart (each side of the pickup). One mm is quite a lot when I print to an accuracy of 0.2mm with no issues. I'm going to keep looking and see if I can find any common ground on this. Its really frustrating that most ›manufacturers don't produce decent information on the ear spacing. Seymour Duncan does produce proper design docs to be fair. I'll keep at it Thanks Rob

I'm reaching out to the community here for some help on what I think should be an easy answer and I'm struggling to find it. I'm 3d printing a bass guitar (build documented here) I'm wanting to put mounting holes in the base of the guitar for mounting pickups. Theer are other types of mounting systems already in play on the printed guitar, but I want to have mounting holes for putting in Fender Jazz pickups, specifically the in line pickups, not the split ones as they require a very wide gap which I can't put into the guitar (easily). So I thought that the Fender jazz pickups would be as standard as anything and that all the people who make jazz pickups would adhere to the standard, e.g. holes are a certain width apart and a certain size, so that it's easy to replace one pickup with another. However searching for "fender jazz pickup dimensions" and checking Images show an range of different dimensions for what I thought would be standard. I know that the bridge and the neck pickups are different lengths as the strings widen as they get to the bridge but there's a plethora of widths and lengthes. The one dimension I couldn't find was a fender website with the dimensions on. Specifically what I'm after are the four holes that mount the pickup to the body. Not that interested in the width of the pickup itself, its the body mounting holes. Any pointers to what would be "standard" or "official" dimensions greatfully received. Thanks Rob

I've been tweaking various bits to try and make sure it's tunable and that I don't fix into the design, things that are wrong. I've printed a few neck pockets, adjusted the height slightly so that when I follow the tuning guide that @SamIAm posted three pages earlier. The bass plays well in the lower frets but I still feel the strings are too high when I get to the dusty end of the neck. However I discovered that small changes in the truss rod do work, so I'm a lot happier. I feel that I might be getting to the stage where I'm tweaking for tweaking sake and not actually progressing the build. I have all the bits printed now and am focussing on the pickups and mounting them. I spent a few days messing around with body mounting the pickups but the height limitations of the pickup area means this is hard. I'm playing with a few mm here and there. This is due to three simple measurements, the aluminium backbone 15mm, the printed central spine, 10mm, and the maximum depth of the body 44mm. This gives me a depth 19mm, plus the height from the top of the body to the strings, in which to mount a pickup. Its hard work to design a pickup that connects to the body securely but also has enough movement to lower and raise as needed. So I'm now going back to mounting it on the pickguard and will (possibly) use some lightweight foam to dampen it. I may well steal the design from my six string to do all of this This means I'm now into getting the control panel fitted using a Squier set of pots and pickups just to get things going. I have other ideas for the control panel, but I want to get it going first before the mad ideas come into play. So things to do now: 1. Design a functional pickguard for the body. 2. Design a functional pickguard for the control panel. This means I'm going to have to glue things together <shock horror>. 3. Put the low tension strings on to replace the tug boat strings. Thanks Rob

I have told you that you need to buy it (whatever 'it' is), is that enough justification? Or you can try: 1. It's cheaper on the electricity bill. 2. It's helping you hit your net zero target and you are actually helping the polar bears. 3. The firmware is end of life and is no longer supported leaving you open to cyber attack. 4. The current company has gone out of business and so the product is no longer supported. 5. The EU has stated there are radiation issues and so it's safer to change it. 6. It's reached the end of the depreciation business cycle and so is no longer cost effective to keep, so changing it actually saves you money. 7. The transformer has a certain live span, it's no longer made and it's cheaper to replace the whole unit rather than just get a new transformer. I have used all of these at one time or another. As I run my own business, point 6 is regularly used Hope this helps Rob

Keeping you away from my kit, though I have quite a few people I'd like you to meet....

I brought this for my daughter for her GCSE maths as my venerable HP-41 LED RPN calculator was deemed too complicated for her. The HP41 took a man to the moon... Anyway I brought this one from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Multi-Function-Scientific-Calculator-Stationary-Calculations-Black/dp/B0BG5VKDG3?th=1 but it had two keys upside down. Amazon told me to keep it and gave me my money back, thats how good it is Just taken it apart and put the keys the right way up and somehow it still works. My daughter now has a pink calculator and so this is no longer needed. As I collect old HP calculators, HP11, HP12, HP15, HP16C (now thats a proper programmers calculator) HP41s and so on and so on, I'm embarrassed to have this near my HP's in case they stop working in shock. Anybody wants it, it's free, it works well, it seems to do loads of stuff but it's not RPN, doesn't have HP on the front and has an two line LCD display. I'll even post it for free. Rob

For a brand new synth to be knackered from the factory is rubbish. Definite QC issues. I would suspect its been outsourced to China, built on a standard production line along with lots of other synths from different manufacturers, flashed with the Argon ROM, put a manufacturer specific case around it and boxed up. There's an awful lot of generic stuff and badge engineering that goes on. I'd try once more and then give up, three's a charm and all that (no idea what that really means TBH). Rob

"If it wasn't for bad luck, you'd have no luck at all..." You appear to have a super power, attracting bad luck. Hopefully next one is better, very poor from the vendor here. I won't say "good luck" as it appears to be pointless Rob