rwillett

At the moment it's 4.2Kg, however I'm not sure I trust the scales, so it's not light. 1.2Kg (or more) is the aluminium backbone. After saying that, it doesn;t feel any heavier than my 97 MIJ Fender Jazz. I am a little surprised as the printed bits are 1.2Kg, never weighed the neck, but there's 2.4Kg+ on the neck and body, there's the bridge, pickups, controls and the tug boat strings. I reckon a carbon fibre backbone would take 0.75Kg off that easily. Rob

Thanks. I'm quite pleased but already thinking of the next version. Too many compromises and not enough thinking in advance for my liking. I've learnt a lot though so that's good.

Yes thanks 😊

Feel free to hijack. If this thread gets people talking, then that's good. Also I'll learn soomething along the way

@JohnH89 Plans now are now to try and work out what the finish on the body needs to be. I have my V1 six string body in the garage, its full of filler, primer, has been attacked by various sanders and tomorrow will be attacked with wet and dry paper to work out how to make the body look good. I still have the V2 body and neck. Even after thinking about what to do for a long time, I still made a load of mistakes that I won't make with the next one. Whether I go headless or not is something I'm thinking about. If I go headless I want the body to look good, so thats a big driver. I have thoughts already.... The bits I want to change for the next guitar mean every single piece has changed. I will also make a glue fitting tool to let me glue bits together safely, quickly. Glue works, but even a 0.1mm alignment issue is noticable. So I may be in touch about your very kind offer. I wouldn't have a clue about making a neck. To me thats the heart of a guitar and its as difficult as heart surgery. IIf I can control it with a computer, I'm good. Power tools and me are not a good combination. 3d printing is easy, trust me, I know All the best Rob

If nothing else works, you can always buy a canoe and have a trip round Brighton pier. For this I'd draw it up in Fusion 360 and really check stuff. I'm happy to help with that bit, but no idea what the ideal measurements should be. One of the things I learnt from the bass was that the pickups, bridge and nut all need to be thought about at the start, rather than what I did, towards the middle I made so many mistakes that I am already thinking about V3 Not sure if the headless comes before or after V3 Rob

Sam, To me the neck is the most important bit. I can change the pickups, I can do a new body, replace the tuners etc etc, but I can't make a neck. I've seen the one with an aluminium truss rod and it was OK as an intellectual exercise, but would Geezer play it? Probably not. Thats why I made the design to handle just about any neck, because I couldn't make a neck. Now your problem, finding a headless five string is tricky. Necks seem to attract a lot of money. I was very lucky with the MIM Jazz neck. I also have a lovely Aria Pro neck as well as a decent Ibanez neck for the next bass projects. One of these, probably the Ibanez will be the headless bass, simply because the shape of the head makes it easier to convert to headless. Mind you I'm probably wrong as normal. I have four eBay searches setup for guitar necks and most of the results are rubbish, but occassionally one pops up thats worth a punt. I am assuming that a wide four string neck can't be repurposed to a five string neck with a new nut? Its going to be headless so the number of tuner holes is immaterial. Rob

The rakish angle was driven by necessity rather than design. I do like them now. The body is using the veroni shapes you suggested. I have done no work on the finish. That's being thought about and tested in the garage on some old bits.

Well after an evening of glue sniffing and the like, I bit the bullet, pulled everything together to see how it worked. Nothing worked for a while until I realised that the metal control plate acts as an earth and as I hadn't used it, plastic wasn't the solution. A quick application of copper tape on the back of the control panel solved that little issue. The pickups actually look good and work well. Not set anything up beyond screwing it together and tuning it. Plugged it into GarageBand and it sounded fine, plugged into a NUX micro headphone amp and sounded fine. Plays OK, zero neck dive. The neck is great, the Hipshot tuners work well and it's a good guitar. Not tried to compare it to my Fender Jazz or Mustang, but good first effort. Will now try and set it up properly. The last photo was coz I left the camera in black and white mode. It is a very black guitar.

Never thought of using it for that. Still working out what I can do with it. My aim was to simply cut out the right shape in the aluminium. It's far too powerful for printed filament and it needs some care and attention. I suspect shaping plywood will be a doddle if I make a six string again.

Oh God. Birthday year and I'm driving back near Pudsey in a few hours.

Still need to think about finishing it. Sanding, spraying and lacquer/epoxy resin comes to mind. Epoxy resin wasn't a great success but I'll try again.

A busy weekend of rugby and finishing things. Pickguard and control panel facia now done. Bottom of guitar glued in place. Pickups are currently slanted as I think they are too wide for the strings to sit in the middle of the pickups. My Fender Jazz pickups aren't perfectly aligned but still better than this. Is this normal? Intending to have this finished middle of the week now. Need to glue the top of the guitar on and then get into setting it up.

Anybody regularly selling on Ebay will be aware of distance selling regs. It all comes down to how much hassle they create. I took a company to court over a Bluetooth speaker, nothing nothing nothing until we walked through the door and they settled. Told the magistrate all done and they moved on.

Distance selling regs invalidates the "No returns" claim. They can say what they like, but they can't ignore the law. even though they try to. Local trading standards won't do anything, but a small claim is easy to make. 90% of people in this position will settle out of court. Now whether somebody would take them to court is another issue, but the small claims court fees are quite low and I would suggest that have a 100% chance of winning their case. I'm running something like 4-0 on small claims. over the last 20 years. Rob

Mr Amazon did one of his regular pilgrages to lay gifts at my feet (more or less). So I printed a drill template to make a stitching cut in the aluminium, then cut through all the holes with my new blades to leave this. This looks like junk and I did wonder if I had cocked it up. So used the blade sander (wonderful tool) for the first time and gently smoothed and smoothed and came up with this. I was amazed how well it came up. I can now start assembling this properly. This is it fixed to the body of the guitar The photos show every blemish, but not a problem. The intention this weekend (apart from a trip to Malton to watch eldest daughter play her first senior womens game) is to get the pockets copper lined, the control panel for the tone and volume printed, to check the height on the strings, and possibly get the pickguard cut and fitted. The last might be a step too far. If this all works, glueing on the body is an evenings work. Progress at last rob

My Prusa does 0.05mm resolution (apparently, I can't measure anything that fine). I suspect a concrete nozzle is probably about 0.05m resolution. rob

Thats the project just after I finish: 1. My bass guitar. Currently the aluminium backbone is the garage awaiting new (non rusty, non blunt) hacksaw blades. I need these to trim the front edges to match the cut outs. Mr Amazon is on the case. 1.1 Already thinking about V2 of above. Lots of lessons learnt and I wounldn't do it the same again. 2. The guitar pickup winder. Currently sitting on the dining table awaiting 1) the bass guitar to finish & 2) writing some HTML to make a web interface to drive the Arduino R4 (not the R3). The R4 has a wifi chip so that might make the interface easier (or it might not). 3. A headless bass. Got all the bits (sort of). Refusing to do anything about it until the first bass is done. 4. Some pickups wound from point 2 for point 3. 5. Working out how to print with steel wool. See its now on my lis! Rob

Looks great, As I look at it though, I'm unhappy with the surface of the pickup cover and will now investigate steel wool and PETG to see if I could make it better Rob

Technically, he's not drop shipping. He makes no mention of VAT and customs duties, so if the guitar turned up at your door, direct from China and the shipping company want their VAT and customs duties paid, that would raise eyebrows (I paraphrase somewhat) and I would refuse the order. Your purchase/contract is with him and not the chinese company and even eBay would (probably) back you up in this situation. The way he has described it makes no mention of paying any other fees, so perhaps he is paying customs and other duties, in which case that could easily come to £40 - £100. My knowledge of how big a pound of flesh HMRC would take is sketchy as I do my best to never speak to them. I even have business insurance for my accountants to handle any and all issues. I am not the vendor and have no relationship with them, but I think we have to be a little careful and not tag everybody with the same brush. Is the guy making money, possibly? is it a lot? Looks doubtful to me, he'd have to sell a lot of them at that price. have a great weekend Rob

Sadly thats the norm. I keep looking at those Chickenbackers and I do fancy one, but until I've played one, I wouldn't touch it with a Chickenbacker neck. AliExpress is a bad place though, I keep getting tempted. I do need the hardware for a new pfsense firewall and am looking for a small one that supports GB throughput. Perhaps I can combine it with a Chickenbacker. Reasonably certain HMRC won't allow that as a business expense

It's called (international) capitalism A large chunk of Amazon and eBay works like this. Not that many companies manufacture their own goods. You can walk down any market these days and see the same stuff each stall have brought from a local warehouse. Same product, same price, different stall. To be fair to the seller (and I don't normally say that), the seller states it is made in China and allow 4-5 weeks for delivery. Normally the person has actually got the goods locally but not in this case. My dad used to buy nuts and bolts by the 10,000, break them down by weight, bag them, and sell them to the local garages. The garages didn't need 10,000 M6 x 30mm bolts each but enough garages in the midlands needed them so its worth his time buying that many. He tied up his capital as he sold them and made his money back over a few months. The only difference now is that companies aren't fronting the money and just using AliExpress, Temu etc and basically drop shipping. Not saying I approve, but can't say the guy is doing anything wrong. Caveat Emptor, buyer beware. Rob

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