rwillett

I may just about get the bridge back together tonight. Might be late though. I'd love to get some strings back on as it looks wrong without them.

I've managed to get first fit done on the parts. This checks that cables sit properly, that potentiometers fit, that the bridge and neck are OK. This check found the earth cable from the bridge to an earth point was awkward so I've resigned the bridge and one of the pillars that hold the pickups so the cable run is different. Thats the hole in the blue support. These are being reprinted now but its a few hours away. The rest seems OK, though the control knobs are a little too close together so I may drop the output down so that the knobs are more widely spaced. Nothing is actually wired up. The pickup looks like a Dickensian street urchin has wiped his snotty fingers on the pickguard so I will look at how to keep that clean and better looking. The back of the guitar is very clean with only the neck screws now. Everything else is hidden away. This was one of thh goals of the redesign. I may end up putting a gloss lacquer on this to make it shine. Might also call it "Hotblack" Sadly thats it for a week or so as I'm away on holiday. I wanted to have it finished but not enough time Rob

Most of my ideas come in the shower, I use the shower screen to draw on as I don't have a whiteboard there (strangely enough) or when walking the dog. I use my morning walks to plan my day, which mostly consists of clearing up other peoples problems. My evening walks tend to have Apple pods in and something loud, such as Motorhead, to help clear my head after spending the day clearing up other peoples problems. The nice thing about walking the dog is that he genuinely has zero interest in my day, only about me throwing a stick for him. Well done on the Greyhound rescue, we've rescued a few cats (who still hate me) and we tried to find a rescue dog, as apparently most of the NW England tried to do as well, and there wasn't a dog to be rescued anywhere within an hours drive. The little village I live in has a lot of dogs, most places including restaurants allow dogs in otherwise they'd struggle with business as everybody has dogs, Border Collies (both working and pets) are common, Labs are everywhere, poodles crossed with anything and everything, we saw a Bernaise/Poodle cross last week and there's a Bernaise / Border Collie cross in Settle (that was a genuine accident). Lovely dog, about the size of a small hippo, with the mind of a collie. It bounces up and down like a collie as well. Terrifying late at night when I first saw it, Rocco, my Border collie/poodle cross ran away and hid Rob

I got the neck and bridge more or less sorted, a slight shim on the neck to push it up and that's pretty close. I didn't spend too much time as I know I had to take it all to pieces to get the the aluminium backbone properly sorted out. So, here's the latest picture of the headless bass, somewhat basic, somewhat smaller. Some of the holes are tapped, some are through, some are countersunk. Nightmare to drill I've marked out the bits to cut and smooth out, I remember Mr Black, my woodwork teacher, telling me to mark off the bits I don't want. I just have been 12 years old. Used a Sharpie for that so its nice and clear. I'm unsure if the finger grinder will 'cut' so might have to drill first, then hacksaw and then use the finger grinder to smooth it all out OR it might just cut through things I have some sacrificial aluminium to check. I'll also use the older pieces of printed frame as a guide for the curves on the backbone. Am also now printing the final pieces at the right resolution with the correct filament. So this is at 0.1mm and is the largest piece by far. So 11 hours solid on the Mk4, which is 2.5x quicker than the Mk3 (26 hours!) Dog needs a walk first though. Rob

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