A 3d printed bass guitar

[rwillett]

7 minutes ago, JohnH89 said:

Laminate ? Heres one I did in walnut to match the body . Looking good so far mate . It confuses me just looking at it . I'm fine with wood and metal but the whole computer/CAD thing is for my next life I think 😁

 

Now that is a good idea. Didn't think of that. is that a wood laminate or something else (I have no idea what else it could be). Is it easy to apply? The front of the headstock is fine, its the back that I want to cover up.

 

Just looked at the back and it's very flat and might be easy to do (for some value of the word easy).

 

Let me know what you did to get that lovely finish please.

 

Between the two of us, you're fine with wood and metal, and I'm find with computer/CAD we might make a complete artist

 

Rob

[JohnH89]

9 hours ago, rwillett said:

 

Now that is a good idea. Didn't think of that. is that a wood laminate or something else (I have no idea what else it could be). Is it easy to apply? The front of the headstock is fine, its the back that I want to cover up.

 

Just looked at the back and it's very flat and might be easy to do (for some value of the word easy).

 

Let me know what you did to get that lovely finish please.

 

Between the two of us, you're fine with wood and metal, and I'm find with computer/CAD we might make a complete artist

 

Rob

That is walnut veneer . 0.6mm thick and bought (I think) from ebay . Wrapped it in a towel soaked with hot water to soften it for a minute or so Cut roughly to size and glued up with PVA wood glue . Clamped solidly and left to cure . Trimmed and finished with with hand tools ( scalpel and files ) and finished with black bison wax . The secret is not rushing it and working out how to clamp it solidly . Easier on the back of the headstock as no curves and no truss rod access . Veneer available in all sorts of woods to match your neck . I am guessing maple ?

[rwillett]

@JohnH89

 

That's really helpful, I'll look at doing that. The back of the neck looks a lot easier for a veneer than the front. I can easily clamp it, as I do have a lot of clamps. Didn't know about the towel and hot water trick.

 

The neck is maple (I think), but a heavy weathered finish. I am very unlikely to find a veneer that will closely match, so using a contrasting veneer would be best. I do like your walnut finish. That Black Bison Wax is expensive though

 

I've just finished making the bushings to make the Hipshort Ultralites fit the neck. An easy 3D print even at 100% infill of about 10min each, nice and tight and the plastic won't deform (or at least I hope not, otherwise I'll have to do it in metal). 18.5mm external diameter and 16.75mm internal diameter. You can see two of them below. I've screwed the two Hipshots on to make sure they all fit.

 

 

Now printing the last big piece of the guitar

 

 

Relatively small at 22 hours

 

Rob

Edited February 16 by rwillett

[rwillett]

A quick sanity check to see if everything fits. Just laid this out, no proper assembly at all. It's 430mm from the nut to the 12th fret and 430mm to where the supports are on the bridge. The bridge doesn't have a lot of room but just enough, phew. If I was out by 5-10mm, I'd reprint the top left part and move the neck out by 5-10mm.

 

Something is missing but can't put my finger on it

 

 

 

[Aidan63]

nice job on those bushings; something you can make and sell

 

looking good on the body too

[JohnH89]

Bison wax is expensive but I have it in the workshop . Furniture wax / beeswax or something similar is fine .

I am sure that you could print a laminate in plastic , already shaped and with holes for the machine heads . Or even with the reducing bushes as part of it . Glue , clamp , job done . Even put a logo of your choice on the back of the headstock . Just a thought .

 

Edited February 16 by JohnH89

[rwillett]

10 minutes ago, Aidan63 said:

nice job on those bushings; something you can make and sell

 

looking good on the body too

The bushings took 5 mins to design, and 20-30 mins to print. I'll do them for free for anybody who wants them, in just about any (sensible) size. Its changing three parameters to design them, internal diameter, external diameter and height. They're easy to print as they need no special handling. I realised after fitting them, that they can't deform as there is laterally nowhere for them to deform to as they are such a tight fit. Quicker than metal as well.

 

@JohnH89 I could easily print a backing layer and attach it, but I do like your walnut veneer. Perhaps if you need something printed, we'll do a swap and you can do my headstock

 

Thanks

Rob

[JohnH89]

I'd come up and do it for ya but I'm at the other end of the country mate . I'll have a look and see if I have any of the walnut veneer left . If I have I'll send it up . 😁 . It will be my small contribution to your most excellent project . When I needed bushes for some hipshot ultralites , I used some carbon fibre tubing . I was lucky that I found some with the right ID/OD .

Edited February 16 by JohnH89

[rwillett]

44 minutes ago, JohnH89 said:

I'd come up and do it for ya but I'm at the other end of the country mate . I'll have a look and see if I have any of the walnut veneer left . If I have I'll send it up . 😁 . It will be my small contribution to your most excellent project . When I needed bushes for some hipshot ultralites , I used some carbon fibre tubing . I was lucky that I found some with the right ID/OD .

 

@JohnH89

 

Thanks very much, keep hold of the vaneer for the moment. I'm going to focus on getting it built and working. Fripperies such as veneer backed headstocks are way down the list. It will work and sound fine without the walnet backing or I hope it will.

 

The top middle is being printed and I have a midnight alarm set to add some embedded nuts in to it. Not happy about that, but paid and real work got in the way, delaying my personal and unpaid work.

 

Just finished the design of the bridge adapter. This is specific to each bridge and bolts down to the middle sections below. Thats one of the reasons for the embedded nuts. It is supposed to be a genuine MIJ Fender Jazz Bridge, it looks like a piece of folded crap to me, but I'm assured its real. This will screw into the bridge adapter. The bridge adapter will screw into the body. This was a feature that worked well on my six string guitar as I made a measurement mistake on the six string and had to move the bridge back by 5mm, I just printed off a new adapter and used that instead.

 

 

 

The above bridge screws into here. The eight outer holes are slighly resessed so they don't interfere with the bridge. The seven smaller holes hold the bridge, or at least thats the intention. Lets see if they pull themselves to pieces.

 

You can also see the earthing strap exit hole on the top and the front entrance hole underneath a little cut away,

 

 

 

Edited February 16 by rwillett

[SpondonBassed]

1 hour ago, rwillett said:

it looks like a piece of folded crap to me

 

Hence the term BBoT (Bent Bit of Tin).  Lot's of folk have looked at these and thought they were cheap and nasty, yet they do the job and have been doing so for decades.

[JohnH89]

5 hours ago, rwillett said:

Thanks very much, keep hold of the vaneer for the moment. I'm going to focus on getting it built and working. Fripperies such as veneer backed headstocks are way down the list. It will work and sound fine without the walnet backing or I hope it will.

 

Agreed . I don't have enough to do a whole headstock left anyway . Lets get on with the proof of concept idea first . Crack on mate . I'm waiting with bated breath ....

Here is the guy I bought it from  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/183424553423?var=691735066632

When the time comes ....

Edited February 16 by JohnH89

[rwillett]

Just put the sodding embedded nuts in to the last big piece.

 

It's 00:11, so pretty much on time and when I expected it to be, however I really want to be in bed. Spent the last two hours staying awake trying to debug serial code on my guitar winder, not sure the 0.5L of Chablis helped, but suspect I may now sleep well. I do hate programming serial code, I forgot how much I hated it, everything has to be perfect for two systems to work. Network code is so, so much simpler, write a packet and send it. Oh well, perhaps a good nights sleep will help me.

 

Rob

 

 

[tauzero]

On 01/02/2024 at 09:25, rwillett said:

It will not be headless. I have all the pieces for a headless bass but I am not chopping the head of a decent MIM Fender Jazz.

 

On 01/02/2024 at 09:25, rwillett said:

Neck dive.

 

You know that the best way to prevent neck dive would be to remove unnecessary, ugly wood from the end of the neck, don't you? Especially if that ugly wood would otherwise be used to stick some lumps of metal on to increase its weight.

[tauzero]

On 02/02/2024 at 20:41, rwillett said:

I have all the bits for a headless but let's get the body sorted and using a decent Fender neck and see if it all works then move to headless.

 

Not going to use a Fender nwck for headless..I have some standards, they may be low but at least I have some. 

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/355197353785

 

If you insist on using that ugly jazz headstock, why not just extend the top horn so it's over fret 11 or so?

 

 

[Geek99]

On 16/02/2024 at 15:57, rwillett said:

 

@JohnH89

 

Thanks very much, keep hold of the vaneer for the moment. I'm going to focus on getting it built and working. Fripperies such as veneer backed

 

Fripperies is a much under-used word 

[rwillett]

7 hours ago, tauzero said:

 

 

You know that the best way to prevent neck dive would be to remove unnecessary, ugly wood from the end of the neck, don't you? Especially if that ugly wood would otherwise be used to stick some lumps of metal on to increase its weight.

 

Yep I know the maths. I also have never built a bass before, and to be honest, I don't have a particularly long history of building many guitars. So far I'm up to two completed. I can't imagine Fender and Gibson quaking in their shoes at the moment. 

 

So I'll build this one and learn from it before I go the next one. I have most of the parts for a headless  bass but wanted to build a normal bass first to learn. 

 

Also the length of your suggested top horn worries me as it's thin and long. Not sure I would have much structural integrity there. 

 

I'm still not cutting the head off a Fender neck. If anything I'd sell it first. 

 

 

 

[tauzero]

At least you can evaluate the degree of neck dive before sticking lead into the end of the body.

[rwillett]

I have now found that there is a limit on just how big you can print on a Prusa printer without the edges possibly lifting or warping.

 

Some filaments, PETG is one, are slightly fiddly to print, you need a very consistent temperature across the bed and if it's too big, the edges can lift very slightly from the bed, this may only be 0.3-0.5mm but thats enough to be noticable. I found that some of the very large prints were slightly lifting and warping. The solution to this could be:

1. Put an enclosure around the printer to keep it at a high temperature. This puts the electronics at risk, so you normally move the motherboard and PSU outside the enclosure. This is a lot of work and takes up a lot of space, so is not really an option here.
2. Heat the bed even more. I run that at 90C already so not keen.
3. Use a glue to hold the print down. Possible but the bed needs to be cleaned afterwards.
4. Print micky mouse ears to the corners so that there is more adhesion. I don't have much space left to do that, so not an option, also it leaves marks on the model.
5. Change the cooling fan so it works less. Bit tricky and I've never had much success with that.
6. Reduce the size of the print.

I'm going with the last one as its not that difficult to make the prints smaller (a few mins work) and then weld them together again afterwards. The glues I use actually weld the plastic, so it melts it and then the bond is very, very strong. This does create more join lines but since I'm printing at a higher resolution than before, the quality is significantly better than the last six string. I'm quite pleased with the finish and it's starting to look significantly nicer.  I am very picky, so thats a big bonus. I may slightly redesign the pickguards to cover the join lines. However given the higher quality of print (and is noticably better), this may not be an issue.

 

Overall splitting the model down into smaller parts doesn't increase the overall printing time, so instead of 38 hours for a print, it's 2 x 19 hours (or so).

 

This means I have delayed actually assembling the guitar for fit, but the prints I have redone look good. I'm still intending to try and epoxy refinish with a black colour pigment. So thats black on black. I may call this model NSB-1 (None So Black)

 

Rob

[SamIAm]

I've found lifting on larger prints an issue, I use 3DLAC spray adhesive.

It works for 3 or 4 prints and then I need to soap wash/ alcohol spray clean the bed, but I find it is worth the effort.

Sam x

[rwillett]

Thanks

 

Never tried that. What's the finish on the bottom like after using 3dlac?

 

Rob

[SamIAm]

A light spray does not seem to adversely affect the bottom surface (Apart from helping it stick)

And of course a carefully calibrated Z level, but I am preaching to the choir on that!

Sam x

[rwillett]

Have now printed all pieces, I redid a few as I wasn't 100% happy with the results. Printing at 0.2mm does a lot better quality than 0.3mm but takes so much longer.

 

Checked the measurements and the bridge is in the right position. Might like to move it back 5mm but thats a quick print of the bridge adapter and six bolts.  So that seems to work (or appears to).

 

Printed a couple of round plugs to hold the pickguard nuts. You can see the large round holes in the picture which are empty whilst the control panel has five of the plugs glued in. I'm becoming a big fan of FloPlast as its simple to use, doesn't ooze out, welds quickly, doesn't expand and is very, very strong.

 

 

Aesthetically, it looks right. The proportions looks good, I know that @tauzero hates the headstock here, but it is what it is.

 

Next steps are cutting the plywood backbone to the right size, and drilling the mounting holes in the right place. So to make it easy, I've printed a drill jig, I would have had the plywood cut accuratley using a table saw, but my neighbour has just broken his foot and can't get into his workshop, so I may have to pull out a saw or even worse, a circular saw, and do it myself. <gulp>

 

 

Then, bolt the middle together, no glue, and see if the el-cheapo strings I have snap it into two pieces

 

Plan B if they do snap, is an aluminium and ply backbone, Plan C an all aluminium and Plan D a Carbon Fibre backbone.

 

Thats for the weekend.

Rob

[Richard R]

That looks great! The thinnest of black plastic veneer on the headstock would complete the look.

 

I confidently expect it to sound good too 👍

[rwillett]

Thats a good idea. Just printing pick guards and will look at that

 

 

[Jackroadkill]

I really like that.