rwillett

No snow today and the CFO is heading to York for the day leaving me as something called "the responsible parent". Given my eldest is severely hungover in a farm near Kirkby Lonsdale and my youngest is off to work, that leaves me and the dog. I might accidently have to check the cellar and see how warm it is and perhaps check the Armacab paint and see if its frozen, and if not frozen, and all OK, it seems a shame not to test out the paint on some surfaces using the smooth roller for two coats and then the textured roller for the third coat. I will need to build some of jig to hold it but I suspect a coat hanger or two might be just the ticket. Has anybody any experience of masking areas off? Rob

Happy new year all. I originally used black tape around the edges of the grill as there were little sharp bits, I did take the Dremel to them but I then ended up with silver bits on a black grill and I didn't fancy spraying it all to match so put the tape on. To be honest it looked like cr4p and I was never happy with it. The original split tubing around the original circular grill didn't look much better either, so I looked and looked for a better idea and didn't really find anything that I liked, so as per normal, if I can't find it, I look to make my own. So pulled out Fusion 360 and the digital callipers and tried to see if I design something, I wasn't sure how it would look. This is the Fusion 360 view and this is what it looks like close up. and far away I can't make the two long sides in one print as they are 376mm long and the maximum diagonal I can print is around 330mm so its in two pieces. I need to do small adjustments to minimise the gaps but I'll work on that. As its black on a black grille on top of a matt black baffle board, small gaps won't be noticeable. Somewhat surprisingly its a nice tight fit and the holes I was going to put in the back and put hot glue in aren't needed. However in the process of printing these, one version went wrong and I managed to destroy the Y-Axis belt on my Prusa MK4, which was a bit of a surprise, as the belts are supposed to be pretty indestructible. I have a box full of spares but guess what I don't have? Oh well, 5M of 6mm GT2 is on the way and should be here tomorrow but I then have to reprint some broken bits and retune the 3D printer. Thankfully I can use the other printer to make the spares (or I hope I can ) The temperature here is still so cold that I still haven't managed to get the Armacab on the sodding cabinet. We are forecasting snow tomorrow as well, which actually should be warmer than it is today. We got down to -4.5C.

I'm sure the Midlands Bash will be nearly as good. Don't put yourself down 😊

T'other half has a big birthday celebration Easter so very early April is now gone. The Midlands bass bash is June 20th. Sunday April 18th 2026 Sunday April 19th 2026 Saturday April 25th 2026 Sunday April 26th 2026 Saturday May 9th 2026 Sunday May 10th 2026 So last calls with what you can do or can't do. I'll check with the hall to see what is still available but.away tonight. Rob

Black insulating or gaffer tape with a pin pick in works. Also non white masking tape.

Also asking for a "friend"?

Personally speaking, I'd go for an eBay refund. You can spend a lot of time and money trying to get it to work or hacking something together. If you like the challenge, go for it, but you could easily lose 10-20 hours just trying to figure it out. I'm not demeaning your talents here but being realistic. I know what it's like as I love a technical challenge and waste too much time and money doing something that I shouldn't. I now price my own time up and add that to the costs. So if I think something might take 10 hours and I think my time is worth £20 per hour, is it worth me spending £200 to fix it? I make exceptions for learning activities, as I think that learning is always good. Learning not to do something is valuable as well. YMMV Rob

And have replied 😊

I've wondered about doing this for a few months and never had the time to think this through. Background As part of the Basschat 8" speaker thread, I needed to attach a speaker grill to some risers. I wanted the speaker grill to be easily detachable without using any tools, such as an Allen key or a screw driver. I did look at quick release fasteners but they didn't quite work for me, so I thought I'd make some gnurled knobs using M3 bolts. I've made loads of these type of knobs before and have always followed the same pattern, design the knob, then insert a bolt after printing and use a little plug to fix the bolt in. Here's an example, the bolt goes through the hole and I simply glue a plug on top. Dead easy BUT it requires glue and a plug. So I wondered if I could design a knob that has the bolt put in as part of the printing process and not afterwards and therefore no plug is needed? This technique might be useful to somebody else so I thought I'd document it so somebody else can benefit from it. This is a little advanced in the number of steps and it might well be partly Prusa specific and Octoprint specific. Solution And this is it. This is a cut away of the knob and you can see where the head of the M3 bolt would sit. It looks like there is already the screw element of the bolt already in place, this is the long column underneath the knob head and this is actually never printed, though it is exported to the slicer. The column is there to position the knob head correctly in the vertical axis in the printer slicer, in my case PrusaSlicer. There are actually two different bodies in Fusion 360. The long column is 3.25mm in diameter and the hole in the knob head is 3.25mm as well. In this case it's a little under 16mm long as I will use an M3 16mm hex headed bolt and part of the bolt is in the head. Technically the knob head has zero surface overlap with the sacrificial column, this is important. Both bodies are exported to PrusaSlicer as a single component. In PrusaSlicer they are then converted to Parts, not Objects in the right hand mode pane. If you convert them to Objects, the head loses it's vertical position. This is done by selecting the component and right clicking it. The bottom of the knob head is painted for manual supports, that's the blue bit below. I used a "Smart Fill" and as the knob head base is flat, that works well. If the edge of the knob has a chamfer, the "Smart Fill" gets it wrong. Select the sacrificial column in the main window and in the right hand Mode Window add in "Infill" and "Layers and Perimeters", using a mouse click. This creates these options JUST for the sacrificial column. This presents these two options at the bottom of the Mode window as well. Change the settings to 0 for everything in these two windows. This tells PrusaSlicer not to print anything for this specific part, the sacrificial column. The column is still there holding the knob up, but doesn't exist for printing purposes. It's worth exploring what these options can do if you change them. Change the support options to "Generate support material" and turn off "Auto generated supports". This is really important, if you don't, PrusaSlicer will generate support material for the inside of the knob where the bolt head will slot in, this means you can't put the bolt in. Press the "Slice now" button and you get this. However your job isn't done yet. You can tweak the support material settings if you wish, I tend to just leave them as-is for this. Using the layer inspector, slide down the layers until you are one layer below where the head of the bolt would be The picture below is one layer higher and you can see the blue indicating an "Overhang perimeter" in PrusaSlicer. If you can see the blue layer, you need to go one layer lower. Right click on the Layer Inspector and select "Add Custom G-Code" You need to add in specific G-Code here to tell the printer to pause. I use Octoprint and a pair of Prusa Mk4's (not the MK4S). The below works for me, but if you have a Bambu or an Creality this might not work, The gist of the code above is: a) Move the printer head to X=10 and Y=200, basically away from the part you are printing. That's the G1 element. b) Make three 1.5sec beeps - That's the M300's and is used to attract my attention. c) Disable the stepper motor timeouts - This is needed for Prusa's but I'm not 100% certain as to why I used this command as I wrote this a few years ago I think that this was because if the stepper motors timeouts aren't disabled, then if I wait for too long, the stepper motors are disabled or de-energised and so aren't fixed in position using a steady current and if you knock the the printer at all, the printing head won't go back to the exact same position. d) Energise the stepper motors - Put some current in the stepper motors to fix the position of the plate and the head. e) The @pause is an Octoprint command which displays pause on the Octoprint (and Octodash) display and then allows you to press "Resume". This is the bit where you then insert the bolt. Kinda important. An email is also generated in Octoprint and sent to me so I don't have to watch the printing. The email is specific to Octoprint and uses the notifications plugin. d) The M105 returns the print head to the correct temperature after the pause (and the insertion) of the bolt. When the printing head temperature is back to the right temp, the printer carries on. I turn off the temperature as it might be an hour before I respond to the email. If this is left with the hot end hot, the Prusa shuts itself down as it thinks there is a problem, safe but not what we want. You now have a knob with an M3 bolt embedded in it, no glue, no plugs, so it's a lot stronger and neater. This looks like a lot of fuss and steps but it's probably 90 secs to go through to setup. Once you've set it up, you can then "Add Instance" and you can create four of them in a few seconds. Hope this helps somebody Rob

As I don't have Facebook, I'm assuming the increase in price is from £1 to £1.10? I know firewood prices have gone up a similar amount...

Hopefully it was a really old one, therefore worthless, and not a nice new one...

Wise words indeed....

The Strat is a lovely guitar, it's a MIJ 87 which appears to be a 62 reissue, thee bolt neck etc. I'm not that up on these things TBH but it's lovely to play, has EMG active pickups, the vibrato is locked with a block of wood and at one time in its life was routed for a humbucker at the bridge. Im trying to write songs, so I use the Strat, my 3d printed headless bass and a macbook. It's hard work but it's very different to my day job so it's a good way to unwind.

I got singing lessons from t'other half. Could be a subtle (or not so subtle) hint. Never has a singing lesson in my life. I used to sing solos when I was younger in primary school and then I grew up or something like that<cough> and can now strip creosote off fences at 10m. Fish wives and RSMs aren't in it.