rwillett

They can be found perhaps not quite yet. Mine is great but as somebody else has said the Tokai might be another option. Don't dismiss the older Squiers. I have an 89 Squier Tele MIK and it's fabulous. Look around and try stuff if you can. Rob

Brought a nice six string neck from John. Exceptionally well packed. A pleasure to deal with in every aspect. Rob

I have a 97 MIJ Jazz in blue and its a great bass. You can find them at around £600 or so.

I have the HA-2 and think it's great. No issues with the usb socket yet. Works well on all guitars. I also have the Nuix but prefer the HA-2. Got the HA-2 for very little off fleaBay so check that out. Rob

So my knowledge of MBF is slightly less than my knowledge of ancient Sanskrit. I looked it up on Google and I'm still clueless, however it appears from what you said that a bass neck could be as little as $1.65 for the raw wood material. I know there are loads of work and other hardware, but that sounds cheap to me. Also I am assuming that a body would be circa 5-6 BFs, which again sounds cheap. Have I got the maths wrong here? Thanks Rob

Just good friends....

@SimonK Some of my release meetings have 20-40 people in as all need to be updated, so very few people put their cameras on. Some people have very low bandwidth so video is a problem, I've not ever done anything with MIDI so will read up about what can be done and how first. I am not printing any green whatsoever However if you are interested in the pedalboard DM me. Thanks Rob

@SimonK The Tri Mixer pedal turned up on Tuesday and I managed to open the box yesterday during a very long and boring MS-Teams call and hook it up. I like it, I like it a lot. Its very quiet, its very easy and it fits. Don;t like the green and my Feng Shui sensai has had to lie down in a faint after seeing it. I have to sell the house now to counter the green colour, but its worth it. My original intention was to have the pedal at the end of the chain of effects and feed it into an iPad to record with. After using it for a whole two hours, that's gone out of the window (well not so much gone, but a better idea has come in). I can now mix different wet amounts of the pedals or have a completely clean signal through to the amp. Use the foot switches on the mixer to bring in the various effects (or not). Need to wire it all up today, but got a few meetings to listen into so that's no problem. The next steps are to work out how to do a midi controller for all of this, so I press one button and it sets up all of the Mod Dwarf and ToneX and iPad up. That needs some thinking about. Thanks for the help Rob

Yep, the issue is now finding another location to put it. It can't be too high otherwise it resonates/vibrates. After opening the Cioks box, all my worries over the cost (not bloody cosy) just faded away. A quality piece of kit indeed. Good advice to buy it.

Now got the Ciorks power supply. Very, very nice. Quite a dense brick, dead easy to use, glanced at the instructions but it's dead simple. Printed out the clamps for the Cioks, took about an hour from thinking about the design to having the power supply fastened in. Using aluminium extrusion means this is really trivial to do. Wired up the various boxes with the shortest cables I could find in the box. Cioks supply an awful lot of cables so no need to buy any. @LukeFRC kinfly sent me a current doubler cable (Thx mate) and I used that to power the Mod Drawf so it's got 12V and 1A. Seems OK to me. Put some Velcro strips on a little 3d printed riser on the mixer. That has little rubber feet and rather than take them off, I printed some 3mm risers and attached them to the back of the mixer with double sided carpet tape and then put velcro on that so I don;t have to take the feet off. The carpet tape is strong but will come off and a little methylated spirits will remove the adhesive if I want to. I need to cable tie stuff down once I've got it wired the way I want it to. The Cioks supply is really, really dull and just works, and I only have one plug for all of the above. Am looking at the iPad mount again and just checking that all of the Tri Mix cables will fit and not interfere with the iPad. Pleased with this to be honest, but also need to try and find a bag for it as well. Rob

I finally got around to doing a simple test for doing multiple colours with a single extruder. This is a white box in a blackbox. I had forgotten how tedious this is. Every layer has to have two colour changes, from one colour to the next and then back again. Doing eight layers took 25 mins. I got bored and gave up This is doable but its hard work. @Owen has suggested a black and white colour scheme and I do like the idea of carrying the Vertoroni shapes through to the pickguard. Its easy to design but it's very, very, very slow to print as there are so many manual colour changes. I think it will take about 8x as long and I have to watch it all the time. Anyway I learnt a lot here Thanks Rob

@Owen I'll look at that as well as @SamIAm's idea Thanks Rob

That might work

That might work. I could redesign the neck heal and the bridge to have more mounting holes for the pickguard. Not sure what that would look like. Could you expand please? Thanks Rob

Thanks but I'm still not very happy with the pickguard. It looks very square and boxy. I'm not a designer and not sure what to do. I have worked out what to do with the Dremel router table. Sell it back on eBay and buy a proper table and use proper router bits with bearings. Then I can print templates and get them looking better. However that still doesn't get round the issue the pickguard looks poor 😩 Any designers out there who can advise? Thx Rob

Had to play with making my own pickguard this morning. Mixed results. I printed out a template to use a Dremel table router. Pretty normal stuff and I thought that this would be ideal (famous last words). I even marked it to make sure what was top and bottom never underestimate my ability to cock things up. I then put masking tape on both sides of my pick guard material to protect it and drew around my template to get a rough idea to cut out something bigger which I could then route down. The masking tape was useful as it allowed me to mark the outline. Put it on the Dremel table router and then created a massive mess. A Dremel on this particular material creates tiny particles that are nightmare to get off your clothes. This was a rough cut to give me a piece of material for routing around. The pickguard material was around 400mm wide and too unwieldy to handle. Once it was cut down, I used two sided tape to hold the template down and then used the template to route around. Simple idea BUT the top of the router bit was rotating so fast it was melting into the PETG template and so it was difficult to get a straight edge. What would have been better would have been a bearing on the top so that router bit rotated but the template didn't melt. A 3d printed template is easy but not the right solution. I don't know what the right solution is at the moment.... Anyway, I took a file to the pickguard to level it out and get it looking better. Not that happy with it, Its better than the previous orange pickguard but its not at the quality I would like. Also its rather square so might put some significant radii on the corners. The other option is to get a black pearl pickguard. Suggestions welcome as to what to do. I put the new pickguard on the guitar as it was better than that what I had, so its temporary until I work it out. I also took the opportunity to put the strap buttons on, take the ferrules off the back to clean that up, replace the solver screws with black ones to hide them. I then plugged it into an amp and had a play. Its not been set up properly, but it sounds pretty good. A lot warmer than my Telecaster, but put some significant gain on it and it breaks up nicely.

Pmed rob