rwillett

The white lie is that you can get around this printing limit by designing and building your own printer, something like a Voron printer (https://vorondesign.com/). Their system allows custom large print bed sizes. Not cheap though. I did look at this and costed one up and it's around £2-£3K. If I was making printed guitars for a living, I'd probably do it, but for me and friends, not worth it. A 600x450mm printer could do just about any guitar in one print. That then opens up other interesting possibilities, no join lines, really weird designs, cheap custom designs, multi colour designs. I'd love to do a rainbow guitar across the whole body for a friend for Pride. We talked about it, but its non-trivial at the moment. Thanks Rob

@Henrythe8 This all comes back to a fundamental part of 3d printing, the size of the print bed. Most printers are around 220x220mm in width and depth and around 200-250 in vertical height. There are printers that are 300x300 and a few that are even bigger. The larger the print bed, the more chance you have of the following issues: 1. Print bed not heating evenly. The filament needs a hot bed to adhere to, PLA filement needs circa 60C, PETG filament around 90C. Its harder work (but not impossible) to keep all the print bed at the right temperature. 2. The frame that holds the extruder head and moves it around the print bed needs to be solid. We work to 0.07mm on the latest printers. The frame has to hold that head exactly in position, for every hour, for every day. No exceptions. The bigger the frame, the more difficult that is. So the compromise is that most decent printers for home use have a print bed around 200-250 in each dimension. I know that you can get 300x300mm printers, but that just kicks the can down the road a tiny bit. So the most we can print is around 220x220mm, we can fiddle that a little by printing on the diagonal, remember Pythagorus? Most guitars and bass's are bigger than 220x220mm, though none are 200mm taller (so far). This means that whatever guitar (bass or six string) you want to print has to be done in pieces, no way round that easily (thats a white lie and I'll cover that later). So you print in pieces, no choice there, which means you have to join the pieces together. This 'join' could be: 1. A clip type joint, push together and it clicks into place. Works for something, but not sure it would on a guitar. Never tried to be honest, but nothing says its going to be a success 2. We screw/bolt pieces together. I've done that on my very first 3d printed guitar and it works very well. Very solid. Downsides, its hard work to hide the nuts and bolts if you have a open type of guitar, which mine are. I had a lot of embedded nuts in the design, but that means that your printing is hard work as you have to pause the print at certain times to insert hardware. Since some of the prints were 30-40 hours (on my old printer), this meant being woken up at 03:30 to put nuts in and then resuming the print. 3. We glue stuff together. I was originally 100% against this, but after experimenting with an awful lot of glues, I found a cheap glue that works brilliantly on PLA and PETG by 'welding' them together. Forget superglues as they do not work reliably. I have 6-8 different superglues I tried out as well as various expoxy resins. The best was Floplast from a plumbers merchants, £9 for 250ml which lasts about six months. The problem with glueing is that you have to get the two parts to match perfectly. No big deal it things are a mm out on a plumbing pipe join, massive issue on a guitar. So I changed the design to put pins to locate the pieces. You can see the three round pin holes on the end of the top left piece below. These are 4mm in diameter, easy to print and work really, really well. Here's the top middle piece that joins to the one above. This works so well, that I built the bass without any glue at all, just pins and screws to the backbone, and it plays pretty well. However there is a little movement, perhaps 0.2mm between the pieces, so I will glue it together to fix that. That was always the plan, use glue, to be honest. Once glued, the pieces are really welded and if I do a stress test in the pieces, which I have done as part of the glue test. Once glued (welded really), the glue is stronger than the component. It does need quite a lot of force to break it and the glued bits don't break. There are a lot of challenges about fit lines and getting them as tight as possible. That's another story and a lot of work to make things flush. Not quite as easy as it sounds In answer to your second point, changing the "artistic" design (I paraphrase), is pretty easy to do. This was designed in from the start. So here's a very wild Explorer design that I thought about as a proof of concept. Probably take a week or two to design and print as I have real work to do, but no real problem, as the hard work has already been done for the core of the guitar. A firebird would be slightly less radical and a bit quicker. It should just be a matter of unassembly of the current body and putting the new one on. There's probably some design compromises around the neck area as that has shaped aluminium and so a few cm each side of the neck would stay and the design would have to match that. So an SG type double cutaway wouldn't be possible without redoing the backbone. Thats a day or two's work and so if somebody wanted an SG bass, its more work than a Firebird but not a massive piece of work. It's adaptation rather than starting new.

Thanks. I actually put a strap on it for the first time yesterday and its very well balanced. I'd like to say its through careful design, extensive use of complex maths and constant iteration of various materials... but lets be honest, I guessed. Sadly its all going to be dismantled over the weekend, tidied up and glued (where appropriate). Its currently held together by screws and pins. Thats by design, and is significantly stronger than I expected. You could gig with it as is, but I do need to do the finishing bits that will annoy me, making sure the aluminium backbone curves perfectly match the printed curves, copper lining to ensure no hum. Surprisingly in my home office, it doesn't hum, no idea why as the amount of electronics here is approaching black hole density. So thats a nice bonus, but lets do the job properly, sort out the little bits, as I want to be able to say "its finished". Rob

Ask me how I know not to do that now

Michael, Thanks, I understand that bit. I remember messing with loudspeakers as a kid in the classroom and playing about with the phases. Rob

After a lot of fiddling about with small wires, tinning, trimming, soldering, frustration with all the previous, I finally got the electrics finished and in. Blow me down with a feather but it worked first time. Volume on two pots and tone (well some version of tone) on the third pot. Pull out the first pot and it puts the two pickups into series mode and turns off the 2nd volume pot,the volume goes down though, which is a bit of a surprise, I wonder if I have the two pickups out of sync. Now one advantage of the way I've wired it, is that its a 10 min job to change what is the bridge wire and which is the hot wire for each pickup. That may be the solution (or not). Anyway, I originally used a NUIX headphone amp plugged into the guitar to check it works. Thats a mistake as the NUIX bass amps simulators leave a lot to be desired and it wasn't clear where the tone was. Plugging back into Logic Pro tidied everything up and I could breathe a sigh of relief as it sounded well. The differences are subtle though, the neck pickup isn't vastly different to the bridge and the tone control has a simple 0.047uF capacitor and the change in tone is there, but is very small. Something to look and think about. Strap buttons are on. It plays quite well (given that there are suspension bridge cables in use for strings). Needs some careful setup now. Next steps are dismantle it all, glue to the major sections together for a more strength, copper tape all of the insides to reduce hum, tidy up the wiring inside the control panel, take a Dremel to little bits of the aluminium backbone to get them flush to the body, polish and lacquer the aluminium, reassemble and then learn how to really set it up.

I've done 4-5 of the YouTube videos and learnt some new stuff. I need to go through the rest of them though. The bloke is very good on the video sessions and its quite easy to follow. The problem is time, and having enough of it. Once I got the KB connected to Logic Pro, which took all of around 30 secs, I then started trying to remember what few chords I knew and then spent a few hours tinkering about and ended up with a very soulful (but very simple) basis of a song. Bit of a surprise as my keyboard skills are basically nil. Not touched it since I came back off holiday as I really, really, really want to get this headless bass finished, but since I had a plumbing issue over the weekend, had to sort that out first. £500 call out focussed my mind about sorting it out myself Spent a lot of time looking at how to dismantle and clean macerators. I will say no more. Rob

Yes that's me. Sorry about that

Sorry, I'm confused, easily done. I've recoloured the wiring diagram so that it's a little clearer so I can try and understand. The black ground wire from the bridge pickup connects to the pot case along with the lime green from the bridge. As these two wires are soldered to the pot case and all the pot cases are grounded via the copper strip, which is how it would be on a normal bass. The neck pickup ground wire is now purple. So I *think* you are saying that the the purple wire, whilst normally an grounding wire, similar to the neck pickup, can't be in this case. However the red earth and the blue earth could connect to a ground point, but I'm not clear where, could this be to the same soldering point on the second pot, where the lime green wire connects to? If so, why doesn't the diagram simply show this? I wonder if the two earth wires, red and blue, are not actually to the pot case as it's actually quite difficult to solder to the push pull pot, you can only solder to the side and not to the top. So is it just a case of soldering the red and blue to the second pot, along with the lime green cables? Thanks Rob

@Hellzero Thanks for this. I've just had a look at the wiring diagram again and wondered why the top potentiometer used earthing symbols and not a simple blob to the pot case. I *think* it was due to making the diagram simple and as the push pull pot has a lot of wiring, they didn't over complicate it. Its easy enough to do this anyway so will see how it goes. I won;t be looking at this until this evening as I (sadly) have real and paid work to do Rob

@JohnH89 Thanks for this. I'll check it out.

This is the wiring I am using Now it's not clear to me where the two earths on the Push Pull switch on the top PCB actually go. The ground from the bridge doesn't appear to be following the same system. The diagram is clear that some wires are grounded on the pot case as well. Most of the wiring is done, I do need to sort out the tone pot and jack socket wiring, but thats for tonight. Rob

Mmm... I'm still being auto logged out. Now I access Basschat across a number of devices,mainly my iPhone and two Macs, a Mini and a Macbook. Without touching anything I seem to be getting asked for login credentials again, whereas before the 2FA came in, it could be a long time before I was asked again. Has anything else changed on the account settings please? Thanks Rob

Thanks for this. I have a decent soldering iron so can solder to the pot case if needed, but the wiring diagram differentiates earth in one part of the wiring from the bridge earth which is soldered to a pot case, hence I'm not sure. Will post the diagram tomorrow. Rob

That's just under 3 hours from where we live 😊 still in the same county as well

Ooof indeedy. Lovely

That looks brilliant. As you appear to be in Yorkshire, put up when you next have a gig and I'll see if I can make it. Mind you from one side of Yorkshire to t'other side (Bridlington) is 3hrs 15 mins. Rob

That is pretty good. Some interesting artefacts on the bottom of the neck. Also where the strings attach to the front appears to defy space and time. However given where things were only 18 months ago, the progression is amazing. Neat idea. Rob

So after 90 minutes of soldering I have something that's starting to look like wiring. Its very fiddly. This is on a mule control panel, so the copper tape is just for checking that things work. Its all very, very tight. I might have to remove the choc blocks and put something else even smaller in. The intention is to NOT solder the pickup wires, so I can change things. Still need to work out how to earth the black wires. Suspect a discreet screw, a washer and nut against the copper tape. As the wiring is more complex (because I'm stupid and never learn to do the easy option), I don't think you can simply solder it to the pot case. When I've finished and tested this, I'll move to the proper control panel. Rob

Sadly I'm no Max Verstappen in a car or playing a bass. More Mr Bean. Rob

OK. Happy to have another try if I know it's worked.

Used napkin? We used to dream of a used napkin, all we had had were a couple of broken leafs and twigs from t'tree that we glued together with our own spit and blood, and that was if we were lucky. Most of time, we'd just have to stand there and hit our heads with rocks to make us forget the rain.

The printing bit is easy, but the splines on the potentiometers trash the inside of the print and they just spin. Tried that last year and it was a miserable failure. If you know of a way to stop the splines grinding the plastic away, do say. However I have managed to get the tall push pull pot to fit by taking a Dremel to the edges and taking off a mm or so. Its very tight but it now fits. This means the volume knob on the push/pull looks OK. It might be a mm too high now. I now know how Andrian Newey feels designing the body to fit his F1 car, packaging is difficult Rob

Looked at it and can't see anything I can configure in 1password to make it use the correct button, aka not Facebook So unless the design changes, I'll have to do it twice with 1password or manually. I'll live. Rob

If it helps, I can reduce your embarrassing number of guitars. It's a free service I offer to Basschat members. No thanks necessary. Rob