rwillett

@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

I also would suggest a few decent amps to ensure that we are getting the very best out of these beasts. Perhaps an old 57 Bassman or Dumble would be good. I think I'm actually the right person to do this comparison as I'm not a very good musician. This means I can't hide any quality issues between the instruments and amps. A good musician would get around the differences whereas I can't. This makes sense to me. Thanks Rob

I wouldn't normally take a 54 Strat but just so we can progress this discussion, I am happy to take it for comparison purposes.

Conversely send your stuff to me to compare. A 59 Strat or 59 Les Paul or 56 Precision most welcome

As I'm in a provocative mood this morning, though to be fair that's my normal mood, I'm happy to lend my 3d printer six string with a plywood backbone, my Fender MIM necked 3d printed Jazz type bass with an aluminium backbone & my soon to be finished V2 headless bass with an aluminium backbone for testing out this theory. The body's of all these six and four strings are all 3d printed. 15mm plywood is simply not strong enough for a bass guitar unless you basically use it for the whole body. It's pretty simple to put whatever pickups you like in them, though I don't many at all. Electrics on the six string are from Home of Tone, the jazz electrics are from Kliogon (top man) and the headless bass are from me and I have to solder them up. Apart from 15mm plywood on the back of the six string, no wood at all. They sound great to me but I'm no expert. The bloke in the shop who helped me set the six string up loved it. He plugged it into a large Marshall stack and beat the hell out of the guitar (in a good way) and smiled a lot. The offer is there. Rob

Wow. That looks like it was soldered by a TIG welder who had no idea how to use TIG welder or how to solder. That can be cleaned up though, with some care and attention, two qualities apparently lacking to date. That assumes they haven't used a club hammer to put the nuts on the other side of the pot. Judging by this, I wouldn't make any assumptions at all.

The F2 was a proper camera. Many of the newspaper photographers used the F2, Canon started eating into that market with the Canon F1. A bloke tried to mug one of the photographers I knew for his F2. The snapper slugged him round the head with the F2 knocked him out and then took pictures for the newspaper and the police. Old school camera and one of the finest cameras ever made. Suspect your 72 has appreciated more as a mint F2 even with the 85mm f1.8 is around £600 now. Mind you that F2 will still be working long after termites and cockroaches have taken over the world.

Let me think, Andy Baxter vs Trash Convertors? Tough call

Somebody may think that they have a bargain. Without a whole load more photos, I don;t think anybody here will drop that some of money on it. I'm absolutely no expert so will leave it to others to comment on the tiny minutae that makes this a genuine bargain or a bitsa.

I've been offered a £5 discount if I buy it. It's definitely back on https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/145890094925?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=Zpnag6mYSVu&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=70h8JO93TH6&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY Tempted... If I buy it as an act of charity, it stops somebody else buying it by accident. It's a selfless act... Decisions...decisions...decisions

That sounds like a lot of complicated electrical connections all waiting to go wrong Good luck to them, perhaps thats why it takes so long to make. Rob

Ok, thats useful to know. I wonder how it handles bending or slap?

You can't have zero latency, unless that have magically changed the laws of physics. Some sort of "spooky action at a distance". I can't see how they get such low values. The string has to be played, the pickup has to register the string is vibrating, something has to work out the frequency which requires an element of sampling over a period of time. C is 440hz which so a string vibrates 440 times a second, so two vibrations in 1/220 of a second. That's 0.05 of a second (ish). Even a battery powered CPU or chip can do a hell of a lot in 0.05 sec but doing it accurately and for even lower notes is quite a feat.

I've spent the last three weeks working out the best finish for 3d printing. Whilst you can sand and fill and spray (repeat as necessary), that's hard work. So have tried to use 3d printing to get the quality up so it looks good. The issue I've had to overcome is that the body has an angle on both the top and the bottom as well as the edges being rounded (or filleted). 3d printers obey the laws of gravity, so when you have an overhang, it has to be supported. Nature abhors a vacuum and 3d printers abhor stuff sticking out without a support. A support leaves traces of the support on the material, and a complex shape such as part of the guitar below doesn't have a single dimension that doesn't require some support. I think I have managed to get it so that the top is smooth and speckle free and the back is slightly grooved, which is fine. The new Prusa Mk4 is very quick and I can test this out. The downside to it being very quick is that I have gone through a fair few rolls of filament. Mr Amazon has a beaten path to my door. The other thing I have been working on is a simple system for attaching pickups and easily adjusting them. My aim was to take "standard" pickups and design a system so that most (but not all) pickups can be easily added and easily adjusted using carbon fibre rods. managed to get some Carbon Fibre in at last. They are astonishingly light and rigid, 3mm rods do flex, but not as much as I would have thought. This is the dark brown below and the red pickups are there to see how much adjustment I have. As the body oft he bass is now 38mm vs 45mm, I have made life difficult for myself, but lets see if I can fit it all in I've also been drilling aluminium and taping it with M2.5 and M3 holes. Thats a tedious job. Each hole has to be drilled twice, a pilot hole to go through double materials, one material has three different taps, then countersunk (very slightly), the other material has a different sized clearance hole. Repeat for many, many holes. I still need to redo the electrics, but thats relatively easy in comparison to drilling and tapping. Rob

I love the disco ball and might corporate it in my next printed guitar.

This is a bass with a lot of potential https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/145885846114?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=Zpnag6mYSVu&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=70h8JO93TH6&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY rob

Perhaps we can do a smaller quarterly one or every six months?

Just to echo what @WinterMute has said, get as much RAM as you can afford. None of the M series Macs allow you to upgrade RAM as that type memory is part of the main CPU. So the days of slipping in an extra 16GB as you can afford it are long gone. Personally speaking I'd get memory over CPU every time now. Whilst you can run an older version of Logic Pro on the older laptops, I run an older version on my 2013 MacBook Pro, I have a feeling that its quite difficult now to do this as you have to buy the new version on a newer Mac which then allows you use the older version on the older Mac. So you *may* need a newer Mac for a while. I would certainly investigate this further before putting any money down on an older piece of kit just to be safe. The older Macs do work very, very well. though. My 2013 Macbook Pro was used every single day for 8-10 hours for 6-7 years. The keyboard is fine, there are 2-3 dead pixels now on the display, but you don't notice it in use. I only keep and use it really to annoy some of the other people in the teams who have the latest and greatest MacBook Pro which is quite an expensive beast now. If you do want to buy a second hand mac, I would suggest the following: 1. Check the battery %. If it is less than 90% after being charged up all day/night, assume you need a new one. Check the number of power cycles. These can be expensive from Apple. They are more expensive from Amazon as the vast majority of the batteries for old Macbooks are made from second hand batteries and are junk. Learnt that lesson the hard way so you end up buying more of them. They aren't that difficult to change, but it needs some care and attention. 2. Carefully check every single key on the keyboard. The Mac keyboards are excellent on pre 2015 models and after 2021. The middle years are very iffy as they changed the mechanism. 3. Load up a graphics program and make a few solid colour backgrounds or windows. e.g. Red, Green and Blue. Then move that window around the screen to check for dead pixels. Most of the time, you won't see the dead pixel as the screen has different colours but this can find dead pixels quite easily. 2-3 aren;t an issue, 20-30 might be. 4. Check the USB and HDMI connections are OK by plugging stuff in.Sometimes crap gets into the sockets and stops them working. 5. Check the PSU whilst its working. Is it too hot, people scrimp and save and use an under powered PSU. A 3rd party PSU is not a problem, but make sure its the right rating. Unplug the PSU and watch the battery percentage for a few minutes to see if it goes down a lot. My old Macbook won't last more than 45 minutes without being plugged in as the battery is rubbish now and I can't find a decent replacement. 6. See if the lid on the Macbook opens smoothly. Never seen one go wrong, but I have heard of it. If in doubt ask on here. There are loads out there for sale, if you pass on one, don't worry, another one will be along soon. Rob

If your budget can stretch to the newer Macs, I'd suggest one of the new Apple Silicon ones rather than Intel ones. Apple is pretty good at keeping their old stuff going but eventually they will end of life the older Macs. Hence the newer CPUs might be better. Apple kit also tends to last physically. I still have and still use a 2013 Macbook Pro as it works OK. Bit slow now and on its 3rd battery. Anyway, I tend to buy apple refurbished. Bit cheaper, dame guarantee and you'll not actually know its refurbished from Apple. https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/refurbished/mac Any of these will run Logic Pro. Rob

I never thought I'd ever say "Bravo, more, more..." to a bagpipe and accordian duo. I didn't have that on my bingo card for this week... Wonderful playing, skilful and the accordian player was in a world of his own. I am humbled by what you can do here. Rob