rwillett

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

I think it's a 1Password issue. If I do it manually it works fine. I suspect 1Password is triggering the wrong button. I'll look at it now. Rob

I haven't done a cold start. May well be the cache. Will do so and see what happens Thanks Rob

I've moved to 2FA, no big deal, use it for 19 other applications not including work. However I have noticed that I am being logged out after a short while, circa 30 mins or so without me doing anything. I can't see anything in the settings to indicate an auto-logout. I do run Firefox with a large number of privacy extensions but nothing there has changed for months. I also note that when I do login, the login page thinks I'm trying to use Facebook login <spit> rather than my Basschat login. Then I got back and it uses my Basschat login, not sure why. I don't use the Facebook at all. I nevre click on the button. Not the worlds worse problem. System is Mac Mini running Sonoma 14.5 and 1Password, which might (or might not) have something to do with it Is it just me or are other people having issues? Thanks Rob

This weekends job was to wire up the control panel. I carefully thought about what to do and decided to be a little adventurous and do a slightly more complex wiring job and have a push pull knob to switch the pickups from series to parallel. The wiorking diagrams look easy enough, so ordered some decent CTS pots, fabric covered wire, a high quality and expensive CTS 250K push pull pot and 300 capacitors as it wasn't much more expensive than ordering 2-3. So if anybody needs any capacitors, just ask. First problem was the overall depth of the push/pull switch. It was a mm or so too deep, but some careful rejigging of positions, I managed to get it to fit (for some defn of fit). However, the big problem is the knobs I have are all around 19mm tall, and the CTS switch really pushes the knobs high. I can't push the shaft any lower as that pushs the base of of the knob too low. Its a compromise that currently sees me eyeing up the Dremel to carve a mm or so out of the plastic CTS casing. Any suggestions as to where I can get taller knobs, 22mm or higher welcomed. Thanks Rob