rwillett

You can see the bend in the 6mm aluminium plate. I'm very surprised as I thought it would be stiffer. The maths says 9x stiffer. That's proven to be a load of b0ll0cks What's interesting is that the printed stuff is holding out under the load. 40% infill seems to be ok.

Well I ran the maths and trusted my gut feeling and both were wrong. The 6mm aluminium bent at the same rate as the 15mm plywood. I worked out the aluminium as 9x stronger. Thankfully, I don't do any maths involving safety critical systems. I have an hour free so am drilling the 12mm aluminium and lets see how that works. Rob

You'd have to buy a lot to move the market this way. Whilst vintage fenders are scarce and there is demand, there are enough sellers to make cornering the market difficult. To move the market they need to be close to a monopoly and this isn't a monopoly at the moment. I'd like to be able to buy enough to move a market though. Sadly I'm no Rotheschild in the oil business

Well so much for maths. My calculations showed that 6mm aluminium should be significantly stronger than 15mm plywood. Rubbish. Just drilled a 6mm slab of alumimium using my nice shiny pillar drill. I made a drill guide to use as everything had to line up perfectly and surprisingly it did. Put everything back together on my test bass and it bends just the same as the 15mm plywood. Approx 2-3mm at each end. Very, very surprised so either I have poor quality aluminium or high quality plywood. Tomorrow is a girls rugby festival in Settle, I'm the organiser so I may not get time to drill the 12mm plate until later in the week. Very disappointed, but more bright paint on the learning curve. Rob

Even better then, 50p...

May I add my name to list for the next turn please? Is it like the pool table at the pub, do I need to put £1 down?

That looks a lot more substantial than mine but also bigger. Not sure the laser makes a massive difference to be honest. We seem to have survived for a few centuries drilling holes without one.

Pillar drill now here. Plugged in, turned on and tuned in. Might drop out later😊 The clamping mechanism and fence look OK but I'm not jumping up and down with joy and can see a heavy vice looming in my future. Also the laser alignment is out by about 0.3mm on one axis. This might be some sort of record of me dismantling something less than 24 hours after receiving it. No point in sending it back as the next one might be as bad. l

Wow, just wow Where exactly in Norfolk do you live again....? Asking for a friend.

Very tasty.... never seen that colour and pickguard combination. Looks great.

Hi, I'm getting a daily digest of emails and want to turn it off as I get the immediate emails. My settings don't seem to have one for daily digest or I can't find it. Can someone point me in the right direction please? thanks Rob

PM'ed you. No idea whats going on. Just checked my profile and there's nothing obvious there to stop you. Rob

Now you're just being silly, I'll double it to £20 and I'll pick it up to save you the effort of putting it in the letter box, can't say fairer than that... Far better offer

@sandy_r Of course you can. I didn't realise I was that frightening that people needed permission to talk to me I will try and be more friendly going forward and stop growling at people. Rob

Wow. What a dragonslayer hero 😊 Deeply impressed.

Send some simple measurements and I'll knock something up. It's not a big deal to print it up and if v1 is wrong, v2 will be better. I'm hoping just to drill and not ream.

Says the man with a 55+ year bass guitar project There's a lot of load through the bass strings. Enough to bend a quality piece of 15mm plywood by 2-3mm. Unless you can spread the load, I'd be surprised if any printed material can handle it short of proper carbon fibre layups. A pickup surround is pretty easy, If the pickup is rectalinear then I need the outside of the pickup measurements plus a small gap, I can round corners so perhaps a 0.5mm curve on the corner might help or might not. It's about 10 secs per corner to design it. I need the width of the pickup surround, too big and it looks silly, too small and it may not cover all of the gap. 10mm is not a problem if you want. For my six string printed guitar, the pickguard is the surrond and the P90's fit onto it. I need the height of the surround, 2-3mm should be the minimum otherwise it gets too flexible. I need to know how you want to fix it to the guitar. Thin double sided tape works well, but also I can put screw holes in and you can screw it in. Here's one I made earlier (in the best Blue Peter tradition). It has countersunk holes to fit the guitar, it has a slight flange around the top and enough of a gap for the pickup to fit snugly but not tightly. The person then sadned it down with very fine sandpaper and spray painted it. I thought it looked great. Pillar drill is on order, should be here Friday. I've been putting it off for years and thought I needed it now. Rob

The printers are silent at the moment as I'm waiting for a pillar drill. Until I've sorted out the backbone for the bass, and making sure the flex has gone, no more printing. This is actually a good time to do other jobs. Not sure about the replacement bridge though. There's a lot of load through the tension of the strings. Let me know what you are looking to do. Rob

I'd be honoured to be able to contribute

If you want me to 3d print some surrounds for your pickups for free let me know. Would tidy up the gaps. Massive respect for this.

I thought it was Derek Smalls. To be fair it doesnt look that bad in black and white, slightly blurred and partially hidden. Suspect my kids would say the same about me.

A little parcel has just turned up, I may, just may, have over specified the aluminium I didn't quite realise how strong 12mm alumium is. The 6mm appears to be strong enough on it's own. Lets see how this goes. The equal length angle sections were brought to test whether simply adding in two quite thin bits of aluminium to the plywood reduces the flex enough. I suspect not, but lets see. No joy on local pillar drill, so one on order along with some cutting fluid. Rob

I Whilst glue technology appears to have come on in leaps and bounds, my knowledge of it is still stuck (pun intended) to the era when superglue came out, and it was the height of fun to put it on door handles or toilet seats. Yes I was that immature. Epxoy resin might well work very well, or it might not. I'm reluctant to try out yet another technology out that I know nothing at all about. I can manage a 12mm plate (or 2 x 6mm plates), box sections seem to require just as much drilling PLUS connecting together. All other things bneing equal (as I can't prove box section is stronger), I always go for the simpler solution. A pillar drill looks the easiest option and is needed for all the options. Will see if anybody in the village has one first though. Rob

The stuff below is me thinking aloud and might be complete and utter b0ll0cks. I'm guessing based on what might be common sense and might as well be verified by my dog. That might work BUT everything has to be perfectly aligned across both widths. The E string puts the most load and so that side of the baseplate will have more load. Joining the beams together is hard as you have to drill across four sections accurately and then through the beams to join it to the bottom of the guitar. In principle it sounds great but I think realistically it's a lot more work and I have little confidence in my ability to drill accurately that many holes. I reckon I have circa 0.5mm latitude on each hole. That's pretty tight.

Yes, I was looking for a wide and thin box section but couldn't find any side enough and thin enough. My maximum depth is around 15-16mm. Also the maths around box section stiffness is complicated. Part of the reason for this is that the Americans use KSI and the rest of the world use GPa. I think I'm.gping to get two 6mm plates 60mm wide and put a 3mm plywood bit in the middle, not that it adds much strength but I get back to 15mm. 6mm aluminum should be equivalent to 3/4" ply but it could be significantly stiffer. 2x6mm should be a lot stiffer. I could also try 6mm and 12mm ply. One other option is 12mm aluminum plus a 3mm bit of ply. The ply would (hopefully) help dampen the resonance of the aluminium. 12mm aluminium is 8x stiffer than 6mm aluminium. I don't know if 2x6mm is the same stiffness as 12mm. For an equal sized material the relative stiffness is the cube of the thickness. 6 x 6 x 6 = 216 12 x 12 x 12 = 1728 1728/216 = 8 I did pure maths, none of this applied nonsense. Rob