rwillett

Mr Amazon did one of his regular pilgrages to lay gifts at my feet (more or less). So I printed a drill template to make a stitching cut in the aluminium, then cut through all the holes with my new blades to leave this. This looks like junk and I did wonder if I had cocked it up. So used the blade sander (wonderful tool) for the first time and gently smoothed and smoothed and came up with this. I was amazed how well it came up. I can now start assembling this properly. This is it fixed to the body of the guitar The photos show every blemish, but not a problem. The intention this weekend (apart from a trip to Malton to watch eldest daughter play her first senior womens game) is to get the pockets copper lined, the control panel for the tone and volume printed, to check the height on the strings, and possibly get the pickguard cut and fitted. The last might be a step too far. If this all works, glueing on the body is an evenings work. Progress at last rob

My Prusa does 0.05mm resolution (apparently, I can't measure anything that fine). I suspect a concrete nozzle is probably about 0.05m resolution. rob

Thats the project just after I finish: 1. My bass guitar. Currently the aluminium backbone is the garage awaiting new (non rusty, non blunt) hacksaw blades. I need these to trim the front edges to match the cut outs. Mr Amazon is on the case. 1.1 Already thinking about V2 of above. Lots of lessons learnt and I wounldn't do it the same again. 2. The guitar pickup winder. Currently sitting on the dining table awaiting 1) the bass guitar to finish & 2) writing some HTML to make a web interface to drive the Arduino R4 (not the R3). The R4 has a wifi chip so that might make the interface easier (or it might not). 3. A headless bass. Got all the bits (sort of). Refusing to do anything about it until the first bass is done. 4. Some pickups wound from point 2 for point 3. 5. Working out how to print with steel wool. See its now on my lis! Rob

Looks great, As I look at it though, I'm unhappy with the surface of the pickup cover and will now investigate steel wool and PETG to see if I could make it better Rob

Technically, he's not drop shipping. He makes no mention of VAT and customs duties, so if the guitar turned up at your door, direct from China and the shipping company want their VAT and customs duties paid, that would raise eyebrows (I paraphrase somewhat) and I would refuse the order. Your purchase/contract is with him and not the chinese company and even eBay would (probably) back you up in this situation. The way he has described it makes no mention of paying any other fees, so perhaps he is paying customs and other duties, in which case that could easily come to £40 - £100. My knowledge of how big a pound of flesh HMRC would take is sketchy as I do my best to never speak to them. I even have business insurance for my accountants to handle any and all issues. I am not the vendor and have no relationship with them, but I think we have to be a little careful and not tag everybody with the same brush. Is the guy making money, possibly? is it a lot? Looks doubtful to me, he'd have to sell a lot of them at that price. have a great weekend Rob

Sadly thats the norm. I keep looking at those Chickenbackers and I do fancy one, but until I've played one, I wouldn't touch it with a Chickenbacker neck. AliExpress is a bad place though, I keep getting tempted. I do need the hardware for a new pfsense firewall and am looking for a small one that supports GB throughput. Perhaps I can combine it with a Chickenbacker. Reasonably certain HMRC won't allow that as a business expense

It's called (international) capitalism A large chunk of Amazon and eBay works like this. Not that many companies manufacture their own goods. You can walk down any market these days and see the same stuff each stall have brought from a local warehouse. Same product, same price, different stall. To be fair to the seller (and I don't normally say that), the seller states it is made in China and allow 4-5 weeks for delivery. Normally the person has actually got the goods locally but not in this case. My dad used to buy nuts and bolts by the 10,000, break them down by weight, bag them, and sell them to the local garages. The garages didn't need 10,000 M6 x 30mm bolts each but enough garages in the midlands needed them so its worth his time buying that many. He tied up his capital as he sold them and made his money back over a few months. The only difference now is that companies aren't fronting the money and just using AliExpress, Temu etc and basically drop shipping. Not saying I approve, but can't say the guy is doing anything wrong. Caveat Emptor, buyer beware. Rob

Pulled this out of the cardboard box from the last house move. It's a Raritan USB Switchman four port KVM. It's VGA only and I moved to HDMI some time ago. It doesn't have the PSU which is in a box somewhere but I can't find it. The PSU is 5V x 2.5A (which seems a lot). It needs a 5.5mm x 2.5mm tip. It is not a 2.1mm tip. heres the spec sheet https://www.daxten.com/uk/download/SwitchMan USB-eur.pdf It does work and will probably work without the PSU plugged in as it can take power from the signal. It works with 1920x1080 monitors and claims to got up to 2048x1536x85Hz (which AFAIK is a monitor resolution that I have never come across). It supports keyboard switching, e.g. Scroll Lock x 2 and then a port number. I ran it with a few Mac's and PC's for quite a long time and it was very reliable and switched quickly. The keyboard switching will NOT work with a Mac keyboard as Mac keyboards don't have scroll lock keys. You will not get that functionality working on a mac keyboard as I spent a long time talking to the keyboard manufacturers. None of us got it to work. The rest of the normal keys work fine. Multimedia keyboards will work but not the extra keys such as volume up and down etc etc. You can press the front buttons on the unit itself to change devices. Thats too slow for me as it means I take my fingers off the keyboard. It has three dedicated cables, these are all VGA cables with USB moulded in along with 3.5mm audio. The audio switching was rubbish so I wouldn't bother. There should be a fourth cable but thats probably run away to form a love nest with the PSU. I no longer need it, flogging it on ebay means I have to buy a PSU and to be honest I can't be arsed. However the unit does workk, but I can't test it as all my stuff is HDMI. Free to a good (or a bad) home. Packaging should be £5-£8, make an appropriate donation to North West Air Ambulance and I'll pay the postage to a UK address or if you happen to be passing Clapham in North Yorkshire, pick it up for free. Thanks Rob

Brought for a project. no longer needed. A medium blue on one side and grey on the other. Has hooks to hang it (coz shooting is too good for it). No stains, no rips, will need a good iron. Free to a good home, just cover the postage, circa £5 I suspect.

Now gone.

Well, funny you should mention these.... I do have a box of them. The issue is that they are twice the size of the choc blocks and space is a little tight. Thats why I used the blocks. I do like them though, but not sure yet if I should use them. The screwfix ones may be smaller though

The monster lives.... I've jury rigged pickup mounts for the neck and bridge and wired in some choc blocks and a nice Fender Jazz set of controls to see if the pickups work, do they work suspended and how they sound in this position. I could change the position but the pole spacing seems to indicate that this is where they need to go Blow me down with a feather but it actually sounds quite good. Nothing is held permanently in place, so I couldn't even pick the body up as the wiring would have fallen apart. It also looks crap in the photos but it doesn't look that bad in real life. I now know it works and it doesn;t sound bad. No copper lining so some hum, but not a great deal. I also couldn't remember which one of the wires went in which direction, so the pickups might be out of sync (well it worked for Peter Green). The aim here was to check: 1. The pickup cases held the pickups OK. - Seems OK 2. Suspending the pickups from the pick guard works. - No issues that I can see or hear. 3. The wiring works. - It works but no idea if it is in sync or out of sync. 4. The earthing strap to the bridge works - OK 5. I have a control panel that works - Seems OK. 6. Position of the pickups is right. - Given the pole positions, can't see any option to be honest. Now I now know it works (phew), I can focus on getting it finished for the NW and Scottish bass bash on May 18th. Next steps. 1. Reprint the bridge adapter base plate as the last one pulled a nut out, so only seven nuts are holding it on. 2. Reprint the neck module base plate as it has stuff in thats not needed and might vibrate. 3. Make a proper pickguard as opposed to the stuff above. 4. Design the control panel to hold the controls. I'll probably drop the chrome plate as it's a little too big for the space. I might leave the choc blocks as they make assembly a whole lot easier. Thanks Rob

Got his priorities right....

I have been trying to work out how to handle the pickups. I've managed to design a test pickup holder that hangs the pickups from the pickguard as opposed to screwing the pickup to the body. I'm still not sure the best way to go. The issue with the pickups are the height and the restricted space to work in. I did have 19mm from the floor to the top of the body, which isn't a lot as a bass pickup is about 20mm high. There needs to be a gap to the string of around 5.5mm (according to my Fender Jazz). The red ellipse is showing where the new pickup case I designed is separating due to spring tension. You solve one problem and then another pops up. [Now solved] The slots on the top allow me to play with the position. The three screws adjust the height ands angle. I'm going to reduce the top of the pickup case as I think I can save 0.5mm, yep its that tight This is the bottom of the pickup. It has to be a reasonable depth as the springs work against it.

My mum, sister, niece and nephew live Chesterfield. Also friends live Dronfield I'm sure I can prevail on one of them. I live North Yorkshire so that's a no go. Oddly enough, one of our friends has a significant other in Devom but he lives Chesterfield. Perhaps the stars might align. Rob

That's indicative that the market does have price sensitivity. Supply is limited, demand is supposedly high but that demand isn't enough to overcome prices. If the guitars were 10% of their price, would he have any left? That's not a comment either good or bad about Andys prices, more an economic argument

13 orders is not statistically significant for this. Given as other people have stated, prices will vary widely based on perceived rarity, condition,phases.of the moon or anything else.

This project isn't dead, just taking a little nap whilst 1. The sodding V1 bass gets finished 2. I play with an Ardunio R4

T'other has forced me to promise not to buy any more guitars. So I'm building them, she never stated anything about making my own, I should have been a lawyer I'll look at it but I really, really shouldn't.

I have the money, wish I had the skill 😩

Thanks for this, I've designed a casing with 38mm ear lugs and printed it off. Looks fine but will need some sanding down and spraying with glossy paint to match the glossy plastic cover of the others OR I could just buy one of eBay Lets see how mine goes first as I already have it printed. yet another thing I didn;t know was sold on ebay. Rob

Thats kinda what I'm doing. I'm working on 40mm x 23.5mm for the ear lugs at the bridge and 38mm x 23.5mm at the neck. Just revising the Fusion 360 so it fits OK. I've manged to break something in the Fusion 360 model so need to fix it <sigh> Rob

Thats just how I have it. I also use Mightier Amp app rather than the Mighty App as its better (or I think it is). Rob

I'm just working from what dimensions I can find on the Internet. The more I read, the more vague it becomes and the assumption that there are "standard measurements" seems to wrong. Fender seems to have changed things as they wanted and whilst many pickups have similarish ears, things like radii of corners, length, width and height are down to people's interpretation I'm going with 40mm x 23.5mm ear spacing for the bridge pickup and 38mm x 23.5mm spacing for the neck pickup.

Thanks for the reply. I'm just googling for dimensions and building a spreadsheet of what I've found. The length and width aren't a problem as I'm not roiting into wood, but fixing onto a slab, so what I'm after are the "ears" spacing. So far I have the stuff below (this is all ears spacing) which is actually coalessing around 1.5" <spit> neck and 1.56" bridge for the ears spacing and betweem 22.5mm and 23.5mm apart (each side of the pickup). One mm is quite a lot when I print to an accuracy of 0.2mm with no issues. I'm going to keep looking and see if I can find any common ground on this. Its really frustrating that most ›manufacturers don't produce decent information on the ear spacing. Seymour Duncan does produce proper design docs to be fair. I'll keep at it Thanks Rob