rwillett

I've already built a CNC machine. Admittedly it was around 800x600mm. https://forum.v1e.com/t/new-build-in-clapham-north-yorkshire-uk/16519 This is not a CNC machine. A CNC machine doesn't have to loop back and forth for the winding. You could program it to do that I suppose in Klipper or Marlin but itwouldn't be ideal. You could argue it's closer to a 3d printer. Also a CNC machine doesn't get to 0.005 mm accuracy at the price I can afford. Mine certainly didn't. I also didnt happen to have a small CNC machine lying around. I did happen to have a few arduinos and stepper motors. No idea what I am winding. I'll build it and play. I may not put an input interface and just reflash from a laptop for awhile.

Hi, As part of my work on 3d printed guitars, I started thinking about what was the best pickup to use for either six string or bass. Currently my six string has a pair of Tesla P90's which sound great to be honest. I have an 89 MIK Squier Telecaster which I love playing but the neck pickup sounds like, well something very muffled and bad. I did think about buying a replacement pickup but to be honest, I haven't a clue. So I thought about making pickups and wondered how difficult it is. After reading a lot, it doesn't seem that bad to do, you have a bobbin, you have some magnets, you have an awful lot of wire and you turn it. I saw people doing this with electric drills, by hand and by using various automated winders. As I'm stupid and can't resist a challenge, I looked at doing my own pickups. I have a few Arduinos and stepper motors sitting around and I used to be able to code, so had a good walk with the dog to think, had a play with a 3d printer, an Arduino simulator and a lot of coffee. My working assumptions were that the major problems are: 1. Actually feeding the wire onto the pickups in a controlled manner 2. Keeping the tension correct all the way through. Since people were using their hand drills to do this, I figured that its not the worlds biggest problems and if I could use a computer, a lead screw and a stepper motor I could control the feed back and forth across the bobbin ad that tension is a simple felt pad to slightly slow things down. So below is the schematic on the Arduino simulator that drives two stepper motors, the top one at full speed and the bottom stepper motor at a far lower speed. The lower stepper motor drives a lead screw that moves the copper wire across the bobbin back and forth with no user intervention. As this isn't a video you can't see it working, but it does The actual core of the code is written, it didn't take that long, a few hours for a few days as I tweaked it. What it doesn't have is an interface to enter all the values, such as the number of loops, the gauge of the wires, the width of the bobbin, the number of steps of the stepper motor per revolution, the pitch oft he lead screw. Thats this load of code here. int ratio = 10; int stepperSpeed = 1000; // int stepper2Speed = stepper1Speed/ratio; int noLoops = 10000; unsigned long loopCounter = 0; int currentRatio = 0; char buffer[21]; double coilWidth = 3.0; double wireWidth = 0.0564; int stepper1Steps = 200; // 200 steps per revolution int stepper2Steps = 400; // 400 steps per revolution int leadscrewPitch = 2; // 2mm double step = (double) stepper2Steps / 360.0; double distancePerStep = (double) leadscrewPitch / (double) stepper2Steps; double numberOfStepsPerRevolutionAsFloat = ((double) wireWidth) / distancePerStep; Putting a simple menu system on here is probably 10x the work of writing the code so am thinking of ways to cheat Along with writing code, I started to physicallty put together the start of the winder. This is the first cut, it has an 8mm lead screw that will be attacched to a Nema 17 motor on the left hand side. This stepper motor will move 1 step every 11.28 steps for the main motor that winds the bobbin up. After 3mm of movement, the bobbin width, the stepper motor will reverse and move back. Each step is around 0.005mm of the lead screw, thats the level stepper motors can do even without microstepping (which TBH I don;t know how to do yet). So as the main stepper motor puts 10,000 loops on, the wire is carefully moved back and forth across the bobbin in a highly controlled manner. Thats the principle anyway. I know that there are screws missing and its a bit Heath Robinson, I didn;t have many M4 and M5 screws to hand. Moving the lead screw by hand is smooth and allow coils up to 120mm to be wound. No idea what that would be, but thats the options available. Next steps are Nema 17 mounts, adding in menus (masses and masses of work), putting in switches to detect the lead screw holder hitting the ends by mistake, adding in PSU, working out CNC shields or stepper motor drivers, mounting on plywood, designing a bobbin holder, designing a bobbin, getting some cheap AWG44 copper wire, but the basics are in place. Thanks Rob

So thats where my order went... I've been looking for that all week...

I've been looking for a Westone 1A bass to go with my Westone 1A guitar. This one looks likes its been tipped in tar and just left to dry. No idea what they were thinking of, defretting a great guitar and painting the body with tar.

@Stub Mandrel I'll send you my PLA mistakes, they'll go well with some onion gravy and perhaps mustard. Rob

430mm from the nut to the 12th fret. 73mm from the bridge to the back of the guitar, 100mm from the back of the heel to the end of the guitar and 170mm from the 12th fret to the end of the heel. Thats the dimensions of a Fender Jazz body and a TMB bass neck. Everything else is just noise (pun intended) Rob

And this is the bass guitar design Still a long way to go Rob

Not sure I can machine aluminium to be honest, so that part is out of the question. Oddly enough I just started the design of a headless bass earlier today. The intention is to use a plywood backbone as I have with this guitar as there is no way a wholly 3d printed guitar using PETG or probably even with Carbon Fibre elements could cope with the stresses of bass strings. Originally when I thought up this six string, I was going to use aluminium as a backbone as it would allow the body to be shallower, however cutting and shaping aluminium is massively harder than plywood. Whilst things can be done with hand tools in aluminum, it's significantly easier with plywood. Aluminum has one key advantage and that it's stiffer than plywood for significantly thinner profile. I also looked at carbon fibre. You can use hand tools for CF but you have to be very very careful as the shards of CF are dangerous. My garage is full at the moment as we have building works underway and I did not want to do anything with CF in the house as we have a dog and two cats. Plywood is a good compromise for me at the moment. I don't see why a Roland Pickup and synth can't be attached to any 3d printed guitar. I had my guitar plugged into a Marshall amp over Xmas and a proper guitarist (not me) was giving it some welly. He loved the design and how it played. It sounded great and I'm hoping the bass I put together will be as good. If anybody wants to commission work just let me know. Rob

There's no problem (in principle) with incorporating wild designs. The limitations are really around the printing area size. As I don't have a printer that can do a complete body in one go, you have to join things together, so you have to have a design that allows it be assembled. so where the join is, you need to have something approaching a body to glue or bolt things together. So here's my outline of the guitar that I made. The purple line is the exterior and the black line inside that is the inside edge. The recctangle in the middle is the space for neck, pickups and bridge. All I did was design a repeating hexagon (not as simple as I thought it would be, I had to go back and do trigonometry from my school days) and overlay it I then overlay that with the maximum printing area rectangles. I tried all the angles to reduce the number of sections, but you still end up with four sections outside the modules that make up the bridge, pickups and neck. A bigger printer could reduce this but it will be a big printer. There is nothing to stop me changing the hexagons in the middle picture to something else. Perhaps large arcs as somebody posted earlier, my dragon drawing skills are limited, indeed my drawing skills are limited, so I would struggle, but so long as there is a picture to trace from, it could be done, with the caveat that where the sections meet, there has to be a reasonable amount of filament to join together. Probably a day or less to get the design in (assuming somebody else has done the artistic work), depends on the complexity. From a printing point of view, it's probably no extra effort to print and assemble. Would need to think about clamping points and how things like the control panels are built in, but nothing difficult. Rob

I've not done anything on the guitar over Xmas, due to a slight pink torpedo up from me, it's still in York and whilst thats the same county, it's 1.45 hours away so not easy to pop back for it. I thought I've have a look at sanding the original body, this was the original one and I'm not sentimental over it at all. So I've had a go sanding down the body with an electric mouse sander, these are the small triangular ones. I've never sanded PETG before so was interested in how it would work. I thought it would simply melt and deform. I was wrong. PETG is tough, and a small mouse sander even with a P80 roughness paper, wasn't making a massive impact on it. It was certainly roughing tghe surface, but it wasn't taking a massive amount off. I might have a try with an orbital sander. The intention is to sand, fill the gaps in, sand some more and get it as smooth as possible, fill the gaps again, get it even smoother and then try an undercoat/primer, then a few coats of satin black followed by an epxoy top coat. I'm not going to do all the body, just a sample section to test it. I'm just experimenting with different fillers. OOn the right is a Humbrol Model Filler and on the left Vallejo plastic putty. The Humbrol looks like it is a two part, though it's all in the tube. The Vallejo seems to be thinner but we'll see. The Humbrol appears to dry quicker, but thats not an important characteristic to me. Here's a picture of the tests

It looks good and you still have the same number of fingers , thumbs and appendages* so I’d chalk that up as a success Rob (*I am making a certain assumption about fingers, thumbs and appendages)

But apart from that....?

So is building one from scratch (or in my case printing one) in or out? It was mentioned previously but can't recall an answer. I have plenty of filament, I have bass necks and bits and bobs. I don't have spare pickups but I could make them from spare copper wire or baztardize another bass guitar. I have been looking at building a computer controlled pickup winder as I have a few Nema 17 motors and stuff left over from other projects. However 84,000cm of 44AWG enamelled wire could be tricky. I do have some spare stray pickups though so could reuse them. Strings seem to be consumables so that's good and I do have enough nuts, bolts and other electrical bits for a small nuclear reactor. To be honest I suspect I won't last the first month (or week) but you never know. I would have to delete all my carefully curated eBay searches as well. Rob

Brilliant. Thanks from Rob who piggybackes the OP

What a coincidence.... So am I! If you do get something please share it here. Thanks Rob

That looks very interesting. I happen to have a a spare pi 5 at the moment as well.

Looking at them again, the two outside ones are so similar and so complex, that I'm pretty sure they are 3d printed. They are too similar and too complex to be hand carved IMHO. Any information welcomed as I like them

I'm guessing they are 3d printed but can't be certain. The outer two look similar outlines and similar controls, but the middle one is different. From a design point of view, the outline and the infill design could be anything so long as its strong enough to support everything. I used hexagons as other people had and so I knew they'd work. It's probably a few hours work to change to somw of those designs. If they are 3d printed, not sure if it's one big print or smaller ones assembled. Those designs are neat though and I like them.

Great. Let me know of you need any help. Rob

Can you draw with sizes the above? It doesn't need to be an accurate drawing, but the measurements need to be accurate. Preferably in metric. If the ID is 100mm, then state that, the drawing doesn't need to be 100mm itself. Which part is the collar? Are the edges at 90 degrees or are they chamfered or rounded? How much does the internal tube stick out? Is the port two pieces or one? I'm in Spain for a few days and thingiverse isn't working for me Are there any mounting holes? If so what's the diameter of the holes? What's the spacing angle between the holes? The design looks easy to print but the devil appears to be in the details. I suspect once every measurement is known, it'll be a few mins work in F360. But we need every measurement and if edges need to be chamfered or whatever. If its going to be printed, make it exactly what you want. You can work to 0.2mm or less if you need to Rob

I can't print anything til end of next week though as I'm away. 4" is not a problem though.

Looks fairly easy to print though.

Hi The maximum external diameter I can print in one piece is 220mm. However if it can be broken down into smaller pieces, that allows it to be bigger as it's then glued. All depends on the external diameter

S'manth kindly provided some string locks for my yet unstarted and undesigned headless bass. Very, very generous of her and very welcome. Thanks Rob