rwillett

@Richard R I can manage points 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9 (though mine's a 2 min walk). Not too sure on 1 & 5

Er...?

@MichaelDean @lemmywinks Thanks for this. Didn't think about Aliexpress. They do all look the same now. I wonder if they are cheap rip offs OR the chinese manufacturer is doing some quiet midnight production runs... Rob

Dear all, Putting this in and hoping the mods will pin it. Looking to get people together for a NW (and Scottish) bass bash in Clapham, North Yorkshire sometime in May 2024, probably Sat May 11th. 18th (note that this has changed) A number of people live a little north of London and even stuff in the Midlands is a pretty big schlep, so I thought we could get together for a day to playing bass somewhere closer for us. The Clapham in question here, is NOT the one in South London, it doesn't have eye watering house prices, you can't go cottaging on the Common, you also can't buy Tofu in the local shop (actually you can but that's no fun). This Clapham is in North Yorkhire on the borders of Lancashire, Cumbria and North Yorkshire. See here for more details https://claphamyorkshire.co.uk/ The village hall is community run and we can get it for a day in May, provissionally booked for Sat May 18th 2024 (please note, changed from 11th). It has 1Gb internet access so you aren't out of touch even for a day. https://claphamyorkshire.co.uk/locals/clapham-village-hall/ <<- This is the right one Clapham is 22 mins off the M6, 35 mins from Skipton, 45 mins from Lancaster and 40 mins from Kendal. It does have a train station and if anybody would like to come by train, we can arrange a free pickup. There is no taxi service there so don't even think about it. My company will <ahem> sponsor the day so there is no cost to people. I'll see if I can persuade my kids to do teas and coffees. There is a decent kitchen, but also we do have two excellent pizza joints nearby. My daughter works in one and so we may be able to get a deal, I am happy to organise and sort things out, however I have never organised a bass bash so if people have ideas of what they want to see, do and have, speak out. If you assume anything, it will not happen, so speak out. I'll check on what days in May are available. The committee is putting this all online so it's not live yet. I'll speak to them and get some dates. I'll happily bring my kit along for people to use, I'm not precious about it. So there will be an Fender Jazz bass, a Fender Mustang bass, an Ibanez Mikiro bass, a couple of six string electric, including my 3d printed electric. I *may* have completed a 3d printed bass by then as well, a small Ampeg 30W practise amp and quite a few extension cables. I can also bring a few laptops and ipads as well. The wifi is free. Can I get some expressions of interest please and also some thoughts on what to do on the day. Thanks Rob People who have expressed an interest (understand that this is not a commitment) @rwillett - Yes @Desbass @vsmith1 @ossyrocks - Yes @neepheid - Yes @ead- Yes @Frank Blank - Yes @sifi2112 - Yes

Thanks, I wasn't trying to compete, merely have more than me there We may make double figures, though if people know it's happening, that tends to focus peoples attention, so we may get more. Rob

I'm contemplating my next guitar build and thinking about a headless bass. My six string 3d printed guitar is coming to completion. Still stuff to do but I think most of it is ready. Lots of people have done a six string 3d printed, not so many have done a bass guitar, probably due to the string tension. 3D printed elements don't handle stress as well as metal or wood. However some clever thinking gets around that problem. Certainly my six string printed guitar has no issues with string tension, mainly because there is a decent 15mm plywood backbone doing all the hard work. The 3d printed stuff holds stuff together and is very rigid, but I suspect a set of bass flats would pull things apart. I think I can get around this with a decent bit of 25mm plywod, though an 18mm or even 15mm might be enough. I need to test to check. Also I did see a Westone headless bass on eBay that made me thing. This is interesting as it shows my thinking isn't new. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/studio-still-life-of-a-1985-westone-rail-headless-bass-news-photo/103630647 Anyway, I thought I'd try a headless bass. I already have 97 MIJ Jazz, a Fender Mustang, a Mikro bass from Ibanez and a normal bass from Ibanez. One more of the same seems dull, so I've started looking. I can get pickups, switches, and controls easily, however a headless neck is a challenge as is a headless bass bridge. I can see bridges for £50 off eBay from Overlord of Music and I cannot find anybody saying anything good about them. Not even looked at headless necks yet. So are Overlord of Music bridges as bad as people seem to think? or are we being snobs? Thanks Rob

A briliant idea let down by an ugly fact... Story of my life. Rob

I asked about the village hall and didn’t chase up I will ask again when’s the midlands bash?

@MichaelDean I was advised to put three layers but that seems an awful lot. Thanks

I know I'm going to have to shield the various cavities. I've a roll of 10m x 20mm copper tape with conducting adhesive. How many payers should I lay down for it? 1, 2 or 3. I want to be sure and one is enough, great, but if I need three layers, I'll get some more copper tape. Any suggestions welcomed. Thanks Rob

Let me know where you can find that please....

There are so many compromises made in 3d printing. How much infill vs speed? Line width vs quality? Printer orientation vs circles or elipses. If you machine afterwards then that's extra cost and time. Another compromise. It's a heavy burden but another bottle of white may help followed by the last episode of Bodies.

If you wish to donate it, that’s really generous. I'll post you the body back. I’ll send you my address

I can’t see any video? Just me or everyone?

Actually my last response wasn't quite accurate about assuming the print head moving anywhere. There is a setting to allow you to print separate and multiple objects one at a time. So each one is 100% printed and then the print head moves to the next one. This means that if the print head crashes into an object, only that object is lost. Normally you print a tiny layer for each object all at once. The disadvantage of this is that you need to leave a certain distance around the object to allow the print head to move. It's quite a large space to leave so you reduce the numbera that can be printed.

<Tl;Dr>No</Tl;Dr> Think about the shape of the head and the movement of the head. It moves all over the bed based on the fundamental premise there is nothing higher than it and so it can move everywhere and anywhere. A support block would immediately crash into the head. This is the reason why you print supports. The head crash I just had was due to a nut being around 0.25mm too high.

Someone asked me about support and infill, so I thought I'd explain it a little better. This is the neck module. It will hold a small adapter that allows different bridges to be used. The adapter will fit to the bridge using the number of M3 holes in tourquoise on each side of the module. You can see one side below. The red screw holes are for the pickguard. The three large holes in yellow in the middle horizontal section are for Telecaster bridges which appear to have long screws in to hold the pickup adjustment, longer than 19mm anyway. For the purpose of this we can ignore the holes. The blue horizontal section, the middle of the 'H' shape fits between the 15mm plywood backbone and the bridge adapter. If we print the module horizontally, this section is unsupported. We can get away with unsupported sections around 4-6mm, not 100mm. Not going to work. One option might be to change the printing orientation of the bridge module, print it on the end so that it's vertical like so There are three issues with doing this. 1. Any holes will come out as ellipses as gravity takes its toll. So the large three holes in the middle would need to be designed as ellipses in the vertical axis so they sagged down to a circle. Doable but a pain. 2. Any face that is printed on the print bed, comes out very smooth and very nice. The back of this module is hidden and so this nice smooth surface is wasted. 3. The strength of the module is compromised as the longest filament length is either across the back or from the sides. We want the filaments running long to provide the strength. Sp to get around the problem, we design it how we want it to work, and in the slicer program, PrusaSlicer but Cura works the same, we add in a support enforcer. This manually forces the slicing program to automatically generate support wherever the support enforcer touches the main module. Thats the blue box below. Manually forcing something automatically sounds odd, it means that I tell the slicer program where to do support and it automatically generates the support just for that area. I don't want it to auto-generate support everywhere as it then does odd things in the other holes. I have turned the bridge module upside down so that the top gets the nice smooth surface from the steel plate. If I slice it now, I get The green is the automatically generated support. I have set it to be as simple and wide a support as I can. This is the honeycomb support that I will cut away and discard. All it does is hold the middle section up. We can see in the picture above the dark red which is the infill at 20%. I have set PrusaSlicer to generate an infill at 60% for the middle section (from 15mm from the base plate to 25mm) to provide more strength This is the same model, literally 0.3mm higher. You can see the infill is far more tightly packed. I could go even higher, but 60% is fine. The more infill the slower the print On the whole we try not to do too much support as its an effort to remove and to clean. We also want the lowest percentage of infill appropriate for the job. 10% is fine for a lot of things but a guitar has stresses on it, so this is how we handle it. Hope this explains things. Rob

I'll have a look at it and make a call whether to or not. I've had to use the neck off the first version so that's surplus to requirements. Wpuld test there anyway before I touched V2

And this is what happens 10.5 hours into an 11 hour print when the print head nudges a nut and crashes the print... Oh what joy... Got up at 05:00 to start the print again <sigh> This is what the inside of a large print looks like at 20% infill. That's the cross section in the middle of everything. As you increase the infill, the cross section gets denser and denser. 20% infill is 80% air which sounds quite fragile, but a 20% infill print is quite strong. I wouldn't want to make a step ladder out of it, but for most usages where there is no real stress on an item this is fine. For more stressed parts of the guitar, such as the neck module which holds the neck on through screws, I print at 60% infill. This is very strong and hold compression quite well. All the parts of my CNC machine I made that hold the router are printed at 60%, the router pushs a router bit at circa 30K RPM through metal and wood. 60% printing was easily rigid enough for soft metals, CNCing stainless steel is a different question all together and that needs all metal structures or you take off 0.001mm a time and it takes three months to cut anything out. Rob

The bass guitar will be after the new year. Still need to finish this one off. Had a chat with James from Home of Tone yesterday about the wiring loom and that looks fine. The wiring needs to be custom made with quick release connectors. No idea what it's going to sound like, that's part of the fun to be honest. James is very helpful. I'm looking for a bass neck with tuners. Was hoping for a medium scale as I think neck dive will be an issue. I'll look over the weekend for any maths around centre of gravity and levers. If anybody has a bass neck they want to get rid of, let me know.

This is pretty much the finished article apart from any bug fixes. It has a three section pickguard, but this will be replaced by a custom made one once I know it all fits. The pickups are accurate for the Tesla pickups and sit on a cusom made bed that moves along the axis of the neck, so I can move them closer to the bridge or neck or whatever. Its easy to design pickups that fit to the pickguard or fit to the body now. You can see the mounting holes in the middle below. The neck module has been made and checked that it actually does fit the Yamaha neck. I cannot find a decent neck on eBay so have to use the same one as before. The neck module will fit to the plywood baseplate AND will connect the top and bottom of the guitar through four holes on each side of the neck module. This does allow me to change the neck over at some time, just in case a nice thing 58 Telecaster (or Stratocaster) neck falls into my lap. It'd probably take an hour to change the neck and restring it. If the neck module needs reprinting, thats a lot longer. I did this at 0.2mm and 60% infill, and it took 14 hours just for the neck module. But its very strong now. Cable routing is fairly easy, there are multiple paths to the control area lower left. There are six screws for the lower pickguard to hide it and there is a recess at the bottom for a plate to cover and protect it all. The bridge module allows different bridges to be used. I've put three large holes as the mounting screws for a Telecaster type bridge are more than 19mm long. The two rows of screws allow the bidge adapter to screw in. like so. This has the screw pattern for a cheap £5 ebay hardtail. Here's the above picture in cross section These are the five embedded nut slots in the orange section. If I print this at 60% infill it's pretty strong. I'm currently printing out the bottom left and bottom right parts of the frame. They'll be finished around 21:00. Tomorrow will be a quick dry assembly to check dimensions before I print the final versions of the bridge module and neck pickup module. I may adjust by 0.2mm here or there. I can also use the opportunity to check the cable run lengths for Home of Tone's loom. Over the weekend I'll then print the bridge adapter and the pickguards. I'll do the pickguards in white for the moment as black and red doesn't look that good. My intention now is to use plastic filler on all the seam lines, sand it down using a filler/primer. Get it as smooth as possible, spray with a matt black acrylic and then use an epoxy resin as the final hard coat. I will test this on my old version first. Thanks Rob

Damm, that was the problem, I should have come to you as a sommalier Rob

I have never smoked so that might help. Plenty of other vices, but not smoking....

<cough>I'm absolutely fine<cough><cough>A little bit of late onset asthma and that's it. Most be the pure lifestyle I lead...

Many years ago, I loved making Airfix models, 1/72 of airplanes and stuff. Typical boys stuff, and then would paint them up using Humbrol enamels. I suspect many people here did much the same. I woke up one Sunday morning in my bedroom and all I could smell was White Spirit. I looked on the floor and could see a bottle of White Spirit on it's side, the top off and it mostly empty. I smelt the carpet and thought "Bloody hell, knocked it over in the night and it's all spilt on the floor and soaked into the carpet. My mum is going to kill to me". I went out to the bathroom and could still smell the white spirit, "Oh no, its gone everywhere in the house, my mum and dad are going to kill me". I went downstairs and thought it was downstairs as well, I then starting thinking, so I went outside and could still smell it. The penny dropped, I hadn't spilt the white spirit, I'd drunk the whole bottle in the night whilst asleep. There was none on the carpet, but there was an awful lot in my stomach. I wasn't ill, didn't feel that bad, but my breath was awful and took a day or two to get back to normal. Ever since then, I keep stuff like that locked up in a garage and not in the house. I have never touched white spirts since, I moved to meths instead for a classier drink Rob