rwillett

Sold two Echo Shows to Tom. Lovely guy to work with. Immediate payment. 100% sensible and great comms. No issues whatsoever. Why aren't more people like Tom? Thanks Rob

I shall say no more....

I've stopped using the brown stuff as its a nighmare. I used to use it to hold screws in thumb screws for my astrophotography business but have moved to a gel super glue instead. I don;t worry about expansion any more but I do glue myself regularly to the office desk instead. I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything like adhesives, power tools, solvents, chemicals, glass, flammable objects, gas, petrol, alcohol or guitars. I'll either spill it, break it, inhale it (accidently), adhere myself, drink it, set fire to it or try to play it badly. One day I'll tell you why I'm not allowed near white spirit...

A quick update is that there is no real update I've printed off two pieces of the updated V2 of the guitar and two more test pieces are being done as I speak Hopefully by tomorrow morning I'll have this lot printed, though the neck module and bridge module are test pieces to check the support needed. This is an area of compromise, I want the top of the neck & bridge modules to be printed face down as that gives a nicer finish, but that means that the horizonal sections in the middle need supports. Support provides support for overhangs as the printed material won't just stay up. The green below is a honeycomb structure that supports the middle of the bridge, neck pickup and neck modules. I'll cut out the green and discard it once printed. This is a far chunk of printing though. Out of seven hours, the support printing is 1hr 55min. Still got this to print The astute will notice that there are no mounting holes in the neck module. That's because something went wrong in the design and I have no idea what Also need to put pickguard screws in. I have been testing Flopast (https://www.floplast.co.uk/product/solvent-cement) and it's great stuff. I cannot separate the parts once glued. I'm going to try and find out what the strength of the bond is. I suspect the bond is stronger than the 3d printed material itself. £9 a bottle, doesn't seem to have a bad smell, though as I have no sense of smell due to something happening 10 years ago (no idea what), thats probably not a good recommendation. Easy to apply, doesn't expand (I'm looking at you Gorilla Glue), doesn't dry immediately. Whats not to like? Once this is done, I'll dry assemble and check fit. Things might be out by 0.5mm or more or less or not at all. Printing can vary depending on time, temperature, filament, sheer bloodymindness of something or the other. The glue is kept well away, but at this point I can measure things for the wiring harness. House of Tone are just waiting for me to finalise things so they can get it built. I did look at the finish and I'm tempted to look at coating this in an epoxy resin finish. https://www.matterhackers.com/store/l/xtc-3d-high-performance-3d-print-coating-24-oz/sk/M3KW1WX0 However thats for another year. Rob

They look good, though I had some hand clamps already. Thanks

Oh no! Must not even look at this, too late, and there's loads of other guitars as well. Damm, another morning of work lost wondering if I can justify an vintage Fender. I do like the look of the 57 Strat, but I know nothing about these things. Rob

Mine are Irwin hand clamps. They need to fit inside the honycomb so these are ideal. The G clamps in Thingiverse aren't that strong and aren't suitable for clamping honeycomb structures as they need to be long nosed. I did try some years ago when I built a CNC for myself but they weren't a great success. I will also use long wood clamps for clamping across the whole guitar body at the end.

This weekend I experimented with glue. I don't believe I have ever written that phrase in my life before I'm trying to simplify the construction but keep the rigidity in the frame. Floplast looks the business, easy to apply, doesn't immediately go off like superglue and is a solvent adhesive. To avoid using screws and embedded nuts, I designed a simple dowel and hole system I can print. With wood, this is relatively easy, with 3d printing, there are limitations. If you print a hole that is vertical, it is likely that the hole will become ellipitical as gravity comes into effect. If you print thinner layers, then the ellipse is less but is still there AND it takes a hell of a lot longer to print. If I don't print this axis vertical, then something else is compromised. In my case, I want the front of the guitar to be printed on the steel bed as that gives the best finish. Ironing looks rubbish in my opiion. YMMV So I design an ellipse that prints a 3mm round hole when printed vertically. In Fusion 360 this is a 3.4mm on the major axis and 3mm on the minor axis. I also print 8mm long M3 dowels which take 4 min to do each. This means that the components should align pretty closely when clamped together with glue. I have a load of decent hand clamps just itching to be used. I've now completed the top of the design. Got space for a three way switch at the top right, changing that from a 30mm hole to a 40mm hole took a load of work with cable routing. Small changes can mean a lot of unpicking in Fusion 360. Sometimes large changes are dead easy. The face closest to you has six holes, two are for dowel alignments, the other four are for the neck module. The neck module is designed to come out and is not glued in. This allows me to change the neck over. The four holes are for four embedded M3 square nuts. These nuts are square and not hexagons as they go in vertically and if they were hexagons, you couldn't get the shape filled in through 3d printing. You can also see the 40mm hole for the three way switch, a hole for the strap button and five M2.5 holes for the pickguard. The back has a cover plate recess. Again three M2.5 holes with embedded nuts. As these are laid horizontally, I can use cheap hexagon ones as M2.5 square nuts seem to be rare. The 5mm chamfer on the edges is printed at 0.15mm using variable layers in PrusaSlicer. This is the top left of the guitar in PrusaSlicer Just under 13 hours of printing with a pause six hours in to put one M3 nut for the strap button. Both these jobs will get started tomorrow as they do require me to intervene and put nuts into certain places. Rob

I wouldn’t say design process as such , more the fumbling of a blind man with his eyes closed in a dark room searching for a black cat who may or may not be in the room

It's a good idea usind aluminium extrusion. Didn't think about that. I'd be a little cautious of 2020 as it does bend, however there may be different grades in use that are better than others. The nice thing here is that you can attach an awful lot of stuff with t-nuts which are cheap as chips. Can't work out how he's done the neck. Is it printed? I'm out and on my phone so can't quite see.

That could be a mistake stating that...

That's an interesting question, so far for my six strings, not an issue. However it could be, given the size and weight of a bass neck. I did think that this would be a problem for a bass. One option might be to make the end of the body hollow to pack weights in, enough to balance it out OR use one of the anti-dive straps. I do know that my V1 is quite light, certainly lighter than my 89 Telecaster. I can't see the advantage for me to build a neck. I don't have the skills and I couldn't do a better/cheaper job than buying a decent neck. Thats a bridge too far for me <no pun intended> The design workflow is important as you are basically programming the model from step 1 onwards, you are applying instructions to sketches, extrude this, split this. Then apply a sketch to that part of the model and do more instructions. The way you plan this is important as the order is critical. Miss a bit out and it doesn't work. Bascially a short scale SG? Rob

Happy for you to steal what you like. The key thing with this version is that it's easier and simpler to make. The next version will be a bass, probably not a five string short scale headless, but I want to check some stuff out with V2. The design workflow is important. The order you do things is really important and I did it the wrong way for V1, but I might have done it the right way for V2. Basically get the 'master' dimensions roughed out, width and position of bridge, where does the neck go, how high is it? Position of pickups is pretty unimportant from a design point of view. Once you have that, then do the honeycomb, but do it as a repeating pattern, and make each side big enough to handle a clamp end so you clamp to glue. The repeating pattern requires maths but it's not difficult, simple trigonometry. Overlay the printing size of your prusa and then start looking at outlines to fit. Its a bit like object oriented programming to be honest Rob

I have now almost completed the design for the next version. I don't think a single component has been carried over from V1. Some of the neck measurements and the plywood backbone have remained but every other element has been redesigned based on what was learnt from V1. It looks similar but thats about it. The original ideas for the first version were: 1. All my own design so nobody can claim I'm stealing their design. - That still stands 2. No glue. I hate glue, it gets everywhere - I am now experimenting with glue. I have a number of different types of glues from various superglues, Bostick Hard plastic Glue, and the current favourite FloPlast, a solvent cement from my local builders. 3. As there is no glue, all fittings most be as hidden as possible. - This still stands but I have significantly modified the structure to make it easier to print. I have removed most of the bolts and screws from the outside structures and am assuming glue will hold them together. Certainly Bostick Hard Plastics glue and FloPlast are very strong. 4. Must be modular. I don't know which bridge to use yet, I don't know which pickups I want and, importantly, I might want to change them or add three pickups without having to print everything again. Completely rethought how this works. Before, I would have to unscrew the whole guitar to change the bridge or pickups. Not any more, I've thought about this and now have a simple set of adaptors. 5. Must be able to take different necks. I don't have a neck I can use yet, so not sure what I'm going to get. I'm looking for a thin telecaster neck but not found one on eBay I trust to buy yet. Struggling to find one at the price so the Yamaha one off the proof of concept is going to be used. 6. Must be playable. The last guitar was light and easy to play. 7. Must be easy to print and fit on a 220mm x 220mm print bed. The Prusacaster one takes four days to print one part. No doing that This is still applicable. I have changed the design to make it printable without a lot of interventions from myself. I'm now down to four big pieces rather than five. 8. Must be able to use different controls as I have no idea what I'm buying, Telecaset and Stratocaster wiring is easily available second hand on eBay so thats a good start. This version is going to be based around a Telecaster Deluxe. I also think that a lot of the control sets on eBay are junk so am working with House of Tone to get a better set of pots and controls. 9. As few as possible supports for 3d printing. This has zero supports needed at the moment. I'm delighted with that Lesson learnt from the previous guitar is that I need to print the top of the guitar facing down to get the nice smooth finish that the Prusa satin plate provides. This means supports for the three modules in the middle. However as these are hidden from view, no so concerned. So I've picked up a pair of Tesla pickups, thought a lot more carefully about the design and parameterised just about every dimension so I can adapt as needed. The Tesla pickups are bottom mounted so are designed to fit to the guitar and not to the pickguard. That has spurred me to make the pickuops more modular. The same with the bridge, I've gone for a cheap and cheerful hardtail off eBay. Its not quite finished yet, but the second iteration design was a lot easier as I had learnt from the first one. If I take the pickguard off You can see a row of mounting points. The bridge uses these mounting points, in this case the tesla pickups do. They can be moved back and forward to change the tone. I could even get a third pickup in. There's a tiny mounting plate to make the Tesla pickup work. There's now a cable channel to the three way switch on the top. More routing ports to the four pots at the bottom. Learnt my lesson and provide a lot bigger space for controls. The back will have a simple plate that fits across it to hide the void. The strap button mount points are in. Things to do are: 1. The output socket channel. 2. Put the screw holes in for the pickguard. The pickguard will have to be printed in sections as it's too big for my printer. If it works, I'll get one made to measure. 3. When the bridge arrives, make the mounting points on the bridge. 4. Finish the neck mounting section. 5. Keep experimenting with glues just to check stuff like shear strength. Some of the glues are very strong, but how about if I knock it sideways or heat it up? 6. Hope and pray that the Tesla pickups aren't too high. I'm working in mm here and I reckon I have around 2mm spare. I do have a solution to lower the pickup by 4mm but it's a hack. Trying to finish this for Xmas, but have done no printing so far. Lots of test prints to check, but nothing real yet. Rob

Oh I do have a basement, its full of a large biomass boiler, hot water tank, pipes and boxes we haven't opened from the last 2-3 hosue moves Rob

@Andyjr1515 Thanks for your really nice comment. Appreciate it. I originally was going to use a Telecaster kit from a supplier to provide the neck, bridge and electrics, but after building it, I found the shape of the neck was too deep and I struggled to play it as my thumb was in agony after a while. Too many rugby injuries have taken their toll on my body. So I built it, enjoyed doing it with my daughter and gave the guitar to the local schools music dept who were very happy to take it off my hands. By this time, I had laid down the foundations of the 3d printed body and had designed the neck module depth (not width) to fit the other guitar neck. I then started looking around for a guitar neck to use instead and found somebody selling the neck I used on eBay. I took a gamble and it's a great neck. I'm 90% certain it came off a guitar similar to this https://www.axebition.com/electric-guitar/yamaha-rgx-121d. It's stamped RG121DM on the end but no date I could see. I'll be honest and say it never ocurred to me to change the neck height in the 3d printed neck module to compensate for the fact that this neck was not the one I planned for. My thinking is that the original neck was thicker than this one and simply putting a 1.6mm shim in brough the neck up to the same spec as before. Of course that could be complete b0ll0cks and it all just worked. I think the more experienced amongst you are ascribing a level of planning, competence and expertise to me that is wholly unwarranted, I think in my case three wrongs made a right. I've never thought about building a guitar before, so I tried to work out what I presumed would be the fundamentals, the length of the neck from the 12th fret to the bridge, the height of the fretboard and the height of the bridge. Everything else was just guesswork and trying to make it fit a shape I recognised and could print. In hindsight I made so many design and printing errors, I am mortified I got so many things wrong. Anyway, I have now: 1. Shimmed the neck up by 1.6mm 2. Lowered the nut by 0.5mm, glued it on using wood glue. 3. Raised the saddles so there is more adjustment. 4. Drilled a hole in the bridge module so I can run an earthing cable. As this is a 3d print, drilling is normally a big no-no, but as this is a proof of concept, I wasn't going to print another module, this time with a hole, and spend 10 hours waiting for it. 5. Put an earthing cable from the bridge to the ground on the control panel through the newly drilled hole. 6. Swapped the wiring around so that the switch works the right way. 7. Repaired the output socket. 8. Fixed the loose knob 9. Set the string height so its the same as my MIK Telecaster. 10. Tuned it up. 11. Plugged a NUX Mighty Plug Pro, attached headphones and strummed a barre G. Well knock me down with a feather. The damm thing worked, hum was almost all gone, tiny bit in the background but I've heard worse, it sounds great. The neck pickup sounds better than the one on my genuine Telecaster, the bridge pickup, not so good. The tone controls work. No neck buzz, no idea why, luck I guess, the 3d printed nut is fine, no idea how long it will last but it's 24 mins to print a new one. I'm going to leave it overnight and see if the strings go out of tune, but I'm quite pleased with how its turned out. I can still see every mistake I made (and there are lots) but not too shabby for a first effort. Now for V2 Rob

Printed a smaller height nut, printed a 1.6mm shim and put them on, adjusted the saddles and tried to set the strings the same height as my Squier 89 Telecaster. Different neck but it's all I have to go on and to be my utter amazement, its quite nice to play. The Yamaha neck is great, the tuners are really smooth. This is really nice neck and for £30(?) is fabulous value. Suspect it's 30+ years old but great value. I'd prefer it to be a little wider as I have big hands but I can live with it. However In the process I broke the cable off the output socket so that will need repairing and the soldering iron is downstairs and I have a 44 page business case to review before 17:00. So thats me for the day Rob

Thats an interesting idea. I have just about to print a 3d nut thats a little lower, I'll see if I can work it to use the tension rod slot to locate it. I will also print a few neck shims 0.75mm, 1mm, 1.25mm, 1.5mm, 1.75 and 2mm to see if that helps. If they do, I'll repring the neck module with the right size. This was originally designed for a different neck, so suspect thats my issue. Rob

Lowered the saddles as low as they can go, an awful lot better, suspect the nut is actually about right now. I think the neck is a little too low and that it should be around 1mm - 2mm higher so I can use the saddles a bit more. I can easily print a 1-2mm higher neck module, but will see if I can find a good guide to set the neck up properly. This is now a long way outside my comfort zone and expertise. Rob

@bartelby @BigRedX Thanks for this. I'll check out what I can do.

@Pea Turgh If mistakes are learning tools, I should be one of the cleverest people on the planet @BigRedX I've not even looked at the string height yet. The saddles can go lower. I'm going to print a nut to check things out before I start altering the the nut to fit. Thanks for the confirmation of the nut placement. Any idea what sort of glue would be good to fix the nut to the neck? Superglue, woodglue, uhu, hot glue? The bridge is not earthed yet. First job this monring when I go onto my first MS_Team call. can do that whilst listening in. I have some copper tape for cavity insulation. Lets see what difference an earth cable makes. V2 is already being thought about. Thanks Rob

Yes....from a distance. The number of mistakes I made when I look back it are far too numerous. I'm disappointed with how many there are. Plans now are to 1. remove the hum 2. get the action and intonation right. 3. Change the wiring so it works as expected 4. Fix the tone control knob as it's loose 5. Check if I can glue the outside frame with a decent plastic glue. Bostick hard plastic looks like it works, but want to try 3d Gloop for PETG. Can't find it at all in the UK. I have too many screws in the frame, it's rigid as hell but it takes a long time to print. I know what I said about glue, but I might change my mind. 6. Look again at variable layers in prusaslicer to try and get the little 5mm fillet around the edges cleaner. It looks bad to me. 7. Think through how to make the holes and embedded nuts at the same level as they are slightly different heights meaning the 3d printing interactions are too many. One of the pieces is circa 14 hours and needs constant attention to it nuts in. This means I cannot leave it for the whole day and must tend to it constantly. 8. Redo the outline shape to get it right before I do the rest. There are various issues with doing fillets on curves which means I need to have it right before I do the rest. I have a number of design changes labelled "hack1 to fix curve" 9. Do the maths to work out the honeycomb properly in advance as opposed to hacking it to make it fit. 10. Learn to cut wood with a coping saw so it doesn't look like I used my teeth to cut the curves. There are loads more as well. Oh well.

I can see your point here, you have to think in both a classic, almost Newtonian way of thinking and then at the same time switch your brain almost through 180 degrees into Niels Bohr mode, depending on exactly how you wish to examine the world. I have the same issue every time I buy a guitar, I think classically, "Can I afford it?" and then I shift into the Quantum mode of uncertainty, "Will my other half find out about it?". We can also consider Shrodinger here, his classic "Is the cat in the box dead or alive" experiment, can be rewritten to "If my other half doesn't know about the new guitar, does it even exist for her?" or more simply "If she finds out, will she kill me?", basically I am alive and dead at the same time fulfilling Shrodingers axioms.

It's finally wired up and working. A few problems. 1. The action is so high, the strings are in different timezones to the neck. 2. The nut isn't fixed down as I don't know how to fix it. Also not sure which is the front and the back of the nut. I think the front is the flat side and the rounded side goes to the tuners. 3. The hum from the guitar is appalling. Not sure if this is because there is no cavity shielding, poor soldering or bad/no earth. I suspect earthing but not going to look at it tonight. 4. I misread the wiring diagram so the switch is back to front but it does work. 5. The pickguard looks like it was put together by a five year old. It is lighter than my other Telecaster, the neck feels good and if I could reach the strings to press them down, that would be better. No idea about how it really sounds until I get the hum under control. I suspect I need a cable from the bridge to the earth on the control panel but thats tomorrows work. However it plays. Not very well (yet), but it does play

Perhaps it'll become the Scottish and North West bass bash....