rwillett

@JohnH89 That's really helpful, I'll look at doing that. The back of the neck looks a lot easier for a veneer than the front. I can easily clamp it, as I do have a lot of clamps. Didn't know about the towel and hot water trick. The neck is maple (I think), but a heavy weathered finish. I am very unlikely to find a veneer that will closely match, so using a contrasting veneer would be best. I do like your walnut finish. That Black Bison Wax is expensive though I've just finished making the bushings to make the Hipshort Ultralites fit the neck. An easy 3D print even at 100% infill of about 10min each, nice and tight and the plastic won't deform (or at least I hope not, otherwise I'll have to do it in metal). 18.5mm external diameter and 16.75mm internal diameter. You can see two of them below. I've screwed the two Hipshots on to make sure they all fit. Now printing the last big piece of the guitar Relatively small at 22 hours Rob

Is it on here? http://75.151.102.194/DDOS I just searched for the file XUSBAudioDfu.exe which might be the right installer or might not. I don't have the x32 so not 100% sure. which file you might need. I suspect there are other sites that might have it as well that are more legitimate. Personally speaking I wouldn't download it from the above but depends on your level of risk or need. If you can find the checksum of the the file that'll give you some level of comfort. Rob

Now that is a good idea. Didn't think of that. is that a wood laminate or something else (I have no idea what else it could be). Is it easy to apply? The front of the headstock is fine, its the back that I want to cover up. Just looked at the back and it's very flat and might be easy to do (for some value of the word easy). Let me know what you did to get that lovely finish please. Between the two of us, you're fine with wood and metal, and I'm find with computer/CAD we might make a complete artist Rob

So far so good. The picture below is the Top Right of the guitar. 22hrs 43mins to go. The hexagon pattern is the support for the undeneath of the middle of the guitar. This support will be cut away as the middle of the guitar is H shaped. The bottom part of the H will be the plywood backbone. This is a cutaway of the guitar so you can see the H. This helps provide strutural integrity This the the top left and middle. This was 38 hours long and now down to 18 hours or so. The section on the right in the picture below is the top left of the guitar. The section on the right with the the holes is where the bridge and pickups will go. The holes on each side allow pickups to be mounted directly to the guitar OR I can mount the pickups on a pickup shield. There's one more major section to print after this and then I can think about assembly. I now have the Hipshot lightweight tuners, thanks @Raslee. I will need to make some bushingsso that they are a tight fit. I have also been filling the back of the guitar neck wher the old mounting screws were with bamboo skewers and TiteBond. It was suggested that Bamboo is a good choice as its a very hard wood and it comes in 3mm wide skewers which are a bit big, but I trim them down. The only problem is that the colours don't make at all Any suggestions as to handle the colour difference welcomed.

It's the first layers that normally go wrong. So far, so good. Both printers running, just changed the filament on them so they'll now run through the night. Thats the idea anyway. I'm normally up around 06:30 so will check in on them. if these go OK, then two more to go, similar times to print. I'll set up the webcams on the next lot so I can do time lapse recordings. Rob

Might have underestimated the printing time a wee bit This will take 28 hours <gulp>. No embedded nuts so fire and forget. This one is 37 hours 82MB of g-code, hoping nothing goes wrong. Lots of embedded nuts 18 hours in, so around 09:00 tomorrow morning.

Not sure what the difference will be here as the body is plastic and there is a plywood back. I've just had a blast on the 3d printed six string and compared it to my Telecaster, its different but the sustain feels the same. Now I am not a good guitarist, I'm not even sure I'm good enough to be even a bad one, so other people will have a different opinion. I'll bring all my guitars along to the NW Bass Bash so people can play and find out. The bass might be finished by then (I hope). Rob

No problem, let me book myself into a hospital to have all my good taste, common sense and aversion to bling removed Give me a few days. Rob

After a lot of thinking about how to simplify things, I think I've got the design finished. I've been trying to work out how to simplify the printing and print at a higher resolution so it looks good. The issue was and still is, printing at a higher resolution takes a lot longer, a hell of a lot longer and when you have to do things like embed nuts to allow the pickguard to attach, you find that this needs to be done at 03:30 in the morning which is not conducive to a good nights sleep. So I have experimented with gluing nuts and similar in AFTER the guitar has been printed. This means that I focus on getting the nuts embedded early in the guitar print and then, let it print for the next 26 hours. You can see this with the twelve large circular holes below. Ignore the large number of M3 holes, they still stay there. I've now split the model to make each piece as big as possible so the bits only just fit on the printing bed. Before I had nine pieces, I'm now down to five (plus the neck adaptor). I have most of the rest the pieces as well, neck, lightweight tuners, bridge, pickups (though I may wind my own), control knobs and tone controls. So I've about 7-10 days of printing but I have six 1Kg rolls of black so should be OK.

Sounds like everytime I try to play....

That's exactly my point as to why I shouldn't be let near power tools.

I'm tired of playing with fire... and electricity greater than 0.1A and 5V... and circular saws that jump off the bed...and heat sinks that can melt lead...and toxic fumes from playing with ABS...and picking up hot metal from forges... I just about have 10 fingers and thumbs, though I look at them and I have knocked chunks off them and have had bits sewn back on. Rob

That's a fair point.

@nekomatic Sitting on my desk as I speak are: 1 x Raspberry Pi 3, 1 x Raspberry Pi 5 1 x Leonardo Uno (Arduino) 1 x Uno (No name) but it's a nice shade of blue 1 x Keystone 16x2 LCD display with 5 press buttons 1 x CNC Shield V3 3 x DRV 8226 stepper drivers 1 x Freenove Smart Car Shield for Raspberry Pi 1 x Keystudio Motor driver board 1 x WiFi proxy gateway for FIL to get streaming services from our IP address. I know I have a few more Uno's and Pis somewhere as they came with something but got put in a box. Equipment I have, time to write a comms protocol to exchange information to drive a separate LCD display on a different Arduino, not so much.

I have never used punch cards or tape. Well that's not strictly true, they did get used on a Friday night when around 2cm x 2cm squares were ripped out, rolled up and Mr Rizla helped out. The year ahead of me used punch cards, but we moved to micro's and CP/M, I'm reasonably certain I have never directly programmed a main frame apart from writing six Cobol programmes in my second year. All UNIX, networking, Lisp and interesting stuff. Odd how I've moved from multi GB UNIX systems back to 256KB, a 4x4 keyboard and directly programming pins. Rob

My background is Unix, started with very early version of stuff on Vax 11/750's and 11/780's. We used to get 1" (?) tape from Bell Labs, I recall a certain Mr Kernighan sending stuff to us on occassion. My final year thesis was on Lisp and garbage collection and was done on a 64KB (yep 64KB) UNIX box from Motorola with a M68000 processor (might have been a variant as I suspect it had paging built in). Long time ago though,. The Arduino's are quite simple in some respects, limited memory 256KB, only 16Mhz CPU, lots of bit banging to get keyboards and LCD's working as keyboards and displays are very optional extras. I'm having to recall stuff from a long time ago as I'm writing the code, but working in limited ram space is not too bad, at least once the LCD display is connected I can get something out and be seen, the Arduino IDE has a serial IO system, so I can write debugging back. I can remember writing kernel code and using a single led on a control panel to check things were working and building things up from there. The other problem I have is that the guitar winder is downstairs as my office desk is full so I can only work on stuff in the evening. It also requires a dedicated Macbook for the IDE. Glad you have confidence in me. I don;t Rob

I'm not downhearted. This is normal TBH on project development. I can easily replace the 8mm pitch with a 2mm pitch that will just slot straight in. I'm hanging on as the options are: 1. Replace the 8mm with a 2mm one. Cost £10-£20. I'd prefer a ball screw but they are a lot more money but are quieter, smoother and more accurate. 2. Use micro stepping, so I can drive the motor at 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and I believe 1/32 steps. So I add 2-3 jumper and go from 400 steps to 800, 1600, 3200. 6400 and possibly 12800 stepers per 360 degree rotation. So the 8mm pitch is cancelled out by going to 1/4 microsteps which costs a few jumpers on the driver board. Since I've not done it yet, I have no idea of the downsides as there will be some Repeatedability is still key Rob

No it's not interupt driven. The view from Arduino crowd is that interupts are not a good idea on the whole, though there are exceptions. At the start I assumed interrupts would be the way to go, but the recommendation was "no". I do recall TSR programs for DOS and they were a pain so not too worried about not using interupts. Even thing like checking for the limit switch being activated is done through pollng. I think the reason is that the Arduino doesn't have an OS, though there is is RTOS (https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/libraries/freertos/) which is too big a rabbit hole for me to go down, but is on my backlog. All you have is a call to setup() and a call to loop(), so when you press the reset button or startup, you get setup() called and then the system repeatedly calls loop(). All the main code is in the loop and the key is to keep the loop code down to the minimum, that part is fine. I call the init code for everything in setup() and then I have as little code as possible in loop(). Think of loop() as a ticker. You set the stepper motors up and then make a call to the API to do the work, the Accelstepper library API works out if there is a motor step due and if so does it. The rule is to call the code to checkl and move motors at least one per call to loop (). Making calls to the LCD is exceptionally time sensitive, so the strong recommendations for using the LCD library are: 1. Do not use lcd.clear() under any circumstances, if in doubt write spaces to clear the display. 2. Write non changing parts of the LCD once and then only change the parts of the LCD display that actually change. I'm down to changing just three characters 3. Write the changing parts as infrequently as possible, e.g. don't try and update the display 50x a second as thats pointless. I update the LCD display using a timer about every two seconds and thats just to change three characters. 4. Think about diferent displays that are quicker, some LCD displays take 200ms to update. Thats a fifth of a second. Thats crap. Suspect I may have one. 5. Use a different LCD library that is faster, so I now use https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/libraries/hd44780/ as opposed to the standard LD library and that made a big difference, but I still get the motor stalling. I am seriously considering a wholly separate Arduino driving the LCD display and using some sort of serial comms to link them together. What puzzles me is that my Prusa printers use similar tech and have no issues updating the LCD and the motors never stall. I'll keep digging. Rob

I think your explanation is spot on. It's an easy fix, but at the moment I'll keep the threaded rod with an 8mm pitch. Bit annoyed but I'll live. Biggest problem now is that writing even three characters to the lcd at a 1-2 second interval, can sometimes stop the looping motor. No idea why and need to dig in. I'm suspecting a timing issue but the code is so trivial, I can't see why. If I don't update the lcd display, it just works. I have changed the lcd library I use but they all appear to be mostly blocking calls, hence why I suspect a timing issue.

Just worked it out. There are four threads on the rod and each thread is 2mm apart. Each thread has a pitch of 8mm but as there are four threads it looks like tighter thread. The brass nut has a internal pitch of 8mm. I suppose the only advantage I can see is that the four threads mean the nut can join in four places at the start, but since that's a one off activity, that can't be it. The solution is to buy an 8mm lead screw with a 2mm pitch. All the other stuff stays the same. Should be relatively easy. Anyone want an 8mm lead screw with an 8mm pitch? Rob

The next episode is where I discover that what I thought was an 2mm pitch threaded rod is actually an 8mm pitch threaded rod. This means that when I send down 400 steps to the motor, I expected the threaded rod to rotate 360 degrees and to move the winder mechanism 2mm whereas in fact it turned one turn and moved 8mm. As none of my children seem to possess a ruler, I possess digital calibers and do not need rulers, I work digitally and rely on my school age children to provide simple things like rulers, so I guessed how far it was moving until the kids finally found a ruler. As I'm a man, my guesses at distances were perfectly accurate (not). I've just spent two hours looking through Arduino code, trying to understand what I was doing wrong. I've checked motor speeds, distanceToGo(), current settings, aceleration, pulse width settings, written loads of debug code . I must have compiled the stuff 50x trying to find out the problem. I then looked on Amazon and checked what I had brought. This is the diagram I saw Note the words "Screw Spacing: 2mm". Now I thought this meant that one turn means 2mm, it doesn't mean that at all, what I should have looked for was this highlighted below. As I've been working in single steps on the motor, which is too small to see, I never noticed it was all wrong and 4x too much. It was actually one line of code to change a parameter from 2mm to 8mm and it now homes properly. I wonder if I'm actually gone mad and this is all a bad dream Why can't I have have dreams with enormous amounts of alcohol, fabulous food and beautiful women hanging on my every word. Why do I have dreams about debugging things? Off to take the dog for a walk and clear my head. Rob

@Woody1957 You never played "pin the tail on the bass guitar" before? What did you do as a kid at parties?