rwillett

Sam,

To me the neck is the most important bit. I can change the pickups, I can do a new body, replace the tuners etc etc, but I can't make a neck. I've seen the one with an aluminium truss rod and it was OK as an intellectual exercise, but would Geezer play it? Probably not.

Thats why I made the design to handle just about any neck, because I couldn't make a neck.

Now your problem, finding a headless five string is tricky. Necks seem to attract a lot of money. I was very lucky with the MIM Jazz neck. I also have a lovely Aria Pro neck as well as a decent Ibanez neck for the next bass projects. One of these, probably the Ibanez will be the headless bass, simply because the shape of the head makes it easier to convert to headless. Mind you I'm probably wrong as normal. I have four eBay searches setup for guitar necks and most of the results are rubbish, but occassionally one pops up thats worth a punt.

I am assuming that a wide four string neck can't be repurposed to a five string neck with a new nut? Its going to be headless so the number of tuner holes is immaterial.

Rob

The rakish angle was driven by necessity rather than design. I do like them now. 

The body is using the veroni shapes you suggested.

I have done no work on the finish. That's being thought about and tested in the garage on some old bits. 

Well after an evening of glue sniffing and the like, I bit the bullet, pulled everything together to see how it worked. Nothing worked for a while until I realised that the metal control plate acts as an earth and as I hadn't used it, plastic wasn't the solution. A quick application of copper tape on the back of the control panel solved that little issue.

The pickups actually look good and work well. Not set anything up beyond screwing it together and tuning it. Plugged it into GarageBand and it sounded fine, plugged into a NUX micro headphone amp and sounded fine. Plays OK, zero neck dive. The neck is great, the Hipshot tuners work well and it's a good guitar. Not tried to compare it to my Fender Jazz or Mustang, but good first effort.

Will now try and set it up properly.

The last photo was coz I left the camera in black and white mode. It is a very black guitar.

Never thought of using it for that. Still working out what I can do with it. My aim was to simply cut out the right shape in the aluminium.

It's far too powerful for printed filament and it needs some care and attention.  I suspect shaping plywood will be a doddle if I make a six string again. 

Oh God. Birthday year and I'm driving back near Pudsey in a few hours. 

Still need to think about finishing it. Sanding, spraying and lacquer/epoxy resin comes to mind. 

Epoxy resin wasn't a great success but I'll try again. 

A busy weekend of rugby and finishing things.

Pickguard and control panel facia now done.

Bottom of guitar glued in place. 

Pickups are currently slanted as I think they are too wide for the strings to sit in the middle of the pickups. My Fender Jazz pickups aren't perfectly aligned but still better than this. Is this normal?

Intending to have this finished middle of the week now. Need to glue the top of the guitar on and then get into setting it up. 

Do you get many plastic corner eating veloceraptors in Bristol? 

Rob

Anybody regularly selling on Ebay will be aware of distance selling regs. 

It all comes down to how much hassle they create. I took a company to court over a Bluetooth speaker, nothing nothing nothing until we walked through the door and they settled. Told the magistrate all done and they moved on. 

Distance selling regs invalidates the "No returns" claim. They can say what they like, but they can't ignore the law. even though they try to. Local trading standards won't do anything, but a small claim is easy to make. 90% of people in this position will settle out of court.

Now whether somebody would take them to court is another issue, but the small claims court fees are quite low and I would suggest that have a 100% chance of winning their case. I'm running something like 4-0 on small claims. over the last 20 years.

Rob

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

1 hour ago, Woodinblack said:

 

Oh in that case, no, there is no point in him. So buyer beware.

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

1 hour ago, Jonesy said:

I also like that you're using your Hartke as a stand for the boiler 😂 

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.