Hardware starting to roll in

Yup it's getting close to finishing off the uke.

Yesterday the brass washers showed up and today the 6mm heat set brass inserts arrived.

All I'm waiting on now are the 6mm nuts and hopefully they will arrive tomorrow otherwise it's Monday.

It looks like I'll have to further widen the holes with a drill, but I'll wait and see.

I'll use the bolts fed through from one side to help pull the insert square into it's final location while applying heat to the insert. Well that's in theory and works with the 3mm ones I have, I think I need need more hands.

UV light to test the Glow

Using a UV light to test the Glow in the dark properties of the Uke

Using the phone with the flash turned off to try and capture the glow. Doesn't make for great artistic photographs but not the object of the exercise.

Test assembly

It's looking pretty good especially for a prototype. The glued neck seems stronger than I thought it would be, but we'll just have to wait and see I guess.


Scale length 17inches or 431mm

Click to see larger image

It looks like I might be able to cover the gap in the join with the bridge woo hoo, well at minimum hide it somewhat.

I put the bone saddle in the bridge cavity. One of my fears is the 3d printed bridge is going to fail under the tension on it, the other despite having a pretty good glue the thing just pops off under load as well.

I'm under no illusion that the sound from this thing may/will be a little insipid....Dream big and hang the quicyconses. This is making, art, music and discovery!

Dunny dived, bed made, neck glued Tick

...oh and my back is killing me :-D



Using a pin vice to do the drilling for the little screws that hold the machine heads

I'm using an old set of bathroom scales glass that I salvaged to clamp the neck sections while the glue sets. Oh and a sheet of baking paper so the glue doesn't stick hahahahahaa yeah right lol

I'm using the Icon branded pvc glue on the neck and used it on half the body as well. The biggest issue with it is that it is white and stands out on this translucent glow in the dark blue filament.

I found it locally at Bunnings but I had to really search for it.

                            

Some old drawings I did

Skeleton Ukulele Assembly

I've started to assemble the ukulele

Sanding the edges so things sit flat against each other

I have some sandpaper sitting on some glass taken from a set of bathroom scales

Using some spring clamps to hold everything in place

Here it is with a section of the neck for a test fitting............so far so good.

I'm still left with a gap in the joint after all the sanding but it will be covered by the bridge...hopefully

The Skeleton Ukulele neck is done

It isn't glued yet, but it is complete, well up to the point of adding the nut inserts which are still on their way.

With the fretboard layed on top.

I'm still not certain if it will be strong enough to withstand the string tension and I'll really only know when the fretboard is also glued to the neck and when I'm stringing it up.

Skeleton Ukulele Neck update

So I decided to order some glow in the dark filament from Aurarum who had it in stock, rather than wait for Blueprinted to get some more in eventually.

It's bound to be a different colour (edit: it's really close in colour) but I'm now past that precious stage and thinking will this never end and not really caring anymore lol

The 8mm Carbon fibre rod I ordered from HobbyKing also showed up the other day and well I'm printing. Yay

Still no sign of any of the other stuff ordered from aliexpress but it's not really expected for some weeks.

I've slowed down the print speed from 60mm/s to 50mm/s but increased the thickness from 0.25 to 0.3

The neck is printed in 3 sections named body centre & head.

The new glow in the dark body section printed and the new 8mm and 4mm carbon fibre rod fitted

So far it seems to be pretty close in colour and it glows in the dark in a very similar colour as well. 

Carbon fibre doesn't like being cut and tears at the first opportunity. A brief duck duck go found these results. I decided as I have a Dremel (Knock off) I'll just use the diamond cutoff wheel I have for it.

For gluing the pieces together I'm not so concerned with the glue sticking to the carbon fibre as I am to making sure it sticks to the plastic. So I'm going with UHU's All Plastics I've used it in the past on both ABS and PLA and will be testing it on petg soon as well.

I'm printing the centre and the head today and testing the fit of the carbon rods

The evenly placed wave lines seem very prominent on this filament. Not really an issue as they're more cosmetic than anything else and I plan to smooth the back of the neck anyway. I must look into this at some point but won't be overly concerned as I'm going to slowly build my own Ultimaker 2 at some point in the future, but more like This and or This

The harsh side lighting and translucent filament is making the print look exceptionally uneven but I can assure you is actually a pretty good print.

I have to redesign it a bit though as it wasn't thick enough so its gone from 10mm thick to 12 mm

A couple of pics on just how good pei is. The head of the ukulele sitting on 12mm x 34mm

with no support.

3 point vs 4 point bed levelling on a 3d Printer

A quick visual overview of why a 3 point leveling system on a 3d printer is better than a 4 point system.

I didn't say in the video but if your glass plate, if you have one, will not be in perfect contact with the aluminium plate and not transferring its heat efficiently. 

If you are not using glass then you could be suffering from bad adhesion problems that you just can't fix. One problem I was having when I moved to using a glass plate was the screws were pushing down upon the acrylic Y carriage and warping it because the glass doesn't bend and it ended up crashing into the frame so I had to replace the acrylic with an aluminium. Probably wouldn't have been a problem with 3 points of contact.

Actuator wave like robot (While I wait for more filament to show up)

http://phys.org/news/2016-08-actuator-wave-like-robot.html

Discussion here

Any updates will be posted here so come back to see its progress.


A challenge to reverse engineer this robot had a couple of us trying to see if we could do it. We have no other designs on this other than scientific curiosity and to see if it is possible.

I'd like to say as of right now yes, yes it is possible I have a crude partially working prototype.

Due to the size limitations of my printer 220 x 220 x 230mm and not wishing to join and lengths of anything I have to keep the longest piece to under 220mm. That means the helix can't be any longer unless I join it. Keeping everything else to some kind of scale similar to the original article forces me to keep some of the other pieces quite small and delicate.

A redesign while not keeping to the scale of the one in the article could mean a sturdier and easier to work with model so I might look into that in the future.

At this stage it is being held together quite precariously with bits of filament which are not held in position by anything and fall out if you even breathe too hard :-) 

How best to fix the filament to the pieces, I'm still considering. Melting the ends with a metal object that's been heated may be my option but I'm still printing more of the errrr legs so I have time to think about it.

Printed in Blueprinted black and glow in the dark eSun blue

Ok for the connectors I just melted a piece of filament to put a mushroom on one end then threaded it through the two pieces and then applied the soldering iron to the other end and this seems to work.

Edit.

The small legs were failing and breaking so I've redesigned it to be a bit bigger.

Here are the last pictures I took of it before it broke after showing the successful working prototype :-)

Printed in what whatever was in the printer at the time in this case some glow in the dark blue and black pla

Rather than an electric motor I just designed a hand crank which broke after some vigorous winding by enthusiastic testers. You know who you are!