This week on Maker Update: building a bass guitar from scratch, a DIY Sawstop, taking the fun out of jigsaw puzzles, zip-tie channels, 3d scanners, and better living through electrolysis.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.294]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Building a Custom Bass by Xyla Foxlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KML8mQIZkNI

-=More Projects=-

DIY Sawstop by Ruth Amos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F87u7IQL-3M

3d Printed Handbag by 3D Print and design
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSqAChFuueo

CNC Jigsaw Puzzle Solver by Stuff Made Here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu_1S77XkiM

-=Tips & Tools=-

Zip Tie Channels in 3d Print Designs by Alan Reiner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgt9P6jsyaY

Raspberry Pi Alternatives by MichaelKlements
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_FWsuQwSMk

Tips and Tricks for 3D Scanning by 3D Print Everything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiLMHEtqUOY

Electro-Etching Brass Plaques by Becky Stern
https://beckystern.com/2022/07/31/electro-etching-brass-plaques/

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Improving your Sense of Direction by Shawn Hymel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JudlgRa8PuU

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: Building a Bass Guitar from scratch, A DIY Sawstop, Taking the fun out of Jigsaw Puzzles, Ziptie Channels, 3d scanners, and better living through electrolysis.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, I hope you’re all doing great. I gotta be honest, I’ve been feeling a little like my home computer is a little cursed – I’ve had to replace a bunch of different, unrelated components in the past week. I hope that your work is going a little more smoothly – lets check out the project of the week. 

Speaking of feeling a little bit cursed, Xyla Foxlin managed to build this gorgeous, custom bass guitar while going through a rough patch of her own – she moved shops, got covid, her house got burgled, and a bunch of other unfortunate stuff. But that didn’t stop her from making amazing projects – like this Bass. As a first time making a musical instrument, you would think she’d take it easy and make a solid body instrument – but have you ever seen any of her projects? Keeping things simple just isn’t what she does.

Instead she came up with this open body design with these hollow wings made of bent laminations – and it looks incredible. She starts the video off showing how to build a steam box to steam the wood so it could be bent into the shapes she needed for the body. Then she carved out the main body of the guitar which is made from this massive block of purple heart – which afforded plenty of its own challenges. I’ve never worked with it before, and after hearing how much of a pain it is to work with, I’m not sure I want to.

I’ve watched a  handful of guitar builds, and its at this point they typically bolt on an off-the shelf neck, wire in the electronics, and call it good. That’s not what’s happening here – even the neck, the fretboard, the headstock, every last bit is custom made and every part of the build is thoroughly documented. Whether you’re hoping to learn how to shape a guitar neck, steam bending wood, or just set up elaborate clamping jugs, this video is full of incredible references. 

And the resulting instrument doesn’t just look great, it sounds amazing too. The other shock is that Xyla had never held a bass guitar before designing and making this one. There’s a ton of work that went into this project, but its a great testament to sticking it out and building something that only you can build. Chances are you aren’t going to try and duplicate this one – but maybe someone out there can – Xlya is selling off the templates on Ebay.

More projects! Most people don’t look at a Sawstop table saw and think “I could build that myself” – but then again, most people aren’t Ruth Amos. She was recently gifted a tablesaw and after googling all of the ways you can easily injure yourself with one, she decided to take a shot of adding a sawstop-styled safety system to stop the blade if her hand came into contact with it.

Like any great idea, she had a couple of different iterations on the design – a bar that would jam into the spinning blade to stop it, Another that would knock into it from the side – what really impressed me was how easy it was to design the skin-sensing mechanism. It’s basically just a big capacitive touch sensor, which is a pretty easy task for an Arduino. The blade brake that actually worked was an electromagnetic clutch – and while the genuine article can stop the blade a little bit faster sparing more injury, Ruth’s creation looks pretty effective here. Don’t worry though, she’s still saving up for the brand name.

From the facebook 3d printing group I found this handbag designg by 3d print and design. This entire bag is made of flexible panels printed in TPU. But because the entire bag is much larger than most print volumes, the entire surface of the bag is intended to be stitched together like fabric or leather. The solvent used to do this is called Tetrahydrofuran – it looks like it bonds the TPU together by melting it into a single piece. Its great to see 3d printing used in fashion design, but I’ve never seen an approach quite like this. Its a great watch, and a fun video seeing the entire design process, and learning how to make your own voronoi panels. Great stuff.

And finally, Shane from Stuff Made Here has another video where he’s building a complex robot to make the world a little less fun – this time, he’s making a robot that solves jigsaw puzzles. This is one of those problems that just gets more complicated the more you think about it. In order to manipulate the pieces, he needs a high speed gantry with a suction grabber. For the software to understand the shape of the pieces, it needs to capture images of them without any parallax. And to store all of the scanned pieces, it needs this elaborate magazine system to catalog the pieces. 

In this two part project, you’ll see him wrestle with most of the mechanical issues with the project – but before the robot can attempt its intended goal of a 5000 piece puzzle, the software needs to become a lot more efficient – right now it would need to compute for over three thousand years before its ready to start assembling the puzzle. The second part will reveal how he handles that – but in the meantime, the project is already seriously impressive, even just solving small puzzles.

Time for some tips and tools, on Alan Reiner’s youtube channel he shares his latest obsession with making ziptie channels in his 3d printed designs. These are essentially just a curved path through the walls of a 3d print that allow you to use zip ties as anchors. TThese can be used for cable management, mounting electronics, securing batteries, or even attaching two different 3d printed parts together. They look like they’d be fairly simple to add into your modeling workflow, so maybe give this a shot on your next design.

If you’ve gone shopping for a raspberry pi recently, you;ve probably realized how difficult and expensive it can be thanks to the global chip shortage. Michael Klements has a helpful video on some of the alternative single board computers you might be tempted to use instead. He compares them on cost, features, quality of documentation, GPIO, and compatibility with the rest of the pi’s ecosystem of add -on boards. Hopefully this can help get your project back on the road if you’ve been waiting for affordable Pis to become available.

On the 3d print everything youtube channel, they’ve got a video on various tips and tricks in using 3d scanners. They share what they know on the types of scanners they have found to work best, how to set up a good scanning environment, and the best ways to reduce reflections which can cause errors in your scan. There’s also a good breakdown on how to clean up the resulting data into something workable.

And finally, Becky Stern has a great tip on how to use electrolysis to etch brass. Brass can easily be etched through a number of different processes, but they normally involve a lot of nasty chemicals. But with electrolysis, all you need is salt water, a low-voltage power supply, and a piece of scrap steel. You’ll also need an aquarium pump to keep the water moving. This seems like a fantastic method for anyone who has wanted to try etching brass, but didn’t want to bother with all the acids needed for the traditional methods. 

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, Shawn Hymel has an interesting experiment – just like me, Shawn claims to have a terrible sense of direction – and he wants to use technology to try and improve it. The idea is that he’ll create a wearable device with a magnetometer and a haptic feedback motor that will buzz whenever he is facing north. Hopefully with that confirmation feedback he can also identify other clues or landmarks to better learn which direction is north – the angle of the sun, looking for certain landmarks, and maybe even developing a greater sensitivity to the planet’s magnetic field. I won’t spoil the ending, but its a fun watch.

Alright, and that is going to do it for this week’s show! I hope you had a good time with it. If you  did, be sure to subscribe, give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment – I’m curious to know what your favorite project or tip was. Big thanks as always to Digikey for making this whole thing possible – and to you for watching. Take care, we’ll see you soon.