Rooks RCA-4!!!

[rook]

Cool knobs. Do they stay on the spit shaft pots OK with just a regular round hole for them? It looks like the shaft hole was designed-in rather than drilled afterwards.

I only tested one, but it worked okay. The guy who made the model designed the hole to be undersized. To make them fit I had to slowly enlarge the hole until I had a tight fit. Was a bit of extra work, but functioned in the end.

[rook]

TRUSS ROD COVER AND LOGO:

I've been experimenting with a truss rod cover that I could 3D print.

Luckily I came across a model on Thingiverse that I could use as my starting place as I have very little 3D modeling experience.

I had to resize it to fit the pitbull RCA-4 headstock, but that wasn't too difficult.

I then designed the logo I wanted on the cover. Here's the logo I made in illustrator - the inspiration for the design is pretty obvious.



Ravi is my first name, hence "Ravibacker".

I then imported the illustrator SVG file into Fusion 360, extruded the text, and combined it with the model I found on Thingiverse.



I chose Fusion360 because it was free to download and use. It's fairly easy to use, but I'm new to the program so it took me way longer than it should have.

Once I was happy with the design, I exported the file and took it to the library to print it out.

Here it is at various stages:

Fresh from the 3D printer:


Trimmed and mid sanding to smooth it out:


And painted:


Paint job is a bit sloppy, but it looks pretty good in my opinion.

But here's the kicker -- I messed up the dimensions! I forgot that the tuners have a ring that lines the tuning peg holes. The ring is actually pretty wide which means this truss rod cover I made was too fat to fit. Pretty funny thing to discover right when I finished.

Oh, well... Back to make alterations!

All said and done, if I can get the size right I think it'll look pretty fun.

[pablopepper]

That is super cool! Great idea.

[Sonic Mountain]

Yeah that's really cool. I haven't tried fusion 360, might have to have a look.

I started out using Rhino 3d which I found really good. It has similar add/subtract and aligning tools to illustrator so it was pretty natural. The project I'm helping with has switched to 123D Design now which isn't too bad.

[Simon Barden]

Nice work. Can you simply sand it down to size, or will you have to re-print the whole thing?

[rook]

Nice work. Can you simply sand it down to size, or will you have to re-print the whole thing?

Thanks, Simon! I tried to sand it down, but I had printed it at only 20% infill so as I sanded it revealed a weird lattice work of plastic. Not a nice look. The next one I will print will be solid so I can sand as needed.

Learning as I go!

[rook]

Yeah that's really cool. I haven't tried fusion 360, might have to have a look.

I started out using Rhino 3d which I found really good. It has similar add/subtract and aligning tools to illustrator so it was pretty natural. The project I'm helping with has switched to 123D Design now which isn't too bad.

I haven't heard of Rhino3D or 123D thanks for the tip. I'll check them out. Fusion 360 is good, but it would be nice to find something that had less of a learning curve.

[rook]

That is super cool! Great idea.

Thanks, Pablo!

[Gary B]

More great work rook, well done. Taking your build to another level!
I had never thought about 3D printing being used for something like this but I reckon there would be a very healthy market for it if someone wanted to produce these sort of custom parts (hint:-))

[rook]

More great work rook, well done. Taking your build to another level!
I had never thought about 3D printing being used for something like this but I reckon there would be a very healthy market for it if someone wanted to produce these sort of custom parts (hint:-))

LOL! Hint taken! Thanks Gary!