1Q22 Challenge - Knob Twiddling

TTony

You're not working at the moment, are you Wez? !!

WezV

TTony said:

You're not working at the moment, are you Wez? !!

In terms of day job... working from home 4 days a week, in the office  for 1. 

Most of these experiments only take a few minutes to mix up, so are making a nice lunch and breaktime project.

WezV

Taken some mixed colour knobs out the new molds this morning.   Some left over resin went into the original mold to make some dome knobs



Bubbles did cause a high failure rate on the gibson style knobs, right in that tight edge at the bottom of the mold... but a promising first attempt


The witch hat cast nicely, and the dome knobs are almost perfect.

WezV

Chopping board mold turned up from Wish,  should be good for making scratchplate material,  along with a ring mold for non guitar related projects

WezV

So I did some tort and a couple of rings, but almost all the yellow disappeared as it cured.  I need to play a bit more with the colours.  It's almost clear out of the mold.  Think I need dark brown base, then add the lighter stuff

The rings  have proper tort patterning though.

WezV

Think the next steps will be to drill and polish a load of these knob experiments to see what works and what doesn't 

WezV

First 7 dome knobs done and I'm out of inserts



The torty varieties work much better once drilled out.  


Obviously bubbles on the red ones have collected compound, hut I can clean that out once dry 

Bidley

The reddish dome knobs look immensely cool - would look great on my Horizon!

ThePrettyDamned

They look really good. The colours all look good to me. Translucent white smoke anyone? 

Are you thinking of designing your own knobs? I think you'd make them from clay or similar modeling resin, then cast them. Could be pretty cool! 

WezV

I'm not sure about designing my own yet, not sure what I would change.   I did consider recarving some of the wax ones I made to test the first mold

WezV

some tubing has just turned up

this is 6mm ID, 8mm OD clear PVC used as fuel pipe.  It's  flexible, but fairly rigid


its a push fit onto the knobs and seems to grip them really well.  


It will have less give once glued into the middle of a pot, so I'm confident this will make a good inert for push fit knobs

paulnb57

That has potential…

Roland

I love threads like his: pushing the boundaries and exploring new things.

WezV

the tube worked reasonably well, but a little tighter would be ideal.  you can force the knob to keep turning at the end of the pot's travel.  8/10   getting closer

davros

deleted, I didn't read your previous post properly!!

WezV

clear strat knobs, working quite well


although i need to find a suitable paint for the letters and numbers.   tried some copper i had here and it either all wipes out, or is difficult to move when trying to clean them up.  obviously these are pretty hard to repolish with the ridges down the side

markblack

Interesting thread.

I'm sure you've seen this but in case you haven't.

https://www.tdpri.com/threads/epic-knobs-for-andy-brainy.655962/page-10

M

DartmoorHedgehog

Looking pretty good now

Flip

My wife is a keen epoxy fan so this is secondhand - the advice she had was to pour something as deep as a knob (ie diameter to depth) is best done in stages, allowing each stage to set without bubbles before pouring (actually pipetting) the next 'layer'.

The other thing I didn't know was that different acrylic colours have different 'wights' and if you use them together (rather than thoroughly mixed) some colours eg white sink to a different level to other colours.

WezV

I did have a quick play with pipettes on one of the last rounds, but will give that another go.

Layering was something I was nervous about at first, but the working time is so long on this stuff it should work well

I know what you mean about white sinking.  That worked really well for me on the purple ones i did