No holes baseplate

[Jason Rodgers]

Ok, the sheet metal guillotine is assembled, and it works!

Simple parts. Maple 1x2 from the Depot for the scissor arms, some plywood for the base, and a 3" long 1/4-20 carriage bolt with locking nut. These are the old, chipped-up blades from my 6" benchtop jointer. I'm not using the knife edge for cutting, but the square back of the blade.

And this is what it looks like assembled. I tested it out on a soda can and tin can lid. The soda can was .0035" thick, and I could cut through 12 layers (.042") without much trouble. The food can lid was .010", and it left a clean edge on two layers. Notice that curves can be cut, as well.

The 22 gauge nickel silver sheet I purchased online for prototyping these bases is .025" thick, so I think this should work out fine. I might even try out 20 guage (.032") if the cutting and bending goes well on the 22 gauge. That sheet was supposed to arrive in the mail yesterday, so I should be able to post some pics of a first product soon.

[Jason Rodgers]

My nickel silver sheet arrived in the mail today, so I gave a go at making a baseplate. While I certainly learned a good deal, I wouldn't necessarily call it a success. I'm going to lay it all out here, fellas, the good, bad, and ugly.

I sketched out three baseplates for 6-, 7-, and 8-string humbuckers, each with a different angle that matches the fretboard and bridge tilt for my multi-scale guitars.

Then scratched layout lines on the metal.

Now, cutting this all out is where I learned my first big lesson. Basically, I drew up a slant-y version of a typical humbucker baseplate. Two things that didn't work well: 1- Inside corners DO NOT turn out well on the guillotine. 2- Too many lines and changing directions of material makes for too many cuts... makes for too much time... and starts making it not worth the trouble. If I'm serious about pursuing this, I'm going to have to rethink my design to limit those two issues. Instead of starting with a typical baseplate, I need to work from the other direction.

Next lesson learned: a metal brake is a special tool. Bending sucked. The 6 inch sheet metal seamers I bought are cheap. They needed a lot of lapping to make the jaws close evenly, and there's a lot of slop in the action. Even when grasping them tightly with two hands, the jaws would tilt and the metal would slip on one side. Bending the legs worked perfectly, but that was only 1/2" of material.

All said, this prototype would work. It's ugly, but it would work.

Even if I abandon this idea and just choose to use stock parts and have straight pickups in my guitars, I didn't spend too much on this attempt. The guillotine was mostly made of materials I had around the shop, the seaming pliers were $16, and the 6"x6" sheet of nickel silver was $11.50 through Amazon Prime. Another perfectly acceptable option is just to use a flat baseplate without the legs.

[Jason Rodgers]

Ok, so I re-designed my base and tried again, aiming to address the challenges that I mentioned in the previous post. First and foremost, eliminate inside corners. This one basically needs 8 cuts, 7 if I put the template on the edge of the sheet. Cutting was quick and accurate. Another problem that those inside corners introduced was pinching and buckling. After every cut, I'd have to hammer the sheet flat again. Not a problem this time.

As for bending, I used my flat jaw seamers on the legs, but first I chucked the base up in the vise between two pieces of wood and tapped the edges over with a dead blow hammer and small peening hammer. This produced a clean and sharp edge, and again everything stayed nice and flat. I might get one of those clear, orange plastic head hammers, as the peen marred the surface slightly. Still, this result is WAY better than the first try.





I've drawn my baseplates up in Fusion 360 and will just print out full-size templates when I need to make them.