HELLO! Time is flying!!! I have done a lot in the past few weeks, and not all of it has been sunshine and rainbows, unfortunately.
Within the past 2-3 weeks, I printed off a second tenor drone (both top and bottom) and for some reason, the drone doesn’t sound correct. I’m not able to get the normal tenor drone sound, and instead, I get a higher pitched warble, which I have not heard before. I attempted to sand the inside of the piece that was giving me trouble (the bottom of the drone, as the top was working fine with I combined it with the first bottom that I printed), and that did not help very much. I will be reprinting another bottom asap! (and hoping it works as well as the first one lol)
In other news, I also finished up my bass drone top and middle models and got them on the printer. The modeling process was very similar to modeling the tenor drones, as I had suspected. I’ve included the images below!
I was able to get these both on Rebecca’s printer at the same time last week, and had them printed off Wednesday, April 3rd. When I got to class, and saw them on the printer, the middle of the bass drone (the piece in gray) looked a bit strange.
As you might be able to see, there was some strange ribbing/layer-shifting toward the top. I had initially thought that it could have been wobbling a bit from the movement of the bed, but the top of the drone (the print on the right) looks perfectly fine, which was even more strange. Because of this (and a small error in my model, but not big enough to cause too much trouble), the pieces did not fit together. I attempted to sand down the ribbing as best as I could, and the result of that process is seen in the picture above. I eventually was able to fit the pieces together, but it was still a tight fit after 30 minutes of sanding.
I took both of the pieces to practice that night and gave them a try, but we’re in crunch-time for our competition at the end of this month, so I didn’t have much of an opportunity. I was able to confirm that my 2nd tenor drone wasn’t working well, both in and out of the pipes, and the bass drone was not cooperating either.
I contacted a friend of mine, Zachery Bingaman, who I’ve mentioned a few times in these blog posts. I was curious if he knew what went wrong with the top of the middle of the bass drone. (it is hard to describe these pieces without a jumble of words like that lol) He was stumped, but he guessed it wasn’t a printer issue, but rather something that went wrong in the modeling or slicing phases. It looked perfectly fine on my end, and he suggested I chop my drone down to just the problematic area and give that small portion another shot on the printer.
I’ll be printing this off today, and hoping it goes well! I will update later today or tomorrow. In the next update, I’ll hopefully be able to say that I have all of my models complete! I’m currently putting together the bottom of the bass drone, and then the three stocks will be super quick to model. (and hopefully super quick to print!)
More soon! BYE!
