There's been quite a bit of discussion about custom fascias for the player. Quite a few of you will know that I started designing mine about a year ago (I'm waiting for it to be machined up at work). Unfortunately most of you don't have the luxury of having a machine shop at your disposal and will probably never see your own ultimate design in the flesh and fitted to your player. However there is an alternative...

Rapid Prototyping; Some of you will have heard of it, one or two will probably be experts in it and there will be some of you who've just said "Rapid what?". Basically it's a method of manufacturing where the part is built up of layers. These can be layers of powder (such as Plaster) bonded together, layers built up by selectively polymerising a liquid resin or by the selective sintering of plastic or metallic powder, again in layers to produce a finished part. The equipment is quite expensive but there are a number of companies who offer a service whereby you send them an STL file (produced from a 3D Solid Modelling package) and they'll 'print' you one out. One such company is www.xpress3d.com. They also provide an online quoting service which looks pretty good. I did a costing for my design which came out at $145, which I didn't think was too bad. This company use machines from Z-Corp which use the bonded plaster powder infiltrated with CyanoAcrylate for added strength.

Of course this does all depend on you having access to some kind of 3D Solid Modelling software for producing your STL file. This software generally isn't cheap (around £5k for Solid Edge, Inventor or SolidWorks). Again, there is an alternative for those of us who don't have that kind of money floating around. Pro-Desktop Express is a free, downloadable 3D Solid Modelling package that will allow you to design your own fascia, buttons & knob and save them as STL files. You can then send these off to one of these RP companies to get it 'printed out'. Pro-Desktop is a bit cranky but it does work and is free after all.

One advantage of RP over machining is that you have greater freedom over your design. Basically anything you design you can make with RP. You don't have to concern yourself with the limitations that machining places upon your design. Anyway, I hope this will inspire you all to get on and create your own fascias 'n' stuff.

Here are a couple of links:
Pro-Desktop Express

RP Services

happy designing .

It looks like the company that makes the machines that XPress3d uses will give you a free print...

Do we have a Pro/Desktop (or whatever) file of the original fascia, or one someone else has made with the right button/knob positions to start with?

Yeah I know. I've mentioned it on the BBS before. What they don't tell you is that when it arrives you find that it's been scaled. I modelled something for a friend and took advantage of Z-Corp's generous offer of a free print. When it arrived we were really excited to see it in the flesh. We couldn't believe it when we saw the size of it though. They'd scaled it by a factor of 1.8! In this particular instance it didn't matter too much 'cos we did it more out of curiosity than anything else. However for a functioning fascia this would of course be useless. I guess they do it so that you don't use the part to make a mould from or something like that.

I don't know whether the Empeg guys will release the Solid model file of the fascia now that it's been EOL'd. I know they released it to one of our members but they wouldn't make it freely available at the time. Things have now changed though so they might just let us have it. They might even release the model files for the whole player. This would definitely help me to check that I've got my measurements correct.

Please can we have the solid model files Hugo et al?

Grin, if you could figure the exact scaling they use, could you not then extrapolate your measurements by that amount and tell them you need a 8 foot fascia? Or are they all like a 2" piece?

Yeah, I thought of that. I doubt they use the same scaling factor each time though. I don't know whether they scale it randomly or by volume or what. Anyway, I think they might cotton on if they suddenly get lots of requests for very similar looking items . The part I had made was supposed to be 128mm long but it came back 230mm long! I've attached a photo of the real part and the RP part. The RP part is Grey because It's covered in primer at the moment.

That IS quite cool that they can create a product for you like that... Hm, maybe they could fabricate a mock fascia of my stock radio so I could cover the openings of my empeg + alpine deck without spending $150 to buy a new radio and hack the face off....... There could be some slight licensing problems with that though.

Anyway, what IS that thing you created? A space age screwdriver handle or something?

Get some black plastic from home depot. cut it to size. Take a HQ pic of your stock radio. Photoshop it. Print it on some glossy or regular paper maybe and glue it on the plastic.

If the $145 price quoted is for a single model then it's not going to be very worth while for them to make one for you

- Trevor

In reply to:

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Anyway, what IS that thing you created? A space age screwdriver handle or something?

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It's a new product called "TraceMate". It's for tying heavy monofilament Nylon fishing line to hooks & swivels for sea fishing. It was developed by a guy I work with. He's been using something he just knocked up out of some scrap Ali for years but then decided that he could market it. We talked about how to make it more suitable for mass marketing and together we came up with what you see. I did all the CAD work and arranged for the Z-Corp sample but it's his baby and based on his original design. We've had Aluminium extruded to the correct profile and do all the machining at work. I'm not making anything out of it myself but hopefully if it takes off he can make something from it. There's a review of it here. Usually they're Anodised Red, the one on my photo is Yellow because we had some powder coated as a trial.