Progress Update

Progress has been slow since we've had to redesign our tonewheel set up. We realized that ferromagnetic gears are expensive/not readily available, and machining our own wheels out of sheet metal would be a time intensive process that would require several hours of constant supervision for each wheel.

Thus, we came up with the idea of using saw blades to generate a sine wave. We tried running a circular saw close to an electric guitar humbucker pickup, and we were able to observe a sine wave on an oscilloscope. Unfortunately, the staff of the lab we were working in quickly kicked us out when they saw what appeared to be two kids about to saw an entire electric guitar in half so we were not able to take a photo of the sine wave or measure its frequency.

Using our own motor, we plan to more thoroughly test a smaller scale circular saw blade as well as a band saw blade. The apparatus for the band saw blade involves wrapping the saw blade (similar to the one pictured below) around an acrylic laser-cut disk. The teeth on the saw blade would be pointing towards a magnetic pickup. As the disk spins, it should theoretically generate a waveform similar to a tone wheel. We can even create multiple disks that would generate different frequencies at a single fixed motor speed by varying the radius of a disk. The only caveat with using saw blades is that an element of danger is added. There would be saw blades spinning with speeds of 1000 RPM+ so we need to consider some protective measures in case of failure. Perhaps some shielding around the entire tone wheel apparatus will be required.