Ribbon Microphone Corrugator by guitartoys

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

In my never ending quest for a high quality ribbon microphone in every studio locker (chicken in every pot), I designed a tool to help corrugate ribbons for ribbon microphones.
In order to make a ribbon microphone element, you need to corrugate it, putting small folds in the ribbon, to give it flexibility, and allow you to put proper tension on it, when you mount the ribbon into the truss. Many ways to do this, but ultimately everyone uses gears. I wanted a fancy table top unit that was automated, to keep my hands free to feed the ribbon in, and catch it on the way out.
Using some gears, I fashioned a 3-D printed frame, a stepper and Arduino and a footswitch to allow you to corrugate your ribbon microphone elements easily and consistently.
(Crafters can use it too for crimping ribbons)
The full project is up on Instructables, along with parts sources, and Arduino code. Please check it out.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Ribbon-Corrugator-crimper-for-Ribbon-Microphones-A/
Next project in the queue is a fully automated Ribbon element tuner. Basically put a ribbon microphone truss into a carrier, lay the ribbon in, fix one end of the ribbon, and the other will be held down on a sliding part. It will automatically inject a (user selectable) frequency at (user selectable) amplitude and a stepper will adjust the tension for optimal gain. Then fix the other end of the ribbon.
You should then have a nicely tuned ribbon element. Well at least that's the plan, but I'm sure I will face a number of challenges.
Trick here, is I’m designing a set of interchangeable carriers for a variety of different ribbon microphone trusses. So pick the carrier for your mic truss, such as an MXL R80, put the truss in the carrier, and the carrier in the tuner, and you are ready to go.
Once done with that, I'm going to revisit this corrugator, modifying it for 1" wide gears with a diametrical pitch of 64 and a larger stepper. But since custom made gears are so costly this will take some time to get back to.
I hope you find it useful, and look forward to any suggestions you might have.