One of the goals of the project is to take it into full production. That means picks that can be precision-replicated, and easily replaceable.
The first versions of the picks were fully captive on the pick axle, which meant you had to slide everything off of the pick bridge to replace a single pick. The latest version snaps into place on the shaft. The outline below shows the main axle snap feature (bottom left), and the control rod snap feature (top left).
I also replaced the music wire springs with custom-designed, laser-cut leaf springs. They're made of spring-tempered bronze, and will be over-molded into the production picks.
Here's a line drawing, showing how the spring is placed in the pick body:
I designed multiple variants of the leaf springs, each with different stiffnesses. Heavier gauge guitar strings get stiffer leaf springs. This way, you're low E string volume sounds the same as your high E string. The leaf below is stiffer than the one above.
Here's the overall dimensions of a pick:
Of course, I had to try it out. I bought a desktop plastic injection molding machine from LNS technologies:
...had a mold made:
And here's the final product! These are as good as production-ready:
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