How To 3D Print A Guitar!

Hi everyone!

I have been messing around with doing some 3D Printed guitars for a little while now, I would like to share some of the lessons I have learned from making these and teach you a bit about how to print your own.

I am just starting a new printed guitar now so I figure this is a great time to show my process. I will keep you posted with progress on the guitar as it prints out!

Firstly lets go over some precursors, for those of you who have never built a guitar before be sure to read through this carefully as it is quite important. I know its boring, but it really is important, just bear with me for a second and then we can get to the fun stuff! There are a couple of things that you want to make sure of when you are choosing a guitar body to print. The first and biggest thing you have to check is that your scale length is correct, if the scale length is not correct you will never be able to get the guitar properly intonated and it will always be out of tune about half way down the fretboard. The second important thing you will want to look out for it what hardware the guitar uses, does it have a fixed bridge or a floating bridge? If you want to do some crazy dimebag squeals you will want a floating bridge such as a floyd rose, whereas if you want some extra tuning stability and you don’t need to do any whammy bar action then you might want to opt for a fixed bridge such as the classic gibson tune-o-matic bridge. Finally your pickups, make sure the guitar properly fits the pickups that you would like to use!

OK! Now we are done with the boring stuff, time to get to printing!

For my build I will be using a body that I designed which is based off of the LTD Arrow 1000, I have modified it to use a tune-o-matic bridge and to only have a pickup in the bridge position. I only really intend to use this guitar for playing the rhythm section of metal songs so I have no real use for a neck pickup. I am planning to use an active EMG 81 pickup for the bridge so I have included a battery compartment for the 9V battery in the back. For this guitar I am going to be using a slightly different scale length, the real version of this guitar from LTD has a 25.5" scale length, but I will be using an Ibanez Mikro neck purchased from China, it only has a 22" scale length so I have adjusted the model of my guitar to reflect these changes. I am working on a version with the proper 25.5" scale length though, so I should have that done soon.

I will be printing the body of the guitar out of PLA, I have made a couple of these now and I found PLA works the best, as long as you use the proper settings which I will show you shortly the print is incredibly strong, even holding up to some serious bashing. I will be printing the guitar all in one piece today which is better, but not necessary. My first printed guitar which was a BC Rich Warlock was printed in 9 pieces and then glued together, I still have it to this day and I use it very frequently. I used gorilla glue 5 minute epoxy and it worked wonderfully!

Now, for slicer settings I will always go for at least 5 walls, you can go for more if you would like but I have found that 5 produces the best balance between strength and speed. I use 45% infill and will usually combine the infill so it will only print every other layer, this also helps to save time and doesn’t affect the strength of the print too much if at all. I do 5 top and bottom layers to match the 5 walls, and I use tree supports where they are needed. I also will do a little bit more z-hop than usually required, just to ensure that nothing gets bumped and causes a layer shift. When printing the guitar it is a lot of mass on the bed, in my case this one will be around 2.5kg of extra mass on the bed. So any bumps on the infill or support material can and will cause layer shifts (ask me how I know :neutral_face: ). I tend to like to use triangular infill, but that is completely up to you.

I am using a 0.6mm nozzle at a 0.44mm layer height, but your nozzle and layer height choice is completely up to you. I am just impatient and will be post processing it anyways, so I don’t mind having larger layer lines.

Here is a picture of the finished slice for my guitar on the CR-M4:

Now to load it onto the machine and start printing! Make sure your first layer goes down nice and evenly, us a brim or a raft if needed, for me I was able to get the first layer down ok so I don’t see the need for a brim or raft. I will update with some pictures once I get through the print a little bit more. Also remember to make sure you filament runout sensor is activated if you have one, don’t want to run out of material after a day and 1kg of material!

If you have any questions in the meantime please let me know, post a comment here or send me a PM, I will continue to add more information as the print continues!

Matthew

Lookin’ Good!

I have seen a few videos on this (3D printed guitars), including a tutorial on how to split a model (but no success for me yet). I could download the files for a PrusaCaster, but was hoping to print something else. Any tips for those of us with smaller printers?

Absolutely, I printed my first guitar on a standard ender 3!

The best way to go about it is to split up the part and use pegs to put it together, this can be modelled into the part or done through the slicer. I have also had a lot of success with using dovetail joints when splitting it in order to lock the pieces together. Print all of the pieces with the same print settings I have listed up above, then glue them together using Gorilla Glue 5 Minute Epoxy. I have tried other epoxies before but nothing works as well as this stuff!

I always put my pieces together on my kitchen counter, I have a granite countertop which is super flat. So I lay down a baking sheet and then put a bunch of glue on all the pieces that you are putting together, put them together and then lay them down flat on the countertop, I usually lay the front side down so that it is nice and even as this is the side that is showing. Press all of the pieces together and make sure to rub them around so the glue is properly encorporated. Once they are all together I use clamps to hold them tightly together. The beautiful thing about the gorilla glue is that it does not take long to dry, so I can glue it up one night and it will be done by the next morning. If you are having trouble getting everything clamped down at once you can do it in multiple different parts as well, there is nothing wrong with that!

After you are done the post processing is optional but could also help to hold the parts together, I will post more about this as I work my way through the current build. The guitar still has about a day and a half left so I will hopefully get to sanding soon!

Very cool. Thanks for the post.

Interesting info on the gorilla epoxy. I will have to try it.
I have used a lot of JB weld plastic weld two part epoxy - it is more like a 15 minute working time and the bond is stronger than the parts you’re glueing, but it is black so can be very messy if you get it anywhere on the print you don’t want it.

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Yes, I have also found the Gorilla Glue to be stronger than the printed parts. I have never tried the JB weld plastic bond before though, I will have to try that out. Personally the color isn’t a huge deal for me as I sand and paint the bodies!

Thanks for the suggetsion!

Status update on the guitar, hopefully it should be done before end of day today!

The body finished printing, I had to cut off a bit of the tail and print it separately as the printer was about 10cm too short on z, it had the capability of going higher but I didn’t feel like writing new firmware for it :laughing:. So I ended up printing the rest of the tail piece separately and then gluing it on using the 2 part epoxy I mentioned earlier. The beautiful thing about it was that I was unable to get it clamped up because of the weird geometry and angles, but because the glue starts to set so fast I just held it in place until it started to set and then shimmed something underneath it to hold it in place and it worked perfectly!

Taking off the supports was a pain, and because I was using a larger nozzle it ended up having really rough bottom surfaces. I did my best cleanup using a pair of side cutters, it took around an hour to get everything off to a point where I could start post processing it. I first started with the support interface areas, your goal is to fill all the gaps and completely smooth it out, for this I use standard SLA resin, I have a handheld U.V light that I can use to cure the resin, so I lay it on pretty thick and then cure it. Make sure you wear a respirator when you are sanding it, I tend to wear a respirator and also wet sand it, it stops the dust from building up, and it also clears up the surface a bit so you can see where the high and low spots are.

I will put on a layer and then sand it down until the layer is almost completely gone, then I will put another layer on and repeat the same process. Do this until you are happy with the surface of the part. Don’t worry to much about the appearance of it as we will be painting it soon anyways. I generally will not use any resin in the neck pocket, electronics cavity, or the pickup hole as I do not want to change the tolerances of these parts at all, they will also not be visible or painted so there is really no point. I will just sand the bare plastic away until everything fits snugly.

For sanding the body I follow a similar procedure to what I have described earlier except that I do not use very heavy coats. I will usually put 2 or 3 light coats on curing in-between each coat, then sand it down after that. I will usually put a lot of work into the front to get it nice and even as this is the side that is visible, but the back and sides of the guitar I will put less time into. If they have some inconsistencies that is ok with me, but I want the front side to be perfect. I would love to mess around with using a planer to flatten it, but unfortunately I do not have one at my disposal. I figure if I can get one of those I could put a heavy coat of an epoxy on it and then plane it completely flat. Would definitely be much easier than hand sanding, maybe a future project!

Anyways, thats what I am working on now. Throw on some TV and get sanding away, just work at it until you are happy. Once I am done in a couple of days we will move onto the painting steps!