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 
). 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
. 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!