Making a

3D printed guitar

Background

One of my hobbies is playing the guitar which started in 2016 when I bought and electric/acoustic guitar and RC30 loop pedal from Gum tree. I then self taught myself how to play the guitar by watching Youtube videos and about 3hrs practice everyday. I now tend to mainly play finger style and like improvising tunes.

One of the other things I really enjoy doing is camping. When camping I always take my guitar with me but its a bit of a pain as it takes up too much room. Also I am worried it'll get damaged. I really wanted a compact travel guitar. I could have easily bought one, but instead thought why not design and make a unique 3D printed electric/acoustic guitar.

The list of ideas and specifications I came up with for the guitar I was going to make were:

It needed to be compact but width a full size fret board
Make the fret board so it was removable so I could change it for other styles.
Make the guitar light up
Make the string action height adjustable
Make it so I could easily add and remove parts and accessories to the guitar

I had no idea how to make a guitar, but as I am a pretty quick learner I started researching. The project took me about 3 months to complete and within this time I went through several design changes. Below is my design process and some demo videos of the guitar in action.

Project diary

Version 1

To compact the size of the guitar I decided to move the tuning pegs from the neck to inside the body. As I would be 3d printing the guitar out of plastic there were 2 issues:

Strength - the tension of the steel stringing would break the guitar so I added a aluminium bar which gave the neck strength
Guitar size - I had to print the guitar in sections so it would fit on the printer bed

As soon as I added the string and tightened them the guitar started to bend.

Version 2

I redesign the guitar and made the bar the full length of the guitar. I also did a few design modification so by adding a magnet fret board, adding a pre-amp, adding a light up fretboard & adding adjustable string action height.

There was issue. As soon as I tightened the strings they snapped?

Version 2.1

I racked my brains and realised that the strings were been tightened around 2 x 90 degree been. I added a modification to the guitar which was some 3D printed bearings and this worked.

The guitar works really well. I have used it for a few years now without any issues and demonstrate it at each STEM workshop I do. It normally gets quite a wow reaction from the students and teachers and everyone I show it to.

Below a few videos demonstrating some of the features of the guitar.