Got into 3d printing a few years ago and while scrolling the internet for ideas on what to print, I stumbled upon some really cool 3d printed guitars/basses and thought it'd be a cool project to do. But of course, as I had to stroke my hubris to go against the grain and do something different, I noticed that a vast majority of the small niche of 3d printed guitars were only the body. They still had wooden necks. And so I thought, well, how difficult would a nearly 100% 3d printed neck-through bass be? And so I set out to find out exactly that.
After reading several threads and digging around, I found that a good practice for 3d printed instruments was to have some sort of back-bone or stiff rod running through the body to support the tension of the strings. My first design implemented 2 steel 1/4th inch round rods running parallel down the neck that was printed in slices and stacked together. There was no truss rod, as I didn't want to be out of my only spare in case it didn't work out. It was a headless with the tuners built into the body to releave stress on the plastic neck and I threw in a gimmick of being able to remove the top of the central cavity to test out different pickup types.
Needless to say, this one flopped due to several oversights on my part. In the 3d printing world, there are 2 kinds of popular plastics, PLA and PETG. PLA is stiff, brittle, and tends to warp at relatively low temperatures (it bows even in a hot car in the summer). PETG on the other hand is mildly flexible and much more heat resistant, which is why I chose it to test this neck through with. However, it was much too flexible, and after only putting on 1 string, you could land a plane under it. Without a truss rod, there was nothing I really could do with this guy to alleviate such a problem, and so I moved onto the next.
Taking all that I had learned from the first, I decided to go with a single cut design on the second. This time around, I made sure that the neck was going absolutely nowhere by fitting a 3/4 inch square steel tube down the length of the neck, taking the Wishbass approach of sacrificing a truss rod for a fairly thick neck. I once again played up my hubris and designed this one with the gimmick of installing a MIDI keyboard and a synthesizer on the bass side of the neck, which, while still a fun fantacy of mine, didn't come to fruition here...
This time, indeed, the neck stayed completely straight. However, I wanted to protect the fun pattern on the fingerboard that I painted on and decided clear 2 part epoxy would be the best approach. I set up guards around the fingerboard, but it clumped up along the sides and required a lot of sanding to get flat, so much so that I started cutting into the plastic underneath toward the bottom. Whoops. But the worst was yet to come. One night, I had taken it to practice to show off, and low and behold, when I took it out of the bag, the head had sheared off in probably one of the worst ways possible.
Some more 3d printing shenanigans. How the process works is the machine lays down a thin line of plastic, going back and forth until it fills up a layer and then starts adding another on top of it. This shear was on one of those layer lines. Yes, I could glue it back on, but there's nothing stopping it from shearing off at a layer line above it again unfortunately. I switched over to PLA for this neck and the brittleness definitely kicked in. Also, as you can see slightly from the picture, 3d printing kinda cheats as it's not completely one solid chunk of plastic. It has what's called infill that supports the ceiling of the print once it gets there, meaning most 3d printed guitars are naturally "chambered" by design. I opt to use thicker walls to support the tension of the strings with less infill to offset the added weight. Hollow body infill is also the reason you can't just route a new pocket for say, a new pickup, into a 3d printed body, making it somewhat of a customizable downside of this practice.
So that leads me to yet again another design. This time, I wanted to throw the gimmick into the overall theme of the bass and settled as steampunk as a cool aesthetic to go off of. Naturally then, the design of this one took much longer than the other two, but covid gave plenty of time to do so. I also had one big advantage this time around over the previous attempts: a treadmill printer. Normally, 3d printers are confined to an average of 1 foot cubed, however, a treadmill printer uses, well, a treadmill as it's build platform, meaning you can print things infinitely long in one direction, making the whole neck-through platform one continuous piece rather than several glued together, proving quite invaluable to the success of this third design.
I once again went with a thick neck and 3/4 inch square rod. In theme of the gimmick, I used some hook screws with thread joiners cut in half and welded together as tuners and a plate of brass to stop the screws from digging into the plastic body. The fingerboard was actually a cut piece of clear acrylic this time around to show off the thick steel beam going down the neck, which proved much easier to work with over the resin. I also attached a reinforcing jacket around the back of the head to prevent another shear. All of this culminating (finally) into a successful fully 3d printed neck through bass.
While definitely not the most comfortable to play on your knee, it's more of a looker than a recreational practice bass, but man am I proud of how much of a looker it is. Unfortunately, the LED wire I strung through it interferes with the electronics to much to have it on while playing (guess I should've seen that one coming). I haven't tuned it to standard yet, still too worried from the other bass's head snapping off. It's been around for about a year now and there's no sign of it warping or giving under the tension of the strings, although the action is a bit high with the saddles bottomed out, but that may just be an oversight in my designs. A non-3d printed bridge would probably help remedy this, but I'm not too worried about it.
Here's a video for those curious how it sounds. It's straight in, no preamp.
Anyways, this is by no means the end of this 3d printing journey. Got a couple more builds that were body only prints that I have more in-progress pics of that I'm planning on posting here *soonish*, probably in the Luthier's Corner where it belongs (even though I have no clue how to do any form of woodworking outside of drilling holes in necks). Appreciate you getting through the wall of text, and heck, even if you didn't, hope you enjoyed the pics/my mediocre playing video. Got a small preview for what I got cooking currently for ya.
After reading several threads and digging around, I found that a good practice for 3d printed instruments was to have some sort of back-bone or stiff rod running through the body to support the tension of the strings. My first design implemented 2 steel 1/4th inch round rods running parallel down the neck that was printed in slices and stacked together. There was no truss rod, as I didn't want to be out of my only spare in case it didn't work out. It was a headless with the tuners built into the body to releave stress on the plastic neck and I threw in a gimmick of being able to remove the top of the central cavity to test out different pickup types.
Needless to say, this one flopped due to several oversights on my part. In the 3d printing world, there are 2 kinds of popular plastics, PLA and PETG. PLA is stiff, brittle, and tends to warp at relatively low temperatures (it bows even in a hot car in the summer). PETG on the other hand is mildly flexible and much more heat resistant, which is why I chose it to test this neck through with. However, it was much too flexible, and after only putting on 1 string, you could land a plane under it. Without a truss rod, there was nothing I really could do with this guy to alleviate such a problem, and so I moved onto the next.
Taking all that I had learned from the first, I decided to go with a single cut design on the second. This time around, I made sure that the neck was going absolutely nowhere by fitting a 3/4 inch square steel tube down the length of the neck, taking the Wishbass approach of sacrificing a truss rod for a fairly thick neck. I once again played up my hubris and designed this one with the gimmick of installing a MIDI keyboard and a synthesizer on the bass side of the neck, which, while still a fun fantacy of mine, didn't come to fruition here...
This time, indeed, the neck stayed completely straight. However, I wanted to protect the fun pattern on the fingerboard that I painted on and decided clear 2 part epoxy would be the best approach. I set up guards around the fingerboard, but it clumped up along the sides and required a lot of sanding to get flat, so much so that I started cutting into the plastic underneath toward the bottom. Whoops. But the worst was yet to come. One night, I had taken it to practice to show off, and low and behold, when I took it out of the bag, the head had sheared off in probably one of the worst ways possible.
Some more 3d printing shenanigans. How the process works is the machine lays down a thin line of plastic, going back and forth until it fills up a layer and then starts adding another on top of it. This shear was on one of those layer lines. Yes, I could glue it back on, but there's nothing stopping it from shearing off at a layer line above it again unfortunately. I switched over to PLA for this neck and the brittleness definitely kicked in. Also, as you can see slightly from the picture, 3d printing kinda cheats as it's not completely one solid chunk of plastic. It has what's called infill that supports the ceiling of the print once it gets there, meaning most 3d printed guitars are naturally "chambered" by design. I opt to use thicker walls to support the tension of the strings with less infill to offset the added weight. Hollow body infill is also the reason you can't just route a new pocket for say, a new pickup, into a 3d printed body, making it somewhat of a customizable downside of this practice.
So that leads me to yet again another design. This time, I wanted to throw the gimmick into the overall theme of the bass and settled as steampunk as a cool aesthetic to go off of. Naturally then, the design of this one took much longer than the other two, but covid gave plenty of time to do so. I also had one big advantage this time around over the previous attempts: a treadmill printer. Normally, 3d printers are confined to an average of 1 foot cubed, however, a treadmill printer uses, well, a treadmill as it's build platform, meaning you can print things infinitely long in one direction, making the whole neck-through platform one continuous piece rather than several glued together, proving quite invaluable to the success of this third design.
I once again went with a thick neck and 3/4 inch square rod. In theme of the gimmick, I used some hook screws with thread joiners cut in half and welded together as tuners and a plate of brass to stop the screws from digging into the plastic body. The fingerboard was actually a cut piece of clear acrylic this time around to show off the thick steel beam going down the neck, which proved much easier to work with over the resin. I also attached a reinforcing jacket around the back of the head to prevent another shear. All of this culminating (finally) into a successful fully 3d printed neck through bass.
While definitely not the most comfortable to play on your knee, it's more of a looker than a recreational practice bass, but man am I proud of how much of a looker it is. Unfortunately, the LED wire I strung through it interferes with the electronics to much to have it on while playing (guess I should've seen that one coming). I haven't tuned it to standard yet, still too worried from the other bass's head snapping off. It's been around for about a year now and there's no sign of it warping or giving under the tension of the strings, although the action is a bit high with the saddles bottomed out, but that may just be an oversight in my designs. A non-3d printed bridge would probably help remedy this, but I'm not too worried about it.
Here's a video for those curious how it sounds. It's straight in, no preamp.
Anyways, this is by no means the end of this 3d printing journey. Got a couple more builds that were body only prints that I have more in-progress pics of that I'm planning on posting here *soonish*, probably in the Luthier's Corner where it belongs (even though I have no clue how to do any form of woodworking outside of drilling holes in necks). Appreciate you getting through the wall of text, and heck, even if you didn't, hope you enjoyed the pics/my mediocre playing video. Got a small preview for what I got cooking currently for ya.
