A 3d Printing Journey

[T_Bone_TL]

I messed around with channels for a couple of 6mm CF square rods I got off of amazon, 2 down the sides of a channel for a truss rod, but trying to print it was a headache. The walls between the channels were thin and popped off of the build plate before it sewed them all together. Cutting CF rods is also messy business

Some folks prefer rods, tubes or plate. I'm a fan of tow, which is carbon-fiber "yarn" that you can place and then epoxy. Cuts easily with scissors. Not restricted to "straight" applications (the slot can be curved.) The strength is, for all practical purposes, all in tension, but if you keep that in mind, the application can be considerably more subtle than jamming in a straight rod/tube.

Less expensive carbon fiber reinforcement

 

[Bruce Johnson]

Some folks prefer rods, tubes or plate. I'm a fan of tow, which is carbon-fiber "yarn" that you can place and then epoxy. Cuts easily with scissors. Not restricted to "straight" applications (the slot can be curved.) The strength is, for all practical purposes, all in tension, but if you keep that in mind, the application can be considerably more subtle than jamming in a straight rod/tube.

Less expensive carbon fiber reinforcement

I'm not sure how well carbon fiber TOW would work in a 3D printer. If you pause the printing leaving a channel, drop a length of TOW in it, and resume printing over top of it, would the plastic saturate and bond well to the TOW fibers? I doubt it. It more likely would surround the TOW in a plastic tube, and the TOW would slip within it. You'd have to do some testing to find out.

You could pre-cast a slug of epoxy on the end of the TOW, then set the slug into a pocket in the part, then cover it with more plastic. That would probably work.

 

[T_Bone_TL]

I'm not sure how well carbon fiber TOW would work in a 3D printer. If you pause the printing leaving a channel, drop a length of TOW in it, and resume printing over top of it

Not what I was suggesting. Basically I'm saying print a part with a slot just like we'd leave with routing wood; for post-print application of epoxy & TOW.

You might be able to do that mid-print with a pause, but my experience with 3D printers stopping and restarting is that they often screw up when restarting. And the slot/channel would need cleanup to get the stuff in, (on any printer I've used or can afford to) which is better done post-printing than mid-printing.

 

[AbnormalForms]

Some folks prefer rods, tubes or plate. I'm a fan of tow, which is carbon-fiber "yarn" that you can place and then epoxy. Cuts easily with scissors. Not restricted to "straight" applications (the slot can be curved.) The strength is, for all practical purposes, all in tension, but if you keep that in mind, the application can be considerably more subtle than jamming in a straight rod/tube.

Less expensive carbon fiber reinforcement

Woah, that's a very insightful and helpful thread! I had no idea what TOW was, but now consider me converted! Like I had said in the first post, I have like virtually no luthier experience and I had learned about guitar/bass construction was from the few articles I had found on researching other people 3d printing the instruments. It's great to get some insight on how necks are actually constructed from a professional luthier there.

I'm not sure how well carbon fiber TOW would work in a 3D printer. If you pause the printing leaving a channel, drop a length of TOW in it, and resume printing over top of it, would the plastic saturate and bond well to the TOW fibers? I doubt it. It more likely would surround the TOW in a plastic tube, and the TOW would slip within it. You'd have to do some testing to find out.

You could pre-cast a slug of epoxy on the end of the TOW, then set the slug into a pocket in the part, then cover it with more plastic. That would probably work.

Speaking of said professional luthier, first off, just wanna say, excellent info over in that thread, got me real excited to try it here! But T_Bone is correct, the way that I would be printing these, it would basically have just a pre-routed channel that the TOW would then be added into. The treadmill printer works quite a bit differently than the traditional Cartesian ones that you see everywhere now-a-days and probably be very difficult/virtually impossible to embed the TOW within the print itself. I found this video that another TBer linked to in their thread that shows how the treadmill printer works:

I used the same printer to print the core of the steampunk bass, except I orientated my print face down where the flat of the fingerboard was on the bed of the printer to reduce excess plastic support waste. It angles the "grain" of the plastic at a 45 degree angle, so I'm not sure how that may effect the structure of the bass in the long run. I know that ideally you'd want the layers parallel with the tension of the strings, but for that you'd need a printer with a bed that is over a meter long, which would probably support embedding the CF TOW right into the print pretty well, but a bed that long would cause problems in it's own right.