3D printing an electric guitar has always been a dream of mine, but it seemed like such a daunting task. Would the body snap under the tension of the strings? Would it bend over time? Would I need to use special active pickups? Would the plastic body produce an awful sound compared to traditional hardwood? There were so many questions and surprisingly few answers to be found online.
I’m not the first one attempting this, of course. There are several articles and models available online, with some of the designs turning out very well. However, many of these printed guitars were not actually very playable, and some projects that looked nice either didn’t share the 3D model, lacked instructions, were overly complicated or were too expensive.
To understand the thought process – I was designing the guitar with the 3D printing community in mind. I want others to be able to easily follow this build and create their own awesome guitar. So before I started designing anything, I put down a list of priorities:
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From the beginning, the biggest concern was the force the strings apply to the guitar’s body and neck. While the sources slightly differ with the information on this, the consensus seems to be that it’s about 50 kg of load, depending on the string gauge (thickness). These 50 kg are trying to fold the guitar in half, trying to rip the bridge from the body, and trying to severely bend the neck.
Solving the neck problem was honestly a no-brain decision – I’m going to use a real wooden neck. While you might argue that the guitar will no longer be “fully 3d printed”, the neck is such a key and delicate part of the instrument, it would compromise the entire project if I wanted to print it (even though it is possible). Wooden necks are perfectly smooth and straight, have wear-resistant metal frets, and have a truss rod inside, which is used to adjust the relief (concave or convex bow).
Solving the bridge problem though required more thought. The bridge on an electric guitar is a small metal part that holds the bottom end of the strings. It’s usually secured to the body with a couple of screws. If we take a look at the most common guitar designs, one of the bridges might stand out to you as exceptionally suitable for a 3D printed guitar. Can you guess which one it is?
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All but one of the common guitar designs have a very small bridge, sometimes only held in place with 2 screws. However, the Telecaster bridge, that’s a different story! This large metal plate not only holds the bottom strings in place, but also integrates the bottom pickup and has up to 5 mounting holes with widely spaced screw holes, allowing for better distribution of the leverage on the bridge across the entire metal plate and the underlying printed part.
Furthermore, the Telecaster has only one additional pickup, which makes the wiring and designing easier. And lastly, the volume and tune nobs, as well as the pickup selector switch, are all mounted on another metal plate and secured to the body with just 2 screws. This massively simplifies the project, as we won’t have to integrate several knobs and switches to the guitar individually.
In our previous articles, we first talked about 3D printing guitar picks – they worked surprisingly well! And then about printing various guitar accessories, such as capos or strap locks. Check those articles out.
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With the choice being made of going forward with the Telecaster hardware, we have to source all of the parts. In general, there are 3 ways to go about this:
Buying a whole functional guitar just to take it apart right away seems like such a wrong and wasteful way to go about this. The only time this would seem a good solution would be if you find a severely damaged guitar, with the hardware and neck still in decent shape.
The problem is that buying the components individually will be expensive. Even if you go with the absolute cheapest options, you will likely spend several hundred dollars.
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Prepare for the kicker of this build – The Harley Benton Electric Guitar Kit T-Style! This kit costs just $79! And it includes all the hardware you’ll need, all pre-wired with simple connectors that simply snap together. It’s sold by the German-based Musikhaus Thomann, one of the largest music instrument retailers in the world. Which adds a checkmark to one of the requirements from the list – worldwide shipping.
It is so cheap and convenient, I just had to order it. This whole build just turned into an “order this kit and print the parts” level of simplicity. The Harley Benton telecaster kit comes with a rudimentary unpainted wooden body. For the price, it’s amazing it comes with a body at all. But I won’t feel bad leaving that body behind and using a printed one.
I’ve used Fusion 360 to design the body of the guitar. The important starting point was to get all the screw holes, neck mounting interface, and electronics slots right.
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This was made quite a bit easier by the fact, that the kit includes the basic wooden body. By placing a meter next to the body and taking a picture of it from as far as possible, ideally with a zoom lens, we get a great template with only small perspective distortion. Using Fusion’s “Calibrate” feature, you can set the scale of the image. The longer the calibration distance, the lower the error will be. So here I set the whole 50 cm on the meter as my calibration range.
I’ve traced the positions of all holes in a 2D drawing. Using digital calipers, I measured the distance between the features and checked in the drawing if I get the same value. Especially with holes that are far apart, the small perspective distortion will create some inaccuracies. All of the dimensions are obviously important, but the one I especially focused on is the bridge position. The bridge needs to be perfectly aligned with the guitar’s neck so that the strings are nicely centered along its whole length. And secondly, the bridge must be the right distance from the neck, in order for the guitar to be tunable. Specifically, the 12th fret should be exactly in the middle of the string. This is something called guitar intonation and luckily the Telecaster bridge has a fairly wide adjustment range for this. Still, the bridge needs to be in a good position for the adjustment to work, so this is something worth double-checking.
With the mounting holes in place, it was time to get creative. Even though I’m using Telecaster hardware, I didn’t plan to simply copy the good old Telecaster shape. With 3D printing, any shape is possible, so it would be a shame to not take advantage of it.
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I’ve always liked the Fender Jazzmaster and Mustang guitar shapes. So I’ve used the Spline tool in Fusion 360 to create a general shape inspired by those guitars.
The typical thickness of a guitar body is 45 mm, this value was used to extrude the sketch. I’ve then extruded all the holes and slots for the electronics using the template created before. Keeping in mind that all the electronics will have to be connected together, I’ve subtracted a few cylinders from the body to create “tunnels” between the cavities. The bottom pickup slot will be covered by the metal bridge and the top one by a pickguard, so the slots can be a bit bigger than is strictly necessary. Lastly, a bigger hole on the bottom edge connects to the control plate slot. The output jack will be located there. With that, the basic guitar model was done!
Of course, there’s a small problem. The model is way too big to fit on most desktop 3D printers. Hell, it doesn’t even fit on the Original Prusa XL. So it was time to cut it into smaller pieces.
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Apart from being too big, the model still lacked some elegance or a fun design twist. With 3D printing being unbound from traditional design limitations, I experimented with adding various cutouts. I ended up with, you guessed it, hexagons! There’s a functional motivation behind this choice. The hexagons will create a ton of edges, along which it will be easy to split the model into multiple parts. And the seam will be basically invisible, as it will look like the intended part of the design. I’ve also added a big chamfer along the whole top edge. This will make it much more comfortable to play and rest the arm on.
Remember when I talked about the 50 kg of force the strings apply on the neck and the body? It creates one critical requirement for the splitting process. If at all possible, the section of the guitar between the neck and the bridge should be made from just one piece. It would be needlessly complicated to make the connection between two parts in this section strong enough.
Luckily, with some
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