• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join free Log in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

I 3D printed a bass!

#22
MrCoolsville said:
Well, the body anyway. The neck is real wood and pre-assembled while all the hardware is standard metal. Check out the finished build along with some tone demos here:

3D printed bass guitar - tone demo - YouTube

View attachment 4641206

Quick stats
  • Fully passive
  • Fender Precision-style body
  • Single split coil pickup
  • 34" scale
  • 3D printed body made from PLA+
  • Printed in 6 pieces and bound together
  • Steel reinforcement spine (more on that later)
  • Maple neck with composite ebony fretboard
  • 9.4 lbs
  • Total cost of materials was around $300 USD after tax
Parts list
Note that these prices were as of Jan 29, 2022, and these links will probably break over time.
Printing
Printing the body was fairly straight-forward. I found the following two models by EG3DPrinting and zerink for the body and pickguard, respectively:

Hexagonal Precision Bass Guitar by EG3Dprinting
P-BASS pick guard

The body is split into six parts with printed dowls and rectangular inserts to help with alignment and a little bit of rigidity. On my printer, however - a Creality CR-10S Pro V2 - I think I could have printed the body in just two parts: the top and bottom. I didn't realize this until after I was well into the process, though, so I stuck with the original plan. For the majority of the parts, I set layer height to 0.2mm and infill to 20% on a standard 0.4mm nozzle. However, I added a couple of reinforced areas with infill set to 70%: the neck and bridge mounting points. This turned out to be a great decision for adding the steel spine later on. I used the filament noted in the parts list - a PLA+ from Overture - in this amazing "Digital Blue" color. Total print time was around a week running 24 hours a day.

I did run into a small snag printing the left side parts with the hexagon pattern. I originally printed the bottom left piece laying flat as shown in the picture below, but the outside edge was really rough because I added some supports and they didn't come off cleanly. I ultimately reprinted it standing straight up on the inside edge of the part. This gave me a much cleaner print. The middle left was also printed on its inside edge and the top left was printed on its bottom edge (to avoid a big overhang from the horn). I only needed to add minimal supports to these and that did NOT include any supports in the hexagons. But they still printed nicely, just as I had hoped!

The pickguard was straight-forward and printed out in two pieces. There was no way for me to easily orient the entire thing to print in one piece on my printer. So, I settled on two pieces and used a combination of super glue and copper tape on the back to close up the seam.

View attachment 4641207 View attachment 4641215

Assembling the body
I chose the 2-part epoxy by Gorilla to bind the parts together. Using two bigass clamps, I first glued the left and right side of each section (bottom, middle, and top) and let them dry overnight. Then, I glued all three pieces together and let that dry overnight. At this point, the body was fully assembled, but still required a LOT of work. The third picture here shows everything together with the pickguard laying on top. To be honest, it was only at this point that I knew the pickguard would actually fit. Remember, the models came from different people on different websites!

View attachment 4641216 View attachment 4641217 View attachment 4641218

Sanding
This is the part that took the most labor and personal time. My first task was to try hiding all the seams between the six printed parts. I used this ProBond filler from Elmer's that I heard good things about for 3D printing. I just used my finger to liberally glob it on all the seams and let it dry for a few hours.

View attachment 4641219 View attachment 4641220

Then I went to sanding to both smooth out the filler and remove most of the print lines. I started by using some 80 grit sand paper on a hand sander.

View attachment 4641224

It didn't take long to realize how much of a pain it would be to hand sand the whole thing, so I went with my orbital sander instead. That made things MUCH faster and easier. I was able to knock down pretty much all the print lines and smooth out the seams, and it was looking pretty good after a couple rounds of filling, sanding, filling again, and sanding again. Of course, I got to finer and finer grit as I went.

View attachment 4641225 View attachment 4641226

I then started the priming process. I didn't seem to get many pictures here, but I went back and forth between priming, sanding, priming some more, and sanding some more. At the end of it all, the whole body was white and looked pretty damn smooth. I thought the seams were gone, but as you can see in the final product, that wasn't really the case.

Painting
My original plan was to let the blue of the filament remain naked in the hexagons and paint the rest of the body satin black. However, I quickly realized how painful it would be to try taping off the hexagons to keep them pristine while sanding and painting all around them. I ultimately decided to just paint the whole thing black and then come back around and re-paint the hexagons to a blue paint that would closely match the original filament color. I went with a "Sail Blue" color paint I found at Home Depot for a few bucks.

To make it easier to paint, I installed a screw into one of the neck screw holes and hung the body while I painted. The pickguard was just laid down on a piece of cardboard. And it's worth noting that I also painted the headstock black to match the body.

View attachment 4641229 View attachment 4641231 View attachment 4641237

After painting everything black, I taped off most of the body and came back around with the blue.

View attachment 4641233 View attachment 4641234 View attachment 4641235 View attachment 4641236

While paint was drying, I also took the model for the body and took a tiny slice of the hexagon pattern. I then just printed that slice to use for a little flair on the headstock. I painted that the same blue, although the dim yellow lighting in this pic makes the color all wonky.

View attachment 4641238

Ultimately, I did three lighter coats of black/blue and two coats of clear. For the pickguard, I went back with a fine paint brush and added the blue outline to the edges. Here is everything laid together after the paint had dried:

View attachment 4641239

Electronics
I started into the electronics by lining everything with copper shielding tape I had laying around.
View attachment 4641241 View attachment 4641242 View attachment 4641243

I then got everything wired and soldered up. Note the copper tape to hold down and provide a larger contact area for the bridge ground wire. I don't have a pic of it, but I later discovered a problem there because the black paint on the bridge prevented good contact with the copper. A quick scouring with my Dremel fixed that issue.
View attachment 4641245

And this is where I ran into my first major snag. When I went to drop the pickguard down, I realized the pots were too wide to fit into the control cavity. My solution was to use my Dremel to bore out some space for the pots.
View attachment 4641244

After fiddling a bunch with the electronics and placement of the pickguard, I was finally happy and moved on to mounting the bridge and neck. This is where I ran into my second major snag. I drilled in the screws to mount the neck, but then had to remove them for some reason (I don't even remember why now). When I did this, the friction of the screws going through the PLA must have melted the material. This basically locked the screws into place. I realized this as I tried to back out the screws. The head of one snapped and I thought it was a fluke. And then a second screw head snapped.

My first idea was to try using a broken screw backout kit, but that did nothing but make the remaining part of the screw completely inaccessible. I gave up on that screw. For the second broken screw, I had the great idea of using my soldering iron to heat the screw up to soften the plastic, and then using some channel locks to back it out. That worked perfectly and I was able to remove one of the broken screws and the remaining intact screw with no problem. But that left me with one screw still stuck, which I ultimately just left in place. I just drilled a new hole into the body, plate, and neck and ignored the broken one.
View attachment 4641246 View attachment 4641247 View attachment 4641248

Final assembly (or so I thought)
After getting around the broken screw issue and securely mounting the neck, the only thing left was to get the tuners on, install the strap buttons, and string it up. No drama here, the tuners and buttons went on just fine and the body seemed to hold as I got the strings on.
View attachment 4641253

Catastrophe!
Once everything was together and I tuned up the bass, I noticed the string height was pretty bad. No worries, I'll just do a proper setup... right? Well, as I began to tighten the truss rod nut, tragedy struck. The bass snapped in half in my hands.
View attachment 4641255

One of the seams failed. Amazingly, though, the printed pieces themselves seemed to be holding up just fine. But as you can imagine, I was horrified. I felt like the dad in A Christmas Story when his freshly glued leg lamp crumpled into his arms. So, after setting the bass down and calling it a night, I did some thinking on how to solve this third and final major snag. My solution was to mount a 1/8" thick piece of steel to the back of the bass. The piece I bought from Home Depot was 2" wide and 36" long; plenty to work with.

After re-gluing the body back together, I cut the steel piece to size and went about mounting it. I went with four screws through both ends of the bass, with the four at the neck reusing the neck mounting screws. In fact, the steel spine replaced the neck plate altogether. Fortunately, I had increased the infill of the print in a big block where the bridge mounts, so that entire area was strengthened and provided a great place to screw in the spine.
View attachment 4641256

Before doing any further painting to hide the spine, I reassembled the bass and tested everything out. It's been holding strong for well over a week now, so I'm confident that the spine will do its job! I did have a few issues with the electronics making some buzzing noises, but some troubleshooting of my shielding job was all that was needed. She plays smoothly and noise-free now! And after feeling confident that the spine would hold, I went back and painted the back of the bass again. All-in-all, the spine added about 1.1lbs of weight to the body.
View attachment 4641258

Playability and final thoughts
Overall, I'm super happy with how the project turned out. I've never built my own bass before and this was, by far, the most complex 3D printing project I've taken on so far. Coming in at about 9.4lbs, it does feel just a hair on the heavier side for a 4-string P-bass. And it had some significant neck dive before I installed the steel spine. But the added weight of the spine had the hidden benefit of balancing out the weight of the bass, and now it sits perfectly still on my leg or from a strap.

The neck, while super cheap, feels surprisingly good. It's made out of Canadian maple and has a great flat/satin finish. There are no sharp frets and the leveling seems good so far. I was even able to get my string action pretty low. I would have preferred a little bit of a different headstock shape - it's huge and the weight of the tuners is really far out, contributing to the neck dive it used to have - but I guess it works in this classic styling. Oh, and this is now the only bass I have with a truss rod adjustment at the headstock. Thanks, I hate it. Give me a heel adjustment point any day of the week!

The sound of this thing is surprisingly good. It's unbelievable how cheap the electronics are, and yet it sounds... well, like a passive P-bass should. I didn't put it in the video, but playing with a pick sounds great, as does really digging in for some percussive playing (think Flea). I won't say slap sounds great on it, but hey, it's a P-bass.

For 300 bucks, having a completely unique instrument is pretty cool. And I don't think this will be the last bass I 3D print. I already have ideas floating around for a 5-string, but this time I'm going to design the body myself. I'm thinking two Stingray/G&L-style humbuckers with active pickups and electronics, a body shape that looks nothing like what's available today, and higher quality parts all around. I think I might build the steel spine into the model, too. It helped immensely with rigidity, and I bet I could get away with reducing the infill even further for most of the body to reduce filament used and overall weight. I'll also take a different approach for covering seams since that didn't turn out all that great in this project. My father-in-law is a carpenter and already has some great ideas for me there.

If/when the day comes that I do another project, I'll be sure to spin up another thread about it. Until then, let me know what you think about this one!
Click to expand...

‘Awesome! Take a bow!!
 
As an Amazon Associate, TalkBass may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via links on this site.
#24
Huge potential.... ya need a bigger printer. One piece construction - use a composite backbone vice the lowes metal. Then offer fully custom NECKS and BODY (to the customer spec). Allow the customer to choose every aspect of the bass, then print it out for them. Ask $2500 like the other boutique companies and walla "ole Jeds' a millionaire"
 
  • Like
Reactions: MrCoolsville
#26
This is so cool! I fully expected it to be much lighter based on the honeycomb pattern visible at the top of the bass, assuming it was that way all the way through. How many days did it take to print? I saw the clock spinning in the background and thought maybe I counted 2 days?
 
#29
Thank you for posting this with so much detail about the build process. I was actually discussing the future direction of musical instrument technology, especially in regards to basses, with another musician last week and I said that it would probably be along the lines of 3D printing with recycled/reusable plastics or polymers. Looking back at how plastics have pretty much replaced many metal components in automobiles and the rise in home 3D printing it seems the natural direction of things that the trend would be applied to musical instruments as well. I see the same direction for medical implants such as hips and other joints, as well as prosthetic limbs.

Really fantastic job! :thumbsup:
 
  • Like
Reactions: MrCoolsville
#32
MrCoolsville said:
Well, the body anyway. The neck is real wood and pre-assembled while all the hardware is standard metal. Check out the finished build along with some tone demos here:

3D printed bass guitar - tone demo - YouTube

View attachment 4641206

Quick stats
  • Fully passive
  • Fender Precision-style body
  • Single split coil pickup
  • 34" scale
  • 3D printed body made from PLA+
  • Printed in 6 pieces and bound together
  • Steel reinforcement spine (more on that later)
  • Maple neck with composite ebony fretboard
  • 9.4 lbs
  • Total cost of materials was around $300 USD after tax
Parts list
Note that these prices were as of Jan 29, 2022, and these links will probably break over time.
Printing
Printing the body was fairly straight-forward. I found the following two models by EG3DPrinting and zerink for the body and pickguard, respectively:

Hexagonal Precision Bass Guitar by EG3Dprinting
P-BASS pick guard

The body is split into six parts with printed dowls and rectangular inserts to help with alignment and a little bit of rigidity. On my printer, however - a Creality CR-10S Pro V2 - I think I could have printed the body in just two parts: the top and bottom. I didn't realize this until after I was well into the process, though, so I stuck with the original plan. For the majority of the parts, I set layer height to 0.2mm and infill to 20% on a standard 0.4mm nozzle. However, I added a couple of reinforced areas with infill set to 70%: the neck and bridge mounting points. This turned out to be a great decision for adding the steel spine later on. I used the filament noted in the parts list - a PLA+ from Overture - in this amazing "Digital Blue" color. Total print time was around a week running 24 hours a day.

I did run into a small snag printing the left side parts with the hexagon pattern. I originally printed the bottom left piece laying flat as shown in the picture below, but the outside edge was really rough because I added some supports and they didn't come off cleanly. I ultimately reprinted it standing straight up on the inside edge of the part. This gave me a much cleaner print. The middle left was also printed on its inside edge and the top left was printed on its bottom edge (to avoid a big overhang from the horn). I only needed to add minimal supports to these and that did NOT include any supports in the hexagons. But they still printed nicely, just as I had hoped!

The pickguard was straight-forward and printed out in two pieces. There was no way for me to easily orient the entire thing to print in one piece on my printer. So, I settled on two pieces and used a combination of super glue and copper tape on the back to close up the seam.

View attachment 4641207 View attachment 4641215

Assembling the body
I chose the 2-part epoxy by Gorilla to bind the parts together. Using two bigass clamps, I first glued the left and right side of each section (bottom, middle, and top) and let them dry overnight. Then, I glued all three pieces together and let that dry overnight. At this point, the body was fully assembled, but still required a LOT of work. The third picture here shows everything together with the pickguard laying on top. To be honest, it was only at this point that I knew the pickguard would actually fit. Remember, the models came from different people on different websites!

View attachment 4641216 View attachment 4641217 View attachment 4641218

Sanding
This is the part that took the most labor and personal time. My first task was to try hiding all the seams between the six printed parts. I used this ProBond filler from Elmer's that I heard good things about for 3D printing. I just used my finger to liberally glob it on all the seams and let it dry for a few hours.

View attachment 4641219 View attachment 4641220

Then I went to sanding to both smooth out the filler and remove most of the print lines. I started by using some 80 grit sand paper on a hand sander.

View attachment 4641224

It didn't take long to realize how much of a pain it would be to hand sand the whole thing, so I went with my orbital sander instead. That made things MUCH faster and easier. I was able to knock down pretty much all the print lines and smooth out the seams, and it was looking pretty good after a couple rounds of filling, sanding, filling again, and sanding again. Of course, I got to finer and finer grit as I went.

View attachment 4641225 View attachment 4641226

I then started the priming process. I didn't seem to get many pictures here, but I went back and forth between priming, sanding, priming some more, and sanding some more. At the end of it all, the whole body was white and looked pretty damn smooth. I thought the seams were gone, but as you can see in the final product, that wasn't really the case.

Painting
My original plan was to let the blue of the filament remain naked in the hexagons and paint the rest of the body satin black. However, I quickly realized how painful it would be to try taping off the hexagons to keep them pristine while sanding and painting all around them. I ultimately decided to just paint the whole thing black and then come back around and re-paint the hexagons to a blue paint that would closely match the original filament color. I went with a "Sail Blue" color paint I found at Home Depot for a few bucks.

To make it easier to paint, I installed a screw into one of the neck screw holes and hung the body while I painted. The pickguard was just laid down on a piece of cardboard. And it's worth noting that I also painted the headstock black to match the body.

View attachment 4641229 View attachment 4641231 View attachment 4641237

After painting everything black, I taped off most of the body and came back around with the blue.

View attachment 4641233 View attachment 4641234 View attachment 4641235 View attachment 4641236

While paint was drying, I also took the model for the body and took a tiny slice of the hexagon pattern. I then just printed that slice to use for a little flair on the headstock. I painted that the same blue, although the dim yellow lighting in this pic makes the color all wonky.

View attachment 4641238

Ultimately, I did three lighter coats of black/blue and two coats of clear. For the pickguard, I went back with a fine paint brush and added the blue outline to the edges. Here is everything laid together after the paint had dried:

View attachment 4641239

Electronics
I started into the electronics by lining everything with copper shielding tape I had laying around.
View attachment 4641241 View attachment 4641242 View attachment 4641243

I then got everything wired and soldered up. Note the copper tape to hold down and provide a larger contact area for the bridge ground wire. I don't have a pic of it, but I later discovered a problem there because the black paint on the bridge prevented good contact with the copper. A quick scouring with my Dremel fixed that issue.
View attachment 4641245

And this is where I ran into my first major snag. When I went to drop the pickguard down, I realized the pots were too wide to fit into the control cavity. My solution was to use my Dremel to bore out some space for the pots.
View attachment 4641244

After fiddling a bunch with the electronics and placement of the pickguard, I was finally happy and moved on to mounting the bridge and neck. This is where I ran into my second major snag. I drilled in the screws to mount the neck, but then had to remove them for some reason (I don't even remember why now). When I did this, the friction of the screws going through the PLA must have melted the material. This basically locked the screws into place. I realized this as I tried to back out the screws. The head of one snapped and I thought it was a fluke. And then a second screw head snapped.

My first idea was to try using a broken screw backout kit, but that did nothing but make the remaining part of the screw completely inaccessible. I gave up on that screw. For the second broken screw, I had the great idea of using my soldering iron to heat the screw up to soften the plastic, and then using some channel locks to back it out. That worked perfectly and I was able to remove one of the broken screws and the remaining intact screw with no problem. But that left me with one screw still stuck, which I ultimately just left in place. I just drilled a new hole into the body, plate, and neck and ignored the broken one.
View attachment 4641246 View attachment 4641247 View attachment 4641248

Final assembly (or so I thought)
After getting around the broken screw issue and securely mounting the neck, the only thing left was to get the tuners on, install the strap buttons, and string it up. No drama here, the tuners and buttons went on just fine and the body seemed to hold as I got the strings on.
View attachment 4641253

Catastrophe!
Once everything was together and I tuned up the bass, I noticed the string height was pretty bad. No worries, I'll just do a proper setup... right? Well, as I began to tighten the truss rod nut, tragedy struck. The bass snapped in half in my hands.
View attachment 4641255

One of the seams failed. Amazingly, though, the printed pieces themselves seemed to be holding up just fine. But as you can imagine, I was horrified. I felt like the dad in A Christmas Story when his freshly glued leg lamp crumpled into his arms. So, after setting the bass down and calling it a night, I did some thinking on how to solve this third and final major snag. My solution was to mount a 1/8" thick piece of steel to the back of the bass. The piece I bought from Home Depot was 2" wide and 36" long; plenty to work with.

After re-gluing the body back together, I cut the steel piece to size and went about mounting it. I went with four screws through both ends of the bass, with the four at the neck reusing the neck mounting screws. In fact, the steel spine replaced the neck plate altogether. Fortunately, I had increased the infill of the print in a big block where the bridge mounts, so that entire area was strengthened and provided a great place to screw in the spine.
View attachment 4641256

Before doing any further painting to hide the spine, I reassembled the bass and tested everything out. It's been holding strong for well over a week now, so I'm confident that the spine will do its job! I did have a few issues with the electronics making some buzzing noises, but some troubleshooting of my shielding job was all that was needed. She plays smoothly and noise-free now! And after feeling confident that the spine would hold, I went back and painted the back of the bass again. All-in-all, the spine added about 1.1lbs of weight to the body.
View attachment 4641258

Playability and final thoughts
Overall, I'm super happy with how the project turned out. I've never built my own bass before and this was, by far, the most complex 3D printing project I've taken on so far. Coming in at about 9.4lbs, it does feel just a hair on the heavier side for a 4-string P-bass. And it had some significant neck dive before I installed the steel spine. But the added weight of the spine had the hidden benefit of balancing out the weight of the bass, and now it sits perfectly still on my leg or from a strap.

The neck, while super cheap, feels surprisingly good. It's made out of Canadian maple and has a great flat/satin finish. There are no sharp frets and the leveling seems good so far. I was even able to get my string action pretty low. I would have preferred a little bit of a different headstock shape - it's huge and the weight of the tuners is really far out, contributing to the neck dive it used to have - but I guess it works in this classic styling. Oh, and this is now the only bass I have with a truss rod adjustment at the headstock. Thanks, I hate it. Give me a heel adjustment point any day of the week!

The sound of this thing is surprisingly good. It's unbelievable how cheap the electronics are, and yet it sounds... well, like a passive P-bass should. I didn't put it in the video, but playing with a pick sounds great, as does really digging in for some percussive playing (think Flea). I won't say slap sounds great on it, but hey, it's a P-bass.

For 300 bucks, having a completely unique instrument is pretty cool. And I don't think this will be the last bass I 3D print. I already have ideas floating around for a 5-string, but this time I'm going to design the body myself. I'm thinking two Stingray/G&L-style humbuckers with active pickups and electronics, a body shape that looks nothing like what's available today, and higher quality parts all around. I think I might build the steel spine into the model, too. It helped immensely with rigidity, and I bet I could get away with reducing the infill even further for most of the body to reduce filament used and overall weight. I'll also take a different approach for covering seams since that didn't turn out all that great in this project. My father-in-law is a carpenter and already has some great ideas for me there.

If/when the day comes that I do another project, I'll be sure to spin up another thread about it. Until then, let me know what you think about this one!
Click to expand...
Looks cool looking forward to hearing it
oh and cost of the 3D printer itself if you don't mind for those who may want to give it a whirl themselves some day :)
 
As an Amazon Associate, TalkBass may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via links on this site.
#33
Hawk256 said:
Very cool project. I have been into 3D printing for the past 6 years or so and have designed and printed a lot of cool stuff. My biggest concern would be the strength of the 3D printed parts. The metal spine in a good solution for the initial issue but I am very skeptical on the long term viability of making a bass out of any plastic based 3D printing filament. Raw Ultem would look pretty cool if you had a printer that could get the temperature high enough. Hat's off to you for getting it to work in first place. Please keep us updated on the long term strength and durability.
Click to expand...

Will do. I hear your concern about longevity, though. I better not leave this thing in the sun. I think even that amount of heat could soften the plastic just enough to warp it.

GrapeBass said:
First off, good job and great work.

How much time did it take to 'print' the pieces and, at what cost? (materials, time, operation).

I'd bet a CNC'd wood bass would be much cheaper and easier to put together albeit not as unique.
Click to expand...

Thanks! Each piece took about a day to print; something like 25 or 26 hours I think. I used the majority of two 1kg spools of filament totaling less than $50 shipped. I can't comment on electricity use as I'm not tracking that. The printer sits in an unused guest room in my house, so it was no burden to my family to have it running 24x7. And yea, you're probably right about CNC'ing. This particular model, while really cool, doesn't stretch what can be done with a 3D printer. For my next project, I really want to lean into that and do a custom model like no other!
 
  • Like
Reactions: GrapeBass
#34
jtemple said:
This is so cool! I fully expected it to be much lighter based on the honeycomb pattern visible at the top of the bass, assuming it was that way all the way through. How many days did it take to print? I saw the clock spinning in the background and thought maybe I counted 2 days?
Click to expand...

25 or 26 hours for each piece, so about a week in total. And even without the steel spine, it would have weighed somewhere in the low 8lbs range. That was heavier than I expected it to be. At 20% infill for most of the body, there is a lot of empty space inside there!
rtslinger said:
Looks cool looking forward to hearing it
oh and cost of the 3D printer itself if you don't mind for those who may want to give it a whirl themselves some day :)
Click to expand...
I bought mine off a Facebook marketplace ad for $550 USD. The previous owner only had it for a few months when they realized the novelty of it wore off for them pretty quickly and it was just gathering dust.

Oh, and there's a link to a YouTube video of me playing it at the top of the original post. I'm not the most amazing player in the world - I've only been playing for 1.5 year - but it gets the job done for a tone demo, I think :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: JRA
#35
MrCoolsville said:
Thanks! Each piece took about a day to print; something like 25 or 26 hours I think. I used the majority of two 1kg spools of filament totaling less than $50 shipped. I can't comment on electricity use as I'm not tracking that. The printer sits in an unused guest room in my house, so it was no burden to my family to have it running 24x7. And yea, you're probably right about CNC'ing. This particular model, while really cool, doesn't stretch what can be done with a 3D printer. For my next project, I really want to lean into that and do a custom model like no other!
Click to expand...

All said and done, it's a great project and great learning experience with oddles of opportunities for your future endeavors. I be envious!
 
  • Like
Reactions: MrCoolsville
#36
MrCoolsville said:
25 or 26 hours for each piece, so about a week in total. And even without the steel spine, it would have weighed somewhere in the low 8lbs range. That was heavier than I expected it to be. At 20% infill for most of the body, there is a lot of empty space inside there!

I bought mine off a Facebook marketplace ad for $550 USD. The previous owner only had it for a few months when they realized the novelty of it wore off for them pretty quickly and it was just gathering dust.

Oh, and there's a link to a YouTube video of me playing it at the top of the original post. I'm not the most amazing player in the world - I've only been playing for 1.5 year - but it gets the job done for a tone demo, I think :)
Click to expand...
sorry I miss that I'll check it out and thanks for the reply RTS
 
  • Like
Reactions: MrCoolsville
#38
Hawk256 said:
No consumer level machines that can do metals yet. Only plastics or resin. Part strength is the biggest thing holding back 3D printing at this point IMO.
Click to expand...

We had one of these at my old job Studio System™ | Desktop Metal Not quite hobbyist pricing, but a lot more reasonable than it used to be. You can also get metal-bearing filaments for most FDM printers that can be baked to melt away the filler material. I haven't tried it myself, but it seems like a neat option.

On the bass though, I've always thought about going for a bass/guitar build. I would probably be more likely to do what was suggested above, neck-through design with 3D printed wings. Less cool, but more reasonable for someone like me that manages to mess things up on a regular basis.
 
#40
GrapeBass said:
I'd bet a CNC'd wood bass would be much cheaper and easier to put together albeit not as unique.
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm sure it would be cheaper and easier, but FAR less unique - that's being done thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of times every day.

I think this is definitely a cool project. You can work on a 6th of the bass at a time, if you want to improve things - 9.4 pounds is definitely something to make headway on. With 3D printing, you can change the center of gravity - put the weight towards the bridge, so a lighter bass still balances. Plastic is heavier than most wood, but the open areas are definitely lighter - there's a lot to experiment with here.

Nicely done!
 
  • Like
Reactions: MrCoolsville

Latest posts

Top Bottom
Back