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
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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After painting everything black, I taped off most of the body and came back around with the blue.
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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.
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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:
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Electronics
I started into the electronics by lining everything with copper shielding tape I had laying around.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
Thanks for taking the time to share so many details
good how-i-did-it read, too!
