Fuck you. Print the neck too.
3D printed guitars have been around for a decade at this point. The pattern is always the same: 3D print a guitar body with a socket for an off-the-shelf bolt-on neck, screw it in, and call it a 3D printed guitar. You people keep doing the same thing and expect the next thing to be interesting or innovative. Fuck you. Print the neck too.
This is an entirely 3D printed guitar. Minus some hardware (tuners, bridge, pickups, electronics, knobs) and some small bits that could be 3D printed (the bone nut, frets), this thing came off a relatively standard 3D printer.
Because I wanted to demonstrate that a 3D printed guitar neck is possible, I chose a neck-through design. The most iconic neck-through electric guitar is the Gibson Firebird, so I went with that. This proved to be somewhat difficult to model; the fretboard is angled 3 degrees from the top of the body, and the headstock is angled 13 degrees from the plane of the fretboard:
Modeling the Firebird silhouette is well-trodden territory; the hard part is engineering a printed neck that survives 120lbs of string tension.
The slight innovation here is a double-action truss rod, with carbon fiber neck rods running the length of the neck. These are from Stewmac, and are 0.200″ × 0.250″ × 18″, trimmed slightly to length, shaving off a quarter inch of their 18″ length.
With this, the entire guitar body, the fretboard, and even the fretboard inlays are 3D printed. The ‘sides’ or ‘wings’ are bolted on with a ‘tongue and groove’ joint.
