Polycaster - 3D Printed Guitar

thingiverse

I've been working on the Polycaster design for a while now and finally decided to bring it to life by printing it out. The main body is composed of 6 distinct pieces that I carefully assembled using epoxy. The central part was printed with 100% infill, consuming almost an entire roll of filament in the process. Meanwhile, the outer 5 pieces were printed at either 15% or 25% infill, depending on their specific design requirements. To optimize resource usage, I opted to print all those parts using a single roll of filament. The neck pocket and bridge design were carefully modeled after the specs of a classic 60s Stratocaster. With a scale length of 25.5 inches, you can easily swap in any Fender Stratocaster neck or aftermarket replacement neck designed for that purpose. Fortunately, I had a spare neck from a different project lying around, which I decided to use. This was a long and arduous printing process. In total, it took about 9 days to complete the entire print job. The main body piece with 100% infill required approximately 2 1/2 days to print, while the other body pieces took anywhere from 9 to 17 hours per piece to finish. As for the various components like pickguards, knobs, and backplates, they only needed a few hours of printing time. I chose to use a neck that was designed for a guitar with a deeper neck pocket, so I had to carefully shave down the neck joint by a few millimeters to accommodate the strings. Once that was done, everything fell into place perfectly without requiring any further adjustments or intonation. Some parts may require additional support structures during printing, such as the main body piece, which will need supports either at the spring locations or where the neck and pickups are situated. The largest body piece also required supports for the output jack design. The other pieces should be fine without any additional support. Depending on your choice of pickups, you may need to drill a few extra holes to accommodate the wires. I ended up drilling two extra holes to route each pickup individually, but in retrospect, one hole might have been sufficient given the thicker wire gauge used by my pickups.