For my final project, the BIG one, I decided I would try to 3D print a guitar. I love playing guitar for fun and as a hobby, and thought it would be really neat to be able to 3D print a playable guitar. This was definitely a trialing project, and turned out to be a lot tougher than I expected.
To do this project I had to use the Makerbot Replicator 2x. I would print out the guitar in 6 parts, which would then be put together will some sort of adhesive (for the prototype I used hot glue). Since the piece are so big I had to use the Makerbot (over the UP!mini because it is too small). If anyone reading this knows anything about 3D printers then you know that they are very sensitive creatures that tend to do what they want, when they want, and only work for you about 50% of the time. This is where the difficulties arose. After successfully printing two pieces of the guitar, our Makerbot BROKE, and we could not figure out how to fix it! With no printer big enough to fit my pieces, some rethinking was in order.
First I was able to find another Makerbot printer big enough to print my objects at another college down the street from ours, this seemed to bring hope back to the original size guitar. I had to drive over for several nights in a row to try to put pieces on, and actually got one more piece printed, before I got an email from them stating overnight, while one of my parts was printing, their Makerbot malfunction and would be out of order for at least a week. Back to the drawing board...
Finally an idea came to me, and really a panicked thought to get something finished to show for my project. We have about 3-4 Up!mini 3D printers which are about half the size of the Makerbot. I decided to shrink the guitar down to a size that would fit on the Up!mini and make a "prototype" guitar. This worked out pretty well. I had one or two draw backs with these printers but in the end I was able to fully print the mini-guitar and put it together!
To do this project I had to use the Makerbot Replicator 2x. I would print out the guitar in 6 parts, which would then be put together will some sort of adhesive (for the prototype I used hot glue). Since the piece are so big I had to use the Makerbot (over the UP!mini because it is too small). If anyone reading this knows anything about 3D printers then you know that they are very sensitive creatures that tend to do what they want, when they want, and only work for you about 50% of the time. This is where the difficulties arose. After successfully printing two pieces of the guitar, our Makerbot BROKE, and we could not figure out how to fix it! With no printer big enough to fit my pieces, some rethinking was in order.
First I was able to find another Makerbot printer big enough to print my objects at another college down the street from ours, this seemed to bring hope back to the original size guitar. I had to drive over for several nights in a row to try to put pieces on, and actually got one more piece printed, before I got an email from them stating overnight, while one of my parts was printing, their Makerbot malfunction and would be out of order for at least a week. Back to the drawing board...
Finally an idea came to me, and really a panicked thought to get something finished to show for my project. We have about 3-4 Up!mini 3D printers which are about half the size of the Makerbot. I decided to shrink the guitar down to a size that would fit on the Up!mini and make a "prototype" guitar. This worked out pretty well. I had one or two draw backs with these printers but in the end I was able to fully print the mini-guitar and put it together!
Here is the mini-guitar almost done and partial assembled.
Even the Up!mini gave me some issues (I honestly just have a curse with 3D printers). The top motor where the machine heats up the plastic and runs it out fell off, but the printer tried to keep going and got the filament everywhere!
Here is a picture of the mini-guitar next to some of the pieces of the original sized I wanted. It just shows how much I had to shrink it!
Finally here is a picture of one of the Makerbot fails. Not sure what happened, we found it this way. but it seems to have malfunctioned forcing my part to fall off but try to keep going. It had high hopes to try to finish...