3D-print of a guitar

Producing a complex topology

My friend Stan Borkowski just got a 3D-printer for the Amiqual4home project, and is open to suggestions for fun/interesting/original things to print.

Modeling structures that have a complex topolgy is not so obvious: doing it by hand requires too much work, fractals are too regular (Menger sponge) and random volumes look too random.

Therefore I made an algorithm that:

Printing it

Stan pointed out that the slope of overhanging triangles should not be flatter than 30 degrees, otherwise the print thread would not have enough support from the previous layer. So I removed all links that are less than 40 degrees flat to leave some margin.

The result was printed out:

The guitar idea

Then Jérome Maisonnasse suggested that we could make a guitar from this 3D texture. The shape of electric guitars is not constrained by acoustic considerations, because the sound is generated electronically from the vibrations of the strings. The shape of the guitar's body is there only to offer a grip to the player and for design.

Jérome provided the outline of a typical guitar and its dimensions. To add a nice effect and maybe increase the strength of the structure, repeat:

The result looks like

Unfortunately, it turned out that printing this thing in steel would we way too expensive, so we left the project aside.


May 2013.