3D Plasticaster Build

[lunaticds]

Centre piece complete:

Printed with stressingly bugger all filament left on the roll and the wifi on the Octopi box playing up so I had no way to pause it.

You can see on the right the scratch marks from where I had to work at removing the supports that covered the pickup slot.
On the far left you can see a bigger block - in the original design thats wide open for a tremelo. I've filled it with a solid block given that I'll use a hard tail.
Thinking about the strength of this section, there was probably some balance achieved using a trem.. given the pressure on both sides. I may experiment with building a solid support or two that can be glued in if I can find a way of being able to shoehorn a pair of pickups around them.

I'll aim to strip the single coils from the Samick over the weekend and work on how to fit them in this section, and sort out the supports.

The neck section is printing. That'll be a few days out. Most people are saying they need to modify a bit, so that'll have to let that sit until the neck arrives.

[lunaticds]

Pieces sitting roughly together:


I've just resized the pickup holes slightly to get the covers through snug, but without being so tight it'll be impossible once I put a support under there. Screw holes drilled.

The neck mount looks to have around 2 days left printing. Printer has been running 24x7 for a week on this job so far, so a couple of days longer is hardly a concern. Once it's done I can get on to the custom bits I still need - the support for behind the pups and an edge mount enclosure for the output jack. It'll be down behind the logo somewhere and blackwired back to the control cavity so it doesn't stand out too much.

The existing glue joins vary between awesome and woeful. I've attempted to file and sand off a lot of the excess that came from using it to patch the gaps. Some of it I'm hoping will just add to the texture. I have a few gaps left in some of the joins that need a little TLC. I don't really know how effective the primer/filler stuff is yet to know how much it will hide for me.

[lunaticds]

The neck heel part has finally printed - it's taken around 2 days and finished around 3am.



Over 400g of plastic went into it, so it's a fairly heavy chunk of PLA. The supports were a bit of a pain to get out of the pickup cavity, but I managed after messing around for half an hour or so.

I've since made a jack box to mount on the side. It's going to be a little fiddly to get back into it once it's glued in, so when the wiring kit bits arrive, I'll put it all together then glue it in.

I'll likely glue the centre pieces together at some stage today then I can probably move on to attaching the upper body parts.

[lunaticds]

Body is together, has gone through a couple of rounds of filler/primer and on to its first full coat. I don't have a lot of back satin left, so I'm going to avoid another full coat and just worry about hitting the areas that need a touch up - mostly the areas where the primer is still coming through.

I've learned a lot thus far:
- The filler/primer cracks up over parts that had been painted previously despite sanding. I think more effort went into trying to deal with that drama than I ever spent sanding the PLA. The control panel has some fairly deep cracks despite a lot of sanding time. I've decided I might just live with it. A few cracks add to the texture.
- The filler is fun to sand. It makes a lot of mess. It also smells. A lot.
- I need better gear to put bits together while glue dries. Limited clamps made it a challenge.
- This concept has a massive surface area that is quite simply too hard to completely prepare.
- I really should have put more effort into fine tuning my printer to reduce the layer lines and done more testing to avoid using as many supports. There are a lot of mesh areas inside the sections that the supports had adhered to that are too hard to get to. If I'd have been less focused on making this low budget, I suspect I'd have printed enough pieces to make 4 guitars instead of 1.

This is definitely not perfect. A lot of the join work is crap, some due to the additional layers added where I've cut the sections up to fit, where things moved while the glue cured and so on. There is a gap to the right of the centre - you can see it near the bridge. There is a whole area that doesn't have a side in the design to adhere to the section with the control cavity, so there isn't a lot of room for adhesion.
I wound up with two sections to put together, and this was where they joined. Initially they were near perfect, but it become clear soon after that where I'd anchored other areas (I resorted to cable ties), that it was trying to flex. When I let it go, that gap developed, so I let it go. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to create a whole lot of pressure over an area that doesn't have a lot to adhere to. Once the back plate is on it shouldn't stand out too much I hope.

The neck arrived yesterday. Surprisingly straight. The finish is a bit average and there are signs that the clear coat has come over to the fret board.
I've thrown on a coat of lemon oil to start trying to bring up the fretboard, and I went through and gave the frets a quick level, dress and polish.
I 3D printed the Plasticaster logo, laid down some polyurethane on the headstock and managed to get it to stick. This needs some more work - it's coming up a bit bubbly - I imagine the coolness of the garage is probably a bit too cold for it. Once it's dry I'll try to sand it back and wait until it's a bit warmer to give it another coat. I don't really care to do too much more to the headstock other than get that logo stuck there with a couple of coats over it to help keep it there, and otherwise bring the finish back to an acceptable level.

I've got the electronics all ready to go when the body is ready.
The hardware however is a different matter; it's all kit bits from the ST-1 which is still in transit (since 20/8).

[McCreed]

Very interesting build. What's the body weight?

[lunaticds]

Very interesting build. What's the body weight?

A tad over 1.4kg at the moment.

Hopefully I'm somewhere near getting a full coat over this thing now. I go in and move it occasionally and just do patch jobs where required. I'd very much like to not need to put much more time into that body if I can avoid it. There's a lot of "little things" that are too time consuming to fix that I'd rather just ignore for the sake of this being more of a prototype rather than something I want to make awesome. I suspect I could put a few hundred hours into this body trying to get it where I want it only to still wind up with a guitar that doesn't really justify quite so much effort.

Doing the TB-4 at the same time, working on the timber I feel a distinct relationship between what I'm doing, what I'm try to achieve and the material. It behaves and it's enjoyable to put time and effort into.
I'm struggling to have the same thing working with plastic. I suspect a lot of it is just due to the sheer amount of surface area and limited accessibility to so much of it. It was a massive undertaking to print and its taken a lot of sanding and filing to get the body almost to what someone with a better printer setup would have achieved straight off the print bed. The filler is incredibly messy to deal with - useful, but given its behaviour over the sections that had already been painted and the complexity of the surface area it was another set of problems - though I must say, it has taken out some of the need for aggressively sanding the PLA back to reduce the layer lines.
Possibly it's skewed by my relationship to 3D printing - I've never really put any effort into it beyond design.. things print, I use the thing for whatever purpose. It's always been the final step of production rather than the half way point.

I've been looking at a 3D printed bass design - one that lacks the body complexity and instead just provides nice, flat surfaces to work with. That might be a one day future project.

[lunaticds]

Headstock is a bit pockmarked with the last spray. Having a lot of trouble getting a consistent coat over it. Thinking I perhaps need to get a couple more layers over it, let them sit for a day or two so they get hard then try to sand them down till they're flat, recoat then hit with a finer grit paper? I've never tried to finish clear coat from a can before, so not terribly familiar with how to deal with this.

[andybanks]

It's looking pretty good to me. :-)

I would be surprised if it would be possible to get a perfect finish from the printer, and since there are so many internal and hard to get at surfaces, it would take a massive effort to clean it all up to make it look nice. There might have been an opportunity to use plastic welding to fill some of the bigger gaps before the filler, but it is pretty tricky to not burn through the thin shell of the printed parts and screw it all up. I have probably about a 50% hit rate on that sort of thing.

If you look back at the original picture you posted of your inspiration, you'll notice the finish is also not perfect - in fact I think they may have wrapped it in vinyl, but they have definitely hidden the imperfections by using a matte finish. Reflective surfaces (especially dark colours like black) always show up the imperfections, so it will be harder to get a super clean look with the gloss black. If you can live with it, it is still pretty cool... Just stand back and squint a bit. :-)

I am still really keen to see how this works mechanically and how it responds to string tension. Will it stay in tune? will it resonate somehow unexpectedly? Pretty keen to see how it functions. :-)

p.s. I think you are on the right track with the clear, let it go off for a day or two, and then have another crack at it. Apparently the weather is only going to be almost nice in Ballarat tomorrow..

[lunaticds]

It's looking pretty good to me. :-)

I would be surprised if it would be possible to get a perfect finish from the printer, and since there are so many internal and hard to get at surfaces, it would take a massive effort to clean it all up to make it look nice. There might have been an opportunity to use plastic welding to fill some of the bigger gaps before the filler, but it is pretty tricky to not burn through the thin shell of the printed parts and screw it all up. I have probably about a 50% hit rate on that sort of thing.

If you look back at the original picture you posted of your inspiration, you'll notice the finish is also not perfect - in fact I think they may have wrapped it in vinyl, but they have definitely hidden the imperfections by using a matte finish. Reflective surfaces (especially dark colours like black) always show up the imperfections, so it will be harder to get a super clean look with the gloss black. If you can live with it, it is still pretty cool... Just stand back and squint a bit. :-)

I am still really keen to see how this works mechanically and how it responds to string tension. Will it stay in tune? will it resonate somehow unexpectedly? Pretty keen to see how it functions. :-)

p.s. I think you are on the right track with the clear, let it go off for a day or two, and then have another crack at it. Apparently the weather is only going to be almost nice in Ballarat tomorrow..

Cool cheers. The paint is satin, but it seems particularly glossy, and does absolutely show everything. I'm just resigning myself to the fact that the imperfections are cool.

Weather, nice, Ballarat? You mean we're gonna have one of those 3 days a year tomorrow? Awesome. Saves me checking the weather. :P

[Simon Barden]

Clear either needs to go on as flat a surface as possible, or you need to use countless coats to build up enough depth to sand it back flat. It will just follow the contours underneath it, it won’t just fill up any dips first but also cover the bumps. You’d need a very thinned paint indeed for it to pool in the pits and even then, as mist of that liquid would be thinners, it would still dry out leaving a smaller pit, and the paint layer would be even thinner. A standard spray can is probably 30% paint/lacquer, the rest is propellent and thinners. Increase the amount of thinners and the paint content goes down considerably, so you’d need maybe 3x the number of cans.

Plus, too much thinning affects the paint finish and of course on anything but a horizontal surface, it’s just going to run off and not stick. So, getting the surface as flat as possible first is the ideal solution.

For the bass idea, as it would also have to be in parts (unless you get a new 3D printer), maybe you could make a full solid body bass in a jigsaw-style, so the pieces slot together nicely, provide mechanical strength for the joints and provide lots of glue area? You could also highlight the jigsaw effect if you wanted by having the pieces slightly different heights.