Lap Steel Guitar, vintage SciFi style. For 200mm and larger printers by nullandvoid

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is a fun instrument project although not a particularly easy one (depending on your skill level). Print time for all 54 parts is around 70 hours, using 2kg of various color PLA.
This was made in 123D design, the original file is included so feel free to tweak, remix, and alter.
This will print on a 200x200mm printer. The printer will need to be tuned and calibrated very well, but quite a few parts will need to be filed or sanded in order to fit correctly.
It's highly suggested that you set the infill and layer angle to 0 or 90 degrees, which will make the top layers look much better on the assembled lapsteel. I did that for all parts but the fingerboard, you can see that's the only part that does not look all that great.
I used 1.5kg filament for the 4 main body sections. These parts have quite a bit of tension on them. Body4 in particular needs to be very strong with high infill otherwise the bridge will flex and you'll never get the instrument to stay in tune. I used PLA at a higher than normal temperature and less cooling on Body4 to maximize layer adhesion.
The wings can be printed with less infill as they do no bear any load.
Print the fingerboard and splines at 100% infill.
Items needed:
Set of 3x3 tuners
Set of P90 pickups
2 250k or 500k potentiometers
3 way Gibson style switch
1/4 mono jack
3' 1/4-20 threaded rod
1/4-20 nut and washer
200mm 1.4 to 2mm music wire or other hardened steel wire for string anchors
5mm metal rod for bridge and nut
Set of lap steel stings
Superglue
Epoxy
Not counting the filament, the hardware and supplies came to around $40, buying the cheapest I could find on Amazon.
About the part naming:
Assembly numbering: 1 nearest the tuners, higher numbers towards the bridge. Prefix B indicates Bass side (toward player), T is treble side.
Don't leave this in your car on a hot day!