The Prusacaster is a 3D Blue-Print by Prusa Research to create a Custom Build 3D Printed Guitar.

Design priorities

To understand the thought process – I was designing the guitar with the 3D printing community in mind. I want others to be able to easily follow this build and create their own awesome guitar. So before I started designing anything, I put down a list of priorities:

The project should be simple No complicated assemblies of tens of parts, easy to put together No metal rods for reinforcement or other non-essential hardware It should be cheap, if I’m spending a lot of money on a guitar, I’m buying a genuine Fender or Gibson The hardware should be easy to source with worldwide shipping All of the pieces must fit on the Original Prusa i3 MK3S+ (25×21×21 cm) This seems like a really tough limitation, but if it’s not printable on a MK3 sized printer, most people won’t be able to print it It should actually play well and be in tune across the whole range, I don’t want to create an unplayable plastic gimmick It should look incredibly cool!

Keeping it simple

From the beginning, the biggest concern was the force the strings apply to the guitar’s body and neck. While the sources slightly differ with the information on this, the consensus seems to be that it’s about 50 kg of load, depending on the string gauge (thickness). These 50 kg are trying to fold the guitar in half, trying to rip the bridge from the body, and trying to severely bend the neck.

The hardware

With the choice being made of going forward with the Telecaster hardware, we have to source all of the parts. In general, there are 3 ways to go about this:

Buy a cheap Telecaster guitar and dismantle it for parts Buy all the parts individually Buy a Telecaster hardware kit

Buying a whole functional guitar just to take it apart right away seems like such a wrong and wasteful way to go about this. The only time this would seem a good solution would be if you find a severely damaged guitar, with the hardware and neck still in decent shape.

Buying all the parts individually is definitely a feasible option. You’d need:

The guitar neck with tuners 1 standalone single-coil pickup The bridge with an integrated single-coil pickup Telecaster control plate with a 3-way switch and two knobs The output jack

The material choice for the center piece

The only part which will be under significant mechanical load is the big middle piece. It might be tempting to print it from a material like PETG for the added “strength”. However, in our case, we’re specifically looking for a very stiff material (high bending modulus). And maybe surprisingly, good old PLA is fantastic in this regard. Using PLA also fits the theme of this build of keeping it cheap and simple.

Using PLA has one downside – low-temperature resistance. With the centerpiece being quite hefty, it will still be able to withstand the direct sun for reasonably long periods of time. But if one were to leave the guitar in a case on a very hot summer day, that would be a problem. If you want to remove this limitation, pick a stiff material with higher temperature resistance – such as Prusament PC Blend Carbon Fiber, Prusament PA11 Carbon Fiber, or similar. Those are a bit more difficult to print with and a fair bit more expensive though. Since Prague has mostly a moderate climate, I printed this part from PLA. And after a year (that’s how long this article took to finish), it’s still holding strong.

To test if everything fits, I’ve printed one copy of the middle piece with the default PrusaSlicer settings. And since everything did fit, I attached the guitar neck and the bridge to it, and then attached the strings to the “guitar”. And Voilà! The guitar is functional! It looks rather strange with just the centerpiece and it is missing all of the electronics. But it plays!