Custom Guitar -- Progress Update

Sept 19 Update — see the new OFMG guitar page for more information.

I just wanted to post a quick note this morning and will update it with some pictures and more info later this week.

We made some really good progress on the guitar last week! We had been struggling with some of the design issues for the neck and fret buttons but I’m happy to report that those are resolved now and we’ve built a few prototype neck assemblies and they look and feel great.

A big challenge with a project like this is that we want to make the design something that can be 3D printed with a typical consumer grade FDM printer. There are a lot of factors that go into designing parts so they can be 3D printed, including taking the limitations of the printers into account, and designing the parts so that they don’t need a lot of temporary supports or post-processing.

Because there are some parts on the guitar that require a lot of precision to fit properly, some parts will be printed using SLA (resin) printers. This is similar to how we make the Strum Fix Plus 4 using a combination of FDM and SLA parts.

The current neck design uses mostly FDM printed parts; the only SLA parts are the bit of the fret button keycaps that press-fit into the keyboard switches. The rest of it uses FDM printed parts, and they all can be printed without supports or requiring any post-processing! This is huge step forward for us.

The rest of the guitar (the control panel, strummer etc…) are progressing as well. These other parts don’t have the same space constraints as the neck (which your hand needs to wrap around comfortably) so it’s a much less challenging design problem, and we’ve made a few strummers before so that’s kinda up our alley :-)

I’ll post some pictures and CAD renderings later this week. A lot of engineering is about “momentum” and it finally feels like we’re getting up to speed on the guitar project and things are starting to come together.

Best regards,

Scott P