A visit to the hardware hacking area of the recent Hacker Hotel hacker camp in the Netherlands would bring plenty of interesting pieces of hardware to delight the eye. Among them though was one to delight the ear, and on hearing it we asked whether its creator could put it online so we could share it with you. [XDr4g0nX]’s bass guitar is 3D printed, and while it still contains some non-3D-printed parts it’s still a very effective musical instrument.

This is not the first model he’s produced, he told us, an earlier guitar was entirely 3D-printed but proved not to be rigid enough. Tuning such an instrument merely resulted in its bowing out of shape and becoming unplayable as well as out of tune. This one has hefty steel bars for rigidity, though it uses a Yamaha neck rather than 3D-printing the whole instrument. The main body of the instrument has to be printed in multiple parts and epoxied together, which he’s done without some of the ugly seams that sometimes disfigure prints of this nature.

Having heard it, we’d be hard pressed to tell it wasn’t a more traditional guitar, but then again since people have made guitars from all kinds of scrap it’s not the first home build we’ve encountered.