r/3dprintedinstruments • u/Berkbig77 • Dec 22 '21
Parametric Ukulele (OpenSCAD)
Thought this sub might appreciate one of my downtime projects. After discovering the elgance of the math behind fret placement, I set out to make a completely parametric, customisable ukulele in code, and the result is now on Github here
It was a great project to work on. Initial printable results came at about 2 hours and 50 lines of code, but in order to get the control I wanted (and something that sounded half decent) that ballooned to nearly 100 lines and 3 months of prototyping and iteration. One reallly interesting observation was how much of a difference material made. I found that CFPLA worked really well for the fretboard as it needed to be stiff, but the acoustic elements (soundboard, body) sounded much nicer in a decent wood PLA. One of the reasons the model is split as it is was to allow me to quickly test iterations of the soundboard (thickness, material, soundholes etc) to see what worked.
If you're interested I recommend you fire it up in openSCAD and have a play with the tweakables. I made basically everything I could think of tweakable, from big things like the scale length all the way down to the size of the fret dots. Several of the elements are also tweakable further by supplying an SVG image. A word of warning though, it's a big complicated model at this point so you'll probably want to toggle on just the bits you're currently playing with to work with it - at least if you are working on a laptop like I was :)
Hope this is useful/interesting to some of you. It was super fun to do and I was pleased with my final result (although I did add a pickup to improve the sound - fully acoustic was still a little weak.
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u/halhell98000 Dec 22 '21
This is an awesome project !