This week’s selection is the amazing Lord of the Rings Guitar by Olaf Deigel.
Deigel is a Professor of Additive Manufacturing at the University of Auckland, in the same country where the filming of the Lord of the Rings movies took place decades ago.
Deigel describes his complex design:
“For the Tolkien (and guitar) fans out there, the guitar is called Faerlind (Elvish for music of the soul) and is loosely based on an Iceman-style guitar, with a shortened bottom horn and a contoured front, which I thought made for the most Elvish guitar shape. The inside of the guitar features iconic LOTR scenes including the Fellowship, Sting and Narsil swords, Gollum, a Balrog, the key to Erebor, Arwen’s Evenstar pendant, Barad-dûr (the Dark Tower, Eye of Sauron), Gandalf the Grey and White’s staffs and, of course, some rings. And the tree of Gondor is, of course, backlit with white LEDs.”
Deigel used SOLIDWORKS to design the complex guitar, which includes a tremendous amount of detail. If you look closely, you can see various characters from Lord of the Rings inside the guitar.
The main part of the guitar was printed in a single piece using the large format voxelJet VX1000 system with their interesting HSS process. HSS is a process that uses a liquid binder to selectively hold together plastic powder, which is then heated with infrared light to fuse the particles together.
Prints made from HSS are usually quite smooth, and that was the case for the guitar. Deigel reports that it took only three iterations of priming and sanding to achieve a perfectly smooth surface, which was then painted in final colours.
This could be one of the most impressive 3D printed guitars ever produced.
Via LinkedIn
