That IS very cool!
Curious how come you didn't go with the swimming pool route for the pickup cavity? Would've saved you a bit of plastic/resin/whatever you call it...
A couple of reasons. First (and most important), I didn't design the original model, and that's how it came. I do have models with the original '60s routes which would have used even more filament, but I like this one because of the options it gives.
Second, a swimming pool route would have less plastic and therefor be less structurally sound. A guitar is under tremendous stress from the strings trying to pull it in on itself, and that area between the bridge and the neck bears the brunt of that stress. Since my printer can only print to a certain size, I had to chop the model up which you can see since I used different colors for each part. That means that the stress is even more a problem since the only thing fighting the string tension is that middle piece, so a swimming pool route would make that even less strong. Honestly, though, I have my doubts about the strength thing given the huge bridge pickup "route" which may make that argument moot. The bottom line is that plastic is not wood, but it's even more complicated than that...
PLA (the plastic being printed) can deform under stress, so I have my doubts that this guitar will last forever. What's more, 3D printed parts are rarely solid. To save filament the software that preps for the print takes the solid parts and replaces it with a patten called "infill". The default infill is 15% and is a series of triangles:
Upping the infill to 50% makes it look like this:
Since PLA is about $50/kg and each of these parts consumes 1/2-2/3 of a roll, changing the infill has a huge impact on print time and cost, but a higher percentage of infill makes the part stronger. BTW, that's another benefit of splitting up the model: I can print the center stress-bearing part with high infill and the outer more cosmetic parts with low infill. Technically I could do that with the slicer software anyway, but it's easier with separate parts.