Electric Bass Guitar body with tilted fretboard for left hand comfort

This is a model for a bass body optimized for left hand comfort. The fretboard is not parallel to the body surface, but tilted down. Kinda like the Torzal basses, but without the twist. 

Also, the lower horn is shaped so that the bass can be placed on the lap in a position with the neck tilted 45° upwards like a lot of players prefer for standing position, without any chance of it sliding from the leg.

It will roughly fit a Fender style neck, bridge, Precision style pickups, electronics, belt fasteners etc. I highly recommend using a cheap, expendable donor bass and, if you like the concept, upgrade from there.

Stability of the body is achieved through two 25x3mm aluminium rods that are inserted from the bridge side. So I did not use excessive infill, only 20%, and the finished bass weighs less than 3 kg. Once the strings are tensioned, the rods are held in by the bend and do not need other fastening.

This is an advanced project:

• The neck screw positions are custom placed for the neck I had available. 
• You may have to make the neck fit with sandpaper. 
• Neck shimming may very well be necessary. I print my own neck shims; they are part of the model. 
• For you to adapt the model to your needs, I added the .f3d Fusion 360 file.

How to print:

• The body was printed in two parts on an Artillery Sidewinder with a build volume of 300x300x400mm. 
• The main part stands upright on the bridge side and uses organic supports, see pictures. It needs to be tillted from e.g. front left to rear right corner to fit. Pay attention that the placement of organic supports may depend on where exactly you put the body and how you tilt it. Some supports may touch the bass in undesireable places if they have no other room.
• The upper horn is cut off at a height of around 397mm of the 400mm build height (seems old Leo knew that bridge to neck pocket needed to fit into a Sidewinder build volume…) using the Prusa Slicer function to print in different parts with dowels.
• The two parts with dowels were then glued together using the hard plastic adhesive “Uhu Hartkunststoff Spezialkleber” (Germany)
• All electronics channels (pickup to pots and pots to bridge ground wire) are part of the model
• The electronics cover is also included in the printing files
• Expect around 5 days of printing time for the main part, depending on your settings. 
• You cannot fuilly supervise a 5 day print, so make sure there is no fire hazard:
• Make sure thermal runaway protection is working. I heated the nozzle up and pressed an ice cube onto it until it shut down with an error message, but there are other ways to test it. 
• It may also be a wise idea to fit a camera and pay Obico some dollars for an AI print supervision.