Every one of us is a specialist in something, and our belief is that great things happen when different specialists intersect to combine the expertise from different disciplines. One such collision recently took place at RedEyeOnDemand, a popular 3D print service.

It turns out that Tim Thellin and several co-workers at RedEye are hobby musicians, and they decided to put the two skills together. They experimented with different guitar styles and build materials, and eventually came up with a variety of interesting instruments:

It started out as a gimmick to build something really different that would stand out for use at tradeshows. So, we made our first two telecaster style guitars out of PC-ISO and ABSi red materials. The sleek, translucent look of the PC-ISO only added to its rigidness and durability. Then, we chose ABSi red to build something in a different color that we could send to Stratasys' European sales office for use as samples and at their tradeshows. We quickly learned how easy it was to create custom designs with intricate geometries using the FDM technology.

We couldn't stop with single color projects, so we worked on a truly custom design and build a double S-shaped guitar for Stratasys using ABS black and blue. We further enhanced the complexity using PolyJet Clear and Vero White for the knobs.

To accomplish this, Tim first purchased an actual guitar so that he could reuse the non-printable bits as well as get some hints about dimensions and layouts. The video shows some of the process undertaken and the resulting rather unconventional guitar. Future designs are limited only by their imagination.

Amazing stuff, but we're wondering whether this opens up a legal question: what happens if someone buys an object and then precisely copies it? Could that be considered "personal use" by means of making a "backup copy" of the object? Whose Stratocaster is that?

Via YouTube and RedEye On Demand