Oh man, ukuleles, they sound happy. Hey gang, Tim here at Core Electronics and today I'm showing you a great way to combine 3D printed components made from PLA so that by the end of this video we're going to have a completely 3D printed ukulele that we can knock some tunes out of.

There will be situations when you want to 3D print larger than your 3D printer's build space where you're going to want to combine 3D printed parts together. And furthermore, as you wrap your head around 3D printing, you learn different techniques to save on filament by printing in ways that don't require as many supports, but does require some assembly after the fact.

One of the most common filaments used today is PLA, so it's very often that this is the material you're going to find yourself wanting to combine. Before I potentially ruin this print, check out the time lapse of printing this body. I was absolutely cheering when I pulled it off the print bed.

The filament used is Polymaker Polywood and this material is effectively PLA with a special foaming agent which gives it a lighter density than normal, one that is similar to a medium density wood. For that reason, when I tap this ukulele, you get left with a hollow drum sound very similar to a guitar.

So, I'm going to get into it. I thought it worthwhile mentioning as I'm gluing this together, a fair bit went into creating these parts, and I used the Cura slicing in some unique ways to get the exact result I wanted. The coolest change I did to the body was splitting the model in half and then lining the two parts back up in Cura and then turning on the setting to make overhangs printable for just the lower part. This gave off a really nice finish when I printed it with maxed outWall thicknesses. For the dual material neck, I printed it from both tough PLA white and the same Polymaker Polywood material. I pulled the original CAD model into two sections and then folded through all the processes talked about in 3D print awesome dual coloured models.

Big shout out goes to Ian Hanna aka Solstii as it was his original model that made the foundation of these parts. I spent the time customising that model to exactly what I wanted in Fusion 360.

With that, let's get back to seeing how I'm going putting these pieces together, hopefully well. So with that, all the 3D parts for this ukulele have been put together. So I'm going to leave it all to rest until tomorrow and then we can install the extra hardware being the tuners and the strings and finish this here ukulele.

Now, if you're wondering what type of glue I'm using for this ukulele, it's called Psygrip Weld-On 16. This glue takes 24 hours plus to dry and to reach its full strength. Over my experimentation, I found that just using super glue when joining PLA parts is better both in regards to how quickly it dries and also the overall strength of your final component.

So with the parts connected to each other, I started test fitting the tuning pegs. Then I got the soldering iron to temperature and pressed it through the gaps in the tuning pegs mounts to make holes for the screws. I made sure to clean the soldering iron and re-tin the tip so that way next time you use it, it's going to work for you perfectly. Then I started to screw the pegs into the head.

You'll notice here when I'm screwing in one of the screws that the head of the ukulele disconnected. To fix this, I went straight to my stash of super glue and connected it up right quick.Fast. Since then, it's been doing a very good job at staying attached. With all the tuners firmly connected, it was time to attach some strings.

Start at the base and thread the string through the hole and then back around itself. Then wrap the string around itself three times similar to tying the first half of a surgeon's knot. Thread the string through the tuners and then tighten up. This requires a lot of winding so definitely get your hands on a string winder tool. I 3D printed a print in place string winder just the day before which you can see me using right here.

Keep using that winder until the string is a little bit taut and then repeat the process for the other strings. Keep in mind the strings will stretch a whole bunch after you first put them on.

With all the strings attached, it's time to give it some preliminary tuning. There you go. After finished tuning, that timeout lasted a little bit longer than I expected so some things may have shuffled around behind me but it has given the strings time to stretch out and settle.

Things that I've changed from before worth noting, I used an extra loop around the two smaller strings as they were slipping just a little bit and I've also added this tiny little slip paper, this little tit bit right at the top which lets this string be played louder and hold the note longer than it did before.

But here it is all put together. Let's see if I can play something. So I hope this inspired you to create or consider some musical projects in this new year and made you more confident knowing that you can combine components together that will survive. And if you dig our content, come like and subscribe and with that, until next time, stay cozy.