Olaf Diegel enjoys making music with unusual instruments. He’s the designer behind a series of guitars, a set of drums, and a keyboard shell that all came out of a 3D printer. He wasn’t content to rest there, though. Now he has a 3D-printed alto saxophone, an instrument that shows both the current capabilities and future promise of 3D printing. The sax, printed from nylon, consists of 41 components, not counting screws and springs. It’s incredibly light, weighing in at just over one pound. While the technical challenges of 3D-printing a saxophone were considerable, the result is an instrument that sounds quite lively. “Surprisingly to me, the sax sounds very much like a sax,” Diegel writes. Diegel used a traditional sax for the template. The whole project took about six months, with the actual assembling time taking several weeks to get the sax functioning properly.