How long until we see 3D printed components in boat building?

Most cruiser are compelled at one time or another to fabricate various parts with whatever material and tools they have at hand. They don`t last long but can get you there.

 

BB is stating only info that supports his argument. A plastic part costing $0.08 requires ~20 weeks and 50~$100K tooling. There is likely a $200 set up charge every time the tool goes in the mold and a 50,000 shot life to the tool. If you want 20 you need to go to a distributor, and if you are on their electronic order system you can get parts in a few day for a few bucks a piece, but that order system might cost thousands to get on. Lots of parts are not even available -out of production, or only available as part of a large expensive assembly.

Boats are so low volume I suspect that additive manufacturing will become common. The military and large corporations are already moving to stereo lithography for field service to cut warehousing.

 

Makerbot right now has a $1,000 3d scanner that can turn anything into a compatable file in a few minutes. Assuming for a moment that you can't get many files, it wouldn't take much to just scan it instead.

Right now the DMLS machine I am investigating runs about $200,000 with a high resolution accuracy of 5microns. Assuming the purchase of this machine the scanner seems to be a given.

While I have doubts about the difficulty in getting printable files, even if it is difficult now, I don't see this as a long term issue.

 

What do you think your primary parts and material would be?

 

MakerBots scanner creates a relatively low res point cloud file. Try running that through the converter you need to create a file for the DLMS input.

Its a long term issue because the exterior scan of complex parts doesn't give you the shape - and the cost of printing a simple part is so much in excess of normal machining processes (100x) that simple parts make no sense to make with a 3D printer.

 

So in anticipation of that are you going to haul around a DLMS machine that costs over $10k, takes up a 6 cubic meters of space, weighs at least 500kg and can only work in a perfectly calm anchorage?

 

No , but I would probably get rid of my microwave for a machine that could make parts the size of a turkey and cost what I paid for my first gps or mobile phone.

 

And do what with it? that sized machine could do a decent job of creating some cool designs in chocolate http://www.fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Materials:Chocolate or maybe make that really critical plastic label for your GPS or Cell phone http://www.stratasys.com/materials

But that to me seems less useful than just buying one - or maybe having a storage rack of spares the size of a microwave

at 1/100th the cost

 

I paid 0ver $5000.00 for gps in 1985 or1986 . What`s that in todays dollars ? it worked about two hours a day. I paid the same for a mobile phone the size of a small suit case that worked about twenty minutes before needing an overnight charge. Today we have smart phones for a couple hundred dollars or less. Do you really think that twenty five years from now we will not see a use for 3d printers on boats , or in their manufacture ?

 

We talked about this earlier. The massive cost reduction in consumer electronics is the direct result of the economies of mass production. Make a lot of anything and it can become inexpensive. In reality how many consumers will want or need to make parts on their own. Add in the need to have engineering expertise to design the parts you need to make and the market for these machines won't be sufficiently large to allow them to be made inexpensively like mobile phones are today.

There is a lot of neat new manufacturing technology out there, and this may become a mainstream thing for manufacturers to use someday, but don't expect it to be low cost or ubiquitous like consumer electronics are now.

 

Also GPS has no mechanical parts to speak of. ALL of these 3D printers have precision mechanics in them. And precision mechanics come down in price much much more slowly than electronic components do. With electronics the longer you run a facility the MORE productive it gets. with mechanical production you actually slowly wear out your mechanisms so you have a fixed amortization life cycle that over time only decreases slowly

 

To my knowledge the present cheap scanners output surface files similar to the output from Rhino or other designer software. My experience with making STL files from scans was that it worked without any problems. CNC machining from such files (from scans or designers) frequently blew up and our shop generally required complete model recreation from CAD software. As for accuracy they are at fractions of a millimeter now. They can recognize faces and expressions from crummy surveillance cameras, I think it would not be too hard to make software recognize flats and cylinders, then do averaging from pixels. This is already done (20 years ago?) in machine vision and QC. This doesn't cover everything -you still need internal features and maybe some precise geometric tolerance features that might not be obvious to laymen.

3D printers will likely follow the development curve of printers, but with a much larger market and finance behind it. 3D printing will be similar to cellular phones in that it will be more common than "conventional" subtractive and mass production methods in frontier markets -it's a cheaper way to get what you need when you don't have infrastructure.

BB you keep bantering about this 100X cost difference -that neglects all overhead, tooling, warehousing, delivery, setup, customs....

The important questions are how many parts do you need, where, and when? For boats the answers are single digits/year, anywhere in the world, and next day or sooner. The right production method for those requirements is already 3D printing. Service bureaus are more likely for laser sintering than personal machines. Personal machines tend to be extrusion type. If you need metal these can make wax cores for precision casting.

 

Yes, of course ! It still is the scenario I described earlier where parts are made on board for speed of delivery.

So, not only are printed bits going to be made for boats, they will be made on the boats themselves.

It looks like its started, despite all the reasons why it cant work.

 

Need? Who needs a boat? or a sports car? or jewelry? or flowers? or a McMansion? Who needs a book (they have been obsolete for 5 years)?

When you consider the tools, or kitchens, or sports gear, or fashion wares that we buy today 3D printers are brilliant purchases.

 

Well actually books have not been obsolete as some Amazon clients recently found out when the licenses for their content expired. See when I buy a book I get to keep it. When I download an eBook I only am buying a temporary license. Different value prop.

Now as to the price diff, I'm not counting wharehouse costs and you are not counting the Oppty cost of a $10k up front outlay for something you might not use.

And RWatson's point is just economic nonsense. why would you produce non-critical components on board when its 99% cheaper to buy them