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

Baltic,

I am at the exact same conclusion.
So far its good for small numbers of parts, because there is no tooling.
Personally I hope the claims that the cost will come down by orders of magnitude and all the "possible" improvements happen (especially including the increased strength).

But that is going to take hard work and multiple break-throughs. It won't automatically happen. Moore's law for electronics did not happen easily.

I'll find my "one part" that works cost wise, I hope!

 

Well Moore's law for electronics happened because once you come up with a particular fabbing technique it can easily be replicated and also because you can build on the software algorithms for chip design iteratively - and Moore's law helps with that design.

Nothing similar exists in the materials side:
it takes the same amount of energy to sinter a microgram of TI pretty much forever
3d printing can speed up, but unless you are sintering, its still materials limited.
Success with one tool doesn't help others

 

I just finished reading through the posts and I think there is quite a bit of confusion, mostly in limitations specific to one technique cited as general truth.

Laser sintering is pretty impressive producing parts directly or producing tools but it has cost and material limitations. 3D extrusion is less costly and is still in the early stages of material development -including composites. I have not seen it yet but true 3D thin tape printing is the obvious next step though today is is only used to make sails. Hulls are printed flat and hand placed. It is completely feasible today to make a mold in a sandbox formed directly from computer files and print composite material directly on it to make a hull but the payoff is not compelling.

The 'cheap' 3D printing is with small extrusion on an X-Y-Z setup. It has numerous limitations but when you consider the low price it beats tooling, storing, shipping and other logistic limitations for producing many parts sailors need. It does not make a higher performance part cheaper than it would in high volume on a factory floor with a global supply chain and time to wait for supply logistics, but what does that have to do with boating? At this moment how many boats around the world are stuck somewhere they don't want to be because they don't have a part they need to operate safely? How much does the actual cost to produce a part in high volume have to do with what sailors are paying to keep their boats running? Maybe one tenth?

Another point to be made is that while computer driven additive manufacturing is new and coming down in price fast, computer driven subtractive manufacturing is also coming down in price. Considering only one at a time is useless. If you have the large CNC gantry for the 3D printer, why not have a laser cutter to use on it when needed? Having both on the same machine would allow printed parts to be trimmed to higher precision than they can be printed.

So to answer the original post, 3D printed parts have been used for prototypes for years now. They are standard on high dollar development
programs now and they are starting to show up on the race boats of top privateers. I have yet to see them used to support cruising boats but it makes as much sense there as it does in racing.

 

Skyak,

There certainly is lots of confusion, especially about claims without an understanding what the quoted method actually does.
Please provide a reference to:
1. 3D Extrusion, including application to composites
2. 3D thin tape printing as applied to sails
3. 3D printing with small extrusion on a x-y-z setup

Lets not forget that currently most Rapid Prototyping of plastics does not result in 100% density parts, so the strength is somewhat less than other methods.

Laser sintering of metals may not have the same limitation, depending on the program.

Has there been a demonstration of 3d priniting on a large scale gantry? Desk top printers in some cases could be called a gantry but that is not what I am asking about.

 

production boats use COTS parts, the FEW that are "stuck somewhere" don't need a custom part, they need a STANDARD part that cannot get to them easily.

Nor does "cheap 3D printing" beat COTS pricing. what it beats s the cost of customized mold making for short production run parts. but for short production run parts (100 units or less) the DESIGN costs dwarf any cost savings....UNLESS, what you are doing is prototyping implementation of a much larger system with short production run parts
OR
getting the design time free because you own and know how to run SolidWorks or Rino or such

 

What remains unclear to me is what kind of boat parts would be suitable for 3D printing. It is a crude process, like making a plastic part with nothing but a hot glue gun or a metal part built from a number of welds on top of each other.
The 3D printer has a steadier hand and can deposit thinner layers, but the end product still needs machining if it has any mechanical or optical function.

Just like a laser printer cannot print a real 100 dollar bill, a 3D printer provides no more than a resolution limited copy of an object.

 

CDK,

The parts I have seen easily compare to a sand casting.
You still would need to be machine on surfaces that need to be flat, for instance where something else is bolted in.

Recently there was a thread about making a quadrant for a steering gear. 3D could have been used as a pattern for the casting, with a little cleanup. I don't think anybody is making bronze from 3D so you probably could not of made the part directly.

The plastic parts I was looking at for work could have been hand finished to give a better appearance.

 

That is fully correct. For sand casting you could make the plugs in 3D and avoid the tedious job of making it from wood, sanding, painting etc.
In such an application the resolution can also be lowered, greatly reducing printing time.

 

Stereolithography (plastic) and selective metal melting are producing high quality, ready to use parts.

 

Please provide 1 example of each.
I have examples at work that do not match what you say.

 

Ready to use for low load applications Where 3D printing really shines is in mold making. Particularly female mold making for limited production runs. So if you are doing say a foiling Moth or want all the door handles on your new custom Wally to be unique and identical, and you want all the stanchions to match

THAT's what you use 3D printing for. Heck even if you are Jeunesse or Bendy Boat or Bayliner (RIP) where you expect to sell between 30 -100 boats and you want some custom fittings - 3D printing the mold, then coating it in Aluminum and using it for injection molding or to make plugs for Lost Wax casting (which doesn't need post machining if done right) - you can save 75% on your mold tooling costs.

But its not the solution for a boat stuck in an out of way place because that out of way place is one of the last places in the world where a 3D printer will be

 

The thought occurs to me that for fiberglass parts, and perhaps even hulls, a core could be 3D printed with internal honeycomb cells for strength and weight reduction, then fiberglass sprayed over the printed core with a chop gun.

 

Baltic,

Right now the Chinese are using 3d printed titanium for structual elements on fighter aircraft. They are not only getting the same type of production times as with machined parts, but can actually make them lighter.

 

Stumble,

Did you swallow that whole story, hook, line, and sinker?
It actually could be true, but is there any proof?

Jeff,

What would you make the core out of? Anything that is used now?
Chopper gun is the worst possible use of fiberglass unless you just don't care about the strength and weight.
How would you keep the chopper material from filling up the core? That would make it even worse.
The core would probably be 5-10x the cost of current core if parts I've seen are any guide. Plus core is usually very thin cell walls. What I've seen couldn't make the required thinness.

How big of a printer could you actually put your hands on? I really don't know, but a gantry system is really expensive and you would have to have a proven system to work with in order to pay for the gantry and printer.


IMHO, there sure is a lot of wishful thinking going on.

 

As for filling the core up, the honeycomb cells could be 3 dimensional, and thus closed cells. There is a wide variety of materials available in the 3D printing world. I'm sure there are some plastics that can be 3D printed that have a reasonable level of structural strength, Each individual cell doesn't need to be that strong. After all, pink foam board from Home Depot works fine for core material. I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I know some guys who built a 3D printer from stuff they bought at Grainger and McMaster-Carr. With some thought, I'm sure what they did could be scaled up. I live in a very geeky town as we have 2 major universities here as well as NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.
As for the chop gun, Well, it certianly isn't the very best process, but a core as I described could be covered in fiberglass in the traditional way as well. Forget the gun. Drape the glass and mix up some epoxy.
The benefit here is that a boat manufacturer would not have to have a giant boat yard full of full sized molds which must be cleaned, polished, waxed, maintained and so on. no damage to molds or hulls from the process of taking the mold off the hull either. He just prints out a core. Likewise, if he wants to design a new boat, he just computer models the core and prints it. Presto! instant prototyping.
Yes, 3D printing can be pricey...for now, but how much would this laptop I'm typing on have been worth in 1990? As that payroll company keeps saying on the radio, the price of technology goes down over time.