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

Building a 3D CNC machine at home is doable. But its only "cheap" if your labor is free. The cost in making such a device useful is in truing it up. And from a commercial perspective, that's why you have folks paying for time on commercial CNC gantries (like the hull plug of a recent I-14 that I can't find the vid on - could've sworn it was the Killing boat)

And why would you print the core when mechanical construction of the core is cheaper? The reason core's are "open cell" is that a closed cell core WEIGHS MORE and is weaker. The reason for this is that core material is designed to be weaker than the skins so if you use core material to "close" the cell, you are adding in an additional skin layer on the interior of a material that is weaker than the designed skin. That means that you have either a thicker core than you would otherwise need, or a weaker panel.


As for Chinese being honest about what they are doing with their fighter aircraft production??? LOL!!! (hey I heard there was a bridge for sale in Manhattan) Unless you know what part it is, and have actual verification of this, its not that meaningful.

Futhermore, laser sintering of Ti isn't that much less expensive than milling Ti. Where 3D printing is cheaper is when the material used to make the mold or part is cheaper than the traditional approach of milling a mold, and then casting.

That's only cheaper when the cost of milling and casting cannot be amortized out over a full production run. So a custom prototype rubber flange or cover is cheaper to print in absorbent 3D starch - soak it in rubber, vulcanize it and then wash the starch away with water; than it is to use a CNC router to mill a mold out of metal or plastic stock, injection mold the rubber and then toss out the mold.

but if you are doing a run of even 1,000 such rubber flanges - the milled mold is cheaper because the $10k to mill the mold only adds $10 to the part. Whereas the 3D printed part will cost you about 3x that.

 

BB, one foot cube printers can be had for $500 to $1000. That's less than one "boat buck" and I suspect a couple days pay for a live aboard engineer or talented captain. More importantly, how much cost weight and volume can be saved in reduced "spares"? 3D printers will be rapidly adopted in out of the way places because they lack the supply chains of the first world. It is no different than cell phone adoption -in places without wire infrastructure people are willing to pay a large percentage of their income for communication. The total cost of providing the service (with infrastructure) is less and corruption in supply chains can be avoided (and isn't that the reason the 3rd world is the third world?).

I can't argue against the point that most of the parts boats are waiting for are standardized but I think I can make the case for a good investment for increasing up time and reducing cost of ownership. 3D technology has been progressing in large part due to "Open Source" projects. We should do one for boat design.

About material strength -most plastic and metal parts carry lots of extra unstressed material due to manufacturing limitations. They are mostly deflection limited rather than strength limited. The big exception is space limited.

About printing core, here is a big opportunity because of the ability to produce more precisely what is needed for directional shear and compression strength. I suspect we will see 3D cores produced for aviation soon after the development of high strength composite extrusion material and 5+ degree of freedom printing instead of the 3 common today.

 

" suspect we will see 3D cores produced for aviation soon after the development of high strength composite extrusion material and 5+ degree of freedom printing instead of the 3 common today."

Core is a curse word in my part of aviation. Beyond the corrosion issues, a cored part is very expensive due to labor costs.

Aviation wants material properties you can count on every time you use a material. The inherent lack of close tolerance and the poor quality materials makes me bet on NEVER for aircraft.

I have tried to get some simple Titanium brackets (each holding 2 wires) made from sintered powder and I just make myself look foolish everytime.
There are some people who have succeeded, but not around my coworkers.

 

I don't have links for all these handy but start with sails

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyq...ew-vl&list=PLWO8hWaPuxmqaT4B1W9JGIc3vFkfj-6jc

I highly recommend this entire "Volvo Ocean Race - Building the Future" series -good state of the art documentary.

When you watch, consider that there is no reason to print flat and that a computer driven table could be made to produce boat hull panels. The sails use heat cure adhesive but I was thinking that UV could be used for selective cure allowing more design flexibility. Essentially it would be like cylinder mold but without the sacrifices of the mold being one inexact shape -it would do all shapes exactly. This is my idea of the obvious 3D printed composite boat construction.

Here is a 4x2x1 meter production printer. I am sure there are larger proprietary and research printers.

http://www.voxeljet.de/en/systems/vx4000/

Build space lxWxh 4.000 x 2.000 x 1.000 mm
print resolution x, y 600 dpi
layer thickness 120/300 µm
Build speed 15,4 mm/h (=123 l/h)

 

d shape printing in sand with a resin matrix at 6m x 6m x 6m print volume: http://youtu.be/RYaRUVTwIVc

 

That $1000 printer is useful for home fab. Its not useful for a production part on a commercial yacht.. As for a "talented engineer or captain" - nope. "engineers" on boats are mechanics. They have no training in CAD design, much less doing parametric design from takeoffs of a broken part and then generating an appropriate toolpath.

And if its an unstressed part, then it is highly unlikely to keep a boat "trapped" in an out of way port. If its a pro captain then he's got a Sat phone. So then to get a part delivered is at most a 14hr jet flight and then maybe a 2hr seaplane hop and a 2-3hr powerboat delivery. IOW in 24hrs the part is there. Sure there's a cost premium, but you pay that cost premium in salary for having CAD design skills for your crewmember, cuz with those skills they could be making more working for Boeing.

And no - 3D printing has not been driven by "Open source" - its been driven by high end "mass customization" and the need to do fast turnaround prototypes. Open Source has exactly the problem I described: it assumes that your design time is free. It isn't. Open Source has its design time subsidized by other for profit companies. It was popular as a response to WinTel, but at this point as companies have come to realize the value of their technology IP, its for "also ran" projects.

 

They printed a metal gun, and it fired a magazine without exploding.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...&mid=6A3954FD5165C12CA5DB6A3954FD5165C12CA5DB

 

one shot - even a few won't explode - but that material is not designed for those kinds of shock loads

 

No, the plastic one

"May 6, 2013 - Defense Distributed creates a fully functional gun, with 3-D printed plastic parts. ... In December, the test version fired 6 shots (out of a magazine of 10) before breaking. ... They did what all the wannabe experts said they couldn't! ."

The metal one over 50 rounds

"The 1911 has successfully fired over 50 rounds, and the shooter managed to hit a few bullseyes located over 30 yards away. The gun is made of over 30 separate 3D printed parts, composed of 17-4 stainless steel and Inconel 625, a nickel-chromium superalloy."

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...al-gun-is-a-beautiful-45-caliber-m1911-pistol

 

Oh I know the plastic one. You well know plastic has different shockload behaviours.

6 shots is not a large margin of error.

 

Clearly we are talking past each other. You dismiss the capability of low cost machines. I say they have reached a level of usefulness.

About your part delivery -it is beyond optimistic for a developing world port. The part is in inventory next to an airport with a plane headed to your destination? A cargo plane mind you, you can't just put a package on a passenger plane without a passenger anymore. What happened to customs? Did customs in developing countries change radically? My recollection is that standard service is measured in weeks and if it was marked urgent and an expensive boat was desperate for it release was contingent on negotiated ransom -repeatedly at each step if you did not take possession right from customs. Your dream 24hr delivery would cost as much as mid range 3D printer. A realistic delivery would take a week and cost 3 times as much. And of course the delivered part is never wrong.

About crew competence, they can move a file and they can scan the broken part (3D scanners are cheaper than printers). Beyond that all they need is to measure some critical dimensions and communicate electronically-which they do today. The rest is available cheaply online. Crew time is already committed. The faster the boat gets underway the less you pay for crew. Talented engineering is available en-mass over the net for less than the daily cost of crew on the boat. Not every part needed can be printed, but the first one that can pays off the equipment.

 

I think Skyaks points have a lot of merit, but the longevity and toughness of printed 'product' is as BB says, dubious.

The scenario most likely is the creation of critical but 'light' components like circuit boards, smaller switching gear etc.

The number of big machines that cannot run without 'black boxes' is huge, and being able to download the design of the firmware, and create it on the spot, seems like a real possibility.

 

These discussions mean very little without specifying the material you expect to use and the part.
Lots of things can be done, but the machine that had a 6M length printed concrete. The only concrete part I know of is a friends concrete loaded keel (inside of glass).

Quality of the final printed part will be the deciding factor on real use, rather than toys.

 

Who would print a 6 metre lump of concrete ????? Thats just not useful.


But, for example - if your radar or engine control system has malfunctioned

http://www.optomec.com/Additive-Manufacturing-Applications/Printed-Electronics-for-3D-Printing

There is no reason a boat or international space station couldnt knock up one of these.

 

The cost is not in the printer. The cost is in the salary of the crew that knows how to do CAD design from a takeoff of an arbitrary part. Because there is a huge difference between being able to call up via SAT phone or even browse a catalog and place a FedEx order - and downloading a multi-gig Toolpath file.

almost all critical function parts are COTS. so yes, they in fact ARE "in inventory near an airport".

And yes it is true that the cost of shipping that part in 24hrs is going to start approaching the cost of a low end printer - its still cheaper than installing the low end 3D printer (and low end 3D printers are not going to handle the rock and roll off going to sea very well). Why? because with the 3D printer you are fronting that cost as a CapEx cost and losing the associated opportunity cost for the highly unlikely circumstance of a critical safety path breakdown in nowhere's ville.

this is a common challenge I find in counseling High Tech startups. Too many of them seek to solve a problem with a solution that pushes a fairly high opportunity cost up front that in essence negates any benefit from the product over its lifecycle.

Your idea of a vessel - which inherently has limited stores space unless it is Prince Charles' Yacht or similar, in which case the part comes in a Diplomatic pouch - spending valuable cash and storage space for an item that it might use someday to reduce downtime costs by the cost of the device - just does not make economic sense.