Are 3D-printed boats strong enough?

More 3D-Printed Boat tests at: @3DprintingBoats

visited Maarten Logtenberg at Dutch Boat Factory in Delft, where they 3D print boats up to 12 meters long. A 6-meter hull takes 4 days, a 12-meter hull 8 or 9 — printed in one piece, upside down, in a glass-fiber thermoplastic you can hit with a sledgehammer without leaving a mark. Maarten has been in large scale 3D printing for over 15 years: first Leapfrog, one of the earliest desktop 3D printer companies, then CEAD with 80 people in Delft building the giant robot printers, and now his third company printing boats.

We met because the 3D printed boats are completed with extra parts using plastic welding — and they bought a QiTech winder to manufacture their own welding wire in house. Same machine we normally sell for filament production, here spooling 4 mm welding wire from the exact same compound the boats are printed from, so hull and weld are chemically identical.

👉 Winder: https://youtu.be/ynI6ioWIQQY

During the tour I got curious and asked him pretty much everything.

Does a boat really take only 4 days, and is that the finished boat or just the hull? Why is there a crane over the machine, how is the hull fixated, and why doesn’t a part that size warp? Why is the extruder mounted next to the robot instead of on the arm, how does the material survive a meters-long heated hose, and how do you push 50 kg per hour through one nozzle?

Why glass fiber and not carbon? What’s the base polymer? Why does normal HDPE warp so badly you can’t print it — and theirs doesn’t? Can you run recycled material at that consistency? Is the surface sanded or does it come off the machine like that?

Then the process: what that seam line in the hull is, how you weld a printed console onto a printed hull, what carries a 150 hp outboard, what a machine like this costs, who else buys them, and how the same robot prints and CNC mills without a human in the cell. And finally: why there’s a swimming pool inside the factory hall.

Chapters below. Sledgehammer test included.

This visit gave me new hope in European manufacturing. This might be the future of European manufacturing..

0:00 Introduction
0:53 The 12-Meter Boat Printer
2:18 Why we print sideways.
3:31 Glass-Fiber vs Carbon-Fiber
7:34 How you weld a boat together
12:03 From student startup to 80 employees
14:38 Printing and milling in one machine
15:28 Why there’s a pool inside the factory
16:02 Why he started over again

Software:
Unser GitHub: https://github.com/qitechgmbh/control
Software Videos: / @qitechautomation
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Insta: @qitech.de
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