If you want to get active out on the water, you could buy a new kayak, or hunt one down on Craigslist, Or, you could follow [Ivan Miranda]’s example, and print one out instead.
[Ivan] is uniquely well positioned to pursue a build like this. That’s because he has a massive 3D printer which uses a treadmill as a bed. It’s perfect for building long, thin things, and a kayak fits the bill perfectly. [Ivan] has actually printed a kayak before, but it took an excruciating 7 days to finish. This time, he wanted to go faster. He made some extruder tweaks that would allow his treadmill printer to go much faster, and improved the design to use as much of the belt width as possible. With the new setup capable of extruding over 800 grams of plastic per hour, [Ivan] then found a whole bunch of new issues thanks to the amount of heat involved. He steps through the issues one at a time until he has a setup capable of extruding an entire kayak in less than 24 hours.
This isn’t just a dive into 3D printer tech, though. It’s also about watercraft! [Ivan] finishes the print with a sander and a 3D pen to clean up some imperfections. The body is also filled with foam in key areas, and coated with epoxy to make it watertight. It’s not the easiest craft to handle, and probably isn’t what you’d choose for ocean use. It’s too narrow, and wounds [Ivan] when he tries to get in. It might be a floating and functional kayak, just barely, for a smaller individual, but [Ivan] suggests he’ll need to make changes if he were to actually use this thing properly.
Overall, it’s a project that shows you can 3D print big things quite quickly with the right printer, and that maritime engineering principles are key for producing viable watercraft. Video after the break.
He got the filament for free.
Like the summary says, using a 3D printer to make big things with lots of time didn’t seem interesting enough, so [Ivan] tries to use a 3D printer to make a big thing with little time, which presented interesting new challenges.
Unfortunately, the challenge of coming up with a usable kayak design wasn’t fully met.
I thought this was actually quite interesting. I haven’t watched the video yet, but I will.
Well geez I thought the walkthrough on how to set up a regular ol’ treadmill to become an infinite Y-axis and work out all the kinks to get the thing to print watertight all in one piece was pretty interesting. Tough crowd
Agreed
Back in the olden days, whitewater boat designers would prototype designs with a cedar strip boat, which is definitely not 24hr turnaround. Video is worth skipping through to see his inclined printing scheme (I was wondering how he avoided supports before I saw the video.
Yeah I’ve done cedar strip before, it’s a lot of work! And you need to know how to carve and use a plane/drawknife. Which are skills that take a good while to learn to do right.
Using stuff I have laying around in my garage I could build a coracle in a few hours for about $3.
I wish I was as cool and detached as Andrew.
This video ended horribly with him falling in the water EVERYTIME he tried to get in.
Well now I might watch it. You’d think they’d lead with that.
It’s so unstable mainly because it’s extremely narrow, the average kayak is probably close to twice the width of this thing, but he’s limited by the width of his 3D printer’s print area. Plus a wider kayak would require more material which will take longer to print. But since it needed an epoxy coat to be water-tight anyway, maybe he should print a wider “skeletal” kayak split in halves, glue them together and then add a water-tight skin over it and internal flotation foam. That may be printable within 24hrs.
Kayaks that narrow (but longer, so they have adequate displacement and freeboard) can be paddled with some practice, but first you have to fit in the cockpit. You’d think that, with a 3D printer that big, he’d have started by prototyping the parts that have to fit the human. Iterate on the cockpit geometry until it fits and can be comfortably entered and quickly exited, then design the rest of the boat around that. But that’s the sort of thinking that comes from building things to be useful instead of building things to get clicks.
That would actually be a great use of a thing like this. Being able to do a hands-on ergonomics check on a mockup in a few hours would be awesome.
This is quite hilarious, he really didnt try to get in in his studio before taking it out to sea?!
Ivan routinely builds 3d printers. And he has a channel full of stuff like this. I don’t really consider this “click bait”?
It’s only a clickbait if the title overpromises and the content disappoints. I can’t remember that has ever been the case with Ivan Miranda and certainly not in this case. Extending boundaries with tech you could build yourself and making a funny video about it sure fits my bill on what i would like to see on HAD. Just as it doesn’t dominate the feed, otherwise i could just as well stay on youtube.
Spot on!
Iván is pure brilliance. People like him, who push technologies to their very limits to bring to life what many would deem impossible, are the ones who truly make the world a better place. This is genuine garage technology—the good kind—born from passion and a spark of creativity. Who could have imagined, back in the ’80s, that those brilliant ideas forged in a garage would one day become the Big Tech giants shaping our era?
Just print an outrigger or two and make it into a cata- or trimaran. You might even be able to print it/them in the empty space near one end of the main hull and still do it in one shot.
Uh, if it’s not usable, isn’t this a huge waste of filament? I mean, interesting concept and sounds like a lot of good work went into it, but if the end result is useless, why not just make a scale model?
It’d be a waste if the goal was to have a kayak. It’s not a waste for him though, because the goal was to get clicks.
This guy doesn’t know how get into a kayak. You have to push it in front of you and then jump on it on your belly. Then you drag yourself forward, push your body up in a siting position, bring your legs forward and slide in.
Obviously not kayak designer, or a kayaker.
It takes a lot of work and money to make a kayak mold. It makes it difficult to try new designs using the current process.
This could completely revolutionize plastic kayak design as we currently know it.
Much the way that foam blanks revolutionized surfboard design and manufacturing in the 1950s.
I think this attempt is totally amazing.
I bet it costs less than 4 times the price of a real kayak.
Useless. Why don’t we learn anything anymore?