All Aboard The Good Ship Benchy

November 9, 2024 by Jenny List 26 Comments

We’ll go out on a limb here and say that a large portion of Hackaday readers are also boat-builders. That’s a bold statement, but as the term applies to anyone who has built a boat, we’d argue that it encompasses anyone who’s run off a Benchy, the popular 3D printer test model. Among all you newfound mariners, certainly a significant number must have looked at their Benchy and wondered what a full-sized one would be like. Those daydreams of being captain of your ship may not have been realized, but [Dr. D-Flo] has made them a reality for himself with what he claims is the world’s largest Benchy. It floats, and carries him down the waterways of Tennessee in style!

The video below is long but has all the details. The three sections of the boat were printed in PETG on a printer with a one cubic meter build volume, and a few liberties had to be taken with the design to ensure it can be used as a real boat. The infill gaps are filled with expanding foam to provide extra buoyancy, and an aluminium plate is attached to the bottom for strength. The keel meanwhile is a 3D printed sectional mold filled with concrete. The cabin is printed in PETG again, and with the addition of controls and a solar powered trolling motor, the vessel is ready to go. Let’s face it, we all want a try!

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3D Printing A Full Scale Fiberglass Speedboat

January 30, 2021 by Al Williams 15 Comments

It’s an age-old problem. You draw up a nice 6.5-meter long motorboat and then discover the shape won’t allow for a fiberglass mold. What do you do? If you’re [Moi], you grab a few Kuka robots and 3D print it using thermoplastic with embedded glass fibers. A UV light cures the plastic and you wind up with printed fiberglass. That’s the story behind the MAMBO, a 3D printed powerboat.

Despite the color, the fiberglass isn’t blue out of the gate — the boat is painted. Still, it looks nice with lines inspired by [Sonny Levi]’s Arcidiavolo design from 1973. MAMBO stands for Motor Additive Manufacturing BOat. It has a dry weight of about 800 kg and is fitted with a cork floor, white leather seats, and an engine. We presume none of those things were 3D printed.

Although it wasn’t fiberglass, we’ve seen a 3D printed boat before. In particular, the University of Maine’s giant 22,000 square foot printer cranked one out. We’ve also seen boats printed in standard PLA filament, which then had fiberglass cloth and resin applied after printing. True that one was only RC, but there’s no reason the concept couldn’t be scaled up if you had the patience.

Autonomous Air Boat Vs Lake Washington

November 6, 2019 by Danie Conradie 9 Comments

Autonomous vehicles make a regular appearance around here, as does [Daniel Riley] aka [rctestflight]. His fascination with building long-endurance autonomous vehicles continues, and this time he built an autonomous air boat.

This craft incorporates a lot of the lessons learnt from his autonomous boat that used a plastic food container. One of the biggest issues was the submerged propellers kept getting tangled in weeds. This led [Daniel] to move his props above water, sacrificing some efficiency for reliability, and turning it into an air boat. The boat itself is catamaran design with separate 3D printed hulls connected by carbon fibre tubes. As with the tupperware boat, autonomous control is done by the open source Ardupilot software.

During testing [Daniel] had another run in with his old arch-nemesis, seaweed. It turns out the sharp vertical bow is a nice edge for weeds to hook on to, create drag, and screw up the craft’s control. [Daniel]’s workaround involved moving the big batteries to the rear, causing the bows lift almost completely out of the water.

With a long endurance in mind right from the start of the project, [Daniel] put it to the test with a 13 km mission on Lake Washington very early one morning. For most of the mission the boat was completely on its own, with [Daniel] stopping at various points along the lake shore to check on its progress. Everything went smoothly until 10 km into the mission when the telemetry showed it slowing down and angling off course, after which is started going in circles. Lucky for Daniel he was offered a kayak by a lakeside resident, and he managed to recover the half sunken vessel. He suspects the cause of the failure was a slowly leaking hull. [Daniel] is already working on the next version, and were looking forward to seeing what he comes up with. Check out the video after the break. Continue reading “Autonomous Air Boat Vs Lake Washington” →