tugboat

4 Articles

The Little 3D-Printed Tugboat That Could

June 14, 2022 by 24 Comments

If you’ve ever spent time watching the goings-on at a seaport, you must have seen tugboats at work: those little boats that push, pull and nudge enormous cargo ships through tight corners in the harbor. They manage to do that thanks to hugely powerful engines sitting inside their relatively small hulls; their power-to-tonnage ratio can be ten times that of most commercial ships.

One hardware hacker who enjoys building similarly-overpowered machinery is [Luis Marx], and it might not come as a surprise that his latest project is an actual tugboat. Living on the shores of Lake Constance in southern Germany, [Luis] likes to spend time on the water, but got fed up with the chore of paddling. Local regulations restrict the use of outboard motors but allow the use of R/C model boats; therefore, building an R/C tugboat to move yourself around the lake should be perfectly legal.

While we’re not sure if the Lake Constance Police will follow the same reasoning, [Luis]’s model tugboat is a wonderful piece of engineering. With a design inspired by 3DBenchy, the standard 3D printer benchmark that probably anyone with a 3D printer has printed at some point, it took about 30 hours to create the parts plus a generous helping of epoxy resin to make it all waterproof. A beefy lithium-ion battery pack drives two brush-less DC motors designed for racing drones, which together can put out nearly one kilowatt of power.

That, unfortunately, turned out to be way more than the little boat could handle: any attempt at using it simply caused it to leap out of the water and land on its back. Setting the motor controller to around 50% made it much more controllable, yet still strong enough to move [Luis] around on his standup paddle board. The boat is controlled through a custom-made handheld R/C controller that communicates with the ESP8266 inside the boat through WiFi. With no rudder, left-right control is effected by simply reducing the power of one motor by half.

A fully-charged battery pack provides enough juice for about 40 minutes of tugging, so it’s probably a good idea to bring along paddles in any case. Unless, of course, you’ve also got a solar-powered autonomous tugboat ready to come to your rescue.

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Benchmarking A Garbage Disposal Using The 3DBenchy Tugboat

April 29, 2019 by 8 Comments

We’ve always had a love-hate relationship with 3DBenchy, the tugboat-shaped 3D printer calibration target. On one hand, it’s incredibly useful to have a common, widely used, and challenging benchmark object to evaluate printer performance and improve tuning, but we’d somehow like to get back the countless frustrated hours we’ve spent trying to get the damn thing perfect with various printers. So, it was with no little joy that we watched the video below by [Eric R Mockler], in which he uses 3DBenchy prints to benchmark his newest acquisition: a new-in-box garbage disposal he scored off Craigslist. Take that, tugboat!

[Eric] is considering using the disposal as the first step in a failed-print-recycling method to ultimately turn the waste back into filament, presumably to print more tugboats. The tiny bits produced by the disposal should provide a reasonable substitute for pelleted plastic feedstock going into a filament extruder, if the disposal is up to the task, that is. Reasoning that any device capable of grinding chicken bones should handle little plastic tugboats just as well, [Eric] gave it shot, and found that the ⅓-horsepower disposal had no problem grinding even 100%-infill PLA prints.

The video is short and to-the-point, so we’ll even excuse the portrait orientation, just this once. If you’re considering recycling your failed prints, too, you’ll also need a filament extruder, and we’ve got you covered with a low-cost version, or a high-throughput one.

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Retrotechtacular: Pipeline To The Arctic

December 16, 2014 by 42 Comments

They said it couldn’t be done, and perhaps it shouldn’t have been attempted. Shouldas and couldas aside, the oil crisis of the 1970s paved the legislative way for an 800-mile pipeline across the Alaskan frontier, and so the project began. The 48-inch diameter pipe sections would be milled in Japan and shipped to Alaska. Sounds simple enough. But of course, it wasn’t, since the black gold was under Prudhoe Bay in Alaska’s North Slope, far away from her balmy southern climes.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was constructed in three sections: from Valdez to Fairbanks, Fairbanks to a point in the Brooks Pass, and south from Prudhoe Bay to the mountain handoff. Getting pipe to the Valdez and Fairbanks is no big deal, but there is no rail, no highway, and no standard maritime passage to Prudhoe Bay. How on earth would they get 157 miles worth of 58-foot sections of pipe weighing over 8 tons each up to the bubblin’ crude?

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