3D printing boats is becoming standard practice
3dprintingmedia.network
3dprintingmedia.network
I feel like Injection Molding is far more amazing, interesting, intriguing and challenging process than 3D printing and yet, it gets zero media coverage. Before people respond to this - yes, I know the pros/cons of 3D printing and it certainly has place in manufacturing processes. Just pointing out the media hype around 3D printing which I thought would die down after 2015 or so... but it continues to overwhelm news sources.
Edit: Goddamn it HN, why are you all responding to the pros/cons of 3D printing? My complain is about media coverage and how click baity engagement metrics propelled 3D printing into this glorified do-all-world-changing-technology. It disproportionately gets attention, was just using injection-molding as a talking point. There are so many interesting manufacturing techniques. Every MBA exec wants their engineers to explore 3D-printing without knowing its downsides, thanks to the stupid media.
Injection moulding gives high quality and throughput with low flexibility and relatively high capex. That makes it fit for use for some cases and not for others.
In my home 3d printer for instance, i can download and print a snowflake or some small toy my child wants to hang on the Christmas tree that she is missing in about 20 mins which otherwise would entail a trip to the store or ordering online and waiting. However, if i were to print all the decorations she wants to hang, it would take an inordinate amount of time and I'm better off making the trip to the store.
The beauty of 3D printing is that you need no molds. You can print all sorts of stuff with the same printer in the same config.
I think 3D printing is a really scalable approach. You can have a large 3D printer with tens or maybe much more printing heads, all working in parallel on the same large part or the whole product.
3D printing is not really scalable.
Folks that suggest we can just buy 10,000 3D printers to replace 8 injection molding machines haven't really stepped into a high volume factory, much less operate one.
It's clear that 3D printing is no substitute for injection molding, stamping or or other such mass fabrication methods. But, like with every other manufacturing method: it is complementary, there are applications for all of these.
And yes, I've stepped into factories, and worked with/for them, beside that I had a metal workshop and was partner in an early CAD/CAM company. So FWIW I think I understand the limitations of the tech quite well, and I think that if 3D printing could be sped up by a factor of 100 or so (which is definitely in the realm of the possible) that the other disadvantages would matter a lot less than they do today.
Now, 3D printing metal moulds and using them for injection moulding could be interesting...
Comparing with injection molding it seems IM is a good shortcut for many - not all - cases, while 3D printing is a fundamentally generic technology.
Why is there such a large gap between 3d printing something and setting up an expensive ($50k+) and time consuming (months) injection molding station?
https://www.protolabs.com/resources/blog/injection-molding-a...
https://www.moldmakingtechnology.com/articles/lets-be-clear-...
tl;dr: the molds aren't as durable, and can't do certain things as well as steel molds can. But for small volumes and simpler designs that doesn't matter, so they are quite commonly used.
You could make this from reasonably sized stock with 2 setups. First you rough the shape and cut the mold cavity, then you remove the stock and face the backside. I'm used to an automatic tool changer, which would be needed if you want to go fast
https://www.pressebox.com/pressrelease/apium-additive-techno...
There are already 3D printed steel core and cavity inserts for injection molds. They laser sinter powdered metal and then run a very tiny ball end mill around each layer to clean up the surface finish. Traditional CNC and EDM is still how most molds are made, but occasionally it makes sense to 3D print. You can get cooling lines in patterns that are impossible to machine and you can make tools faster sometimes. The costs for the machines are very high, and the size of the parts are limited.
You use the metal sintering printer to deposit the metal. Then you use an in-envelope milling head to polish it.
The cooling can be conformal since the shape isn't limited by milling technology. And, since molds have a lead time of at least 6 weeks (and generally worse because something always goes wrong), speed isn't the issue.
There was a good talk at Molding 2018 by the CEO of a Silicon Valley medical prototyping company about how his folks simply won't deal with conventional molds anymore and he has bought 3 of the 3D metal printers with in-envelope milling heads.
Unfortunately, the Molding conference website is a dumpster fire for useful technical information. If I can remember the name of the company, I'll reply.
https://www.protolabs.com/services/injection-molding/plastic...
Far as I can tell if you're making a few hundred/thousand parts a year that's totally reasonable.
Probably the material cost isn't the problem.
In addition, injection molding machines are huge and complex. They need to melt the plastic and move it into the mold without clogging up and with a repeatable high pressure.
This is obviously for mass production, so I guess you can cut some corners for low-volume production, but I imagine designing a fairly proper mold is still required.
I'm not into firearms but it was interesting to hear the complexities involved, was a lot of things I hadn't thought about.
[1]: https://youtu.be/QmhYMRNzFu8?t=256
[2]: https://www.bitchute.com/video/EMOOqo9G2pPd/ (loud!)
Or they can be small (benchtop), simple and inexpensive ($1000). https://www.minijector.com/
Early in my career I ran one of these machines to mold parts for implantable medical devices. I've also designed tools for them which can be easily machined yourself for a few hundred dollars.
When I want high tolerance parts, or hundreds of parts, I find it is faster and cheaper to go with contract molding despite having 50k of 3D printing equipment in my lab
For super high speed boat building, you could use a combination of this and maybe ultrasonic welding to rapidly fuse multiple sheets and build up a higher body. The challenge would be fusing to a superstructure while maintaining integrity.
Currently, this process is only used for dinghy-scale vessels.
I think you need to start thinking about manufacturing as more than just the mass production of identical products. 3D printing isn't at all suitable if you want to make 10,000 identical items. That doesn't make it useless.
(As long as they don't need more than the ten pieces we get (at most) at a time at least.)
Print on the inside of a spinning drum. That way, you don't have to reverse direction. Print from a whole row of nozzles or lasers or whatever. That way, yet another dimension doesn't require reversing movement. That leaves just one axis if laying something down like an inkjet printer. If curing with a laser, the final axis can be handled by the laser simply crossing the needed distance.
Also a significant amount of energy goes to waste as it gets dissipated by the material, and the powder feedstock is extremely expensive as it needs to be a certain size of round powder which is hard to manufacture.
The cheapest desktop injection molding machine [0] I have seen costs $12500 and it's not very capable. Yeah sure it is intriguing and interesting and challenging just like a $200k CNC machine is interesting but how can you be surprised that there is no community of "home gamers" with these machines? The real injection molding machines are huge, bloody expensive and most of them have been moved to China.
Just look at the size of the final products: https://youtu.be/n7JWPxk92fY?t=857
There are also lots of quality problems because injection molding is a process where you have to mess around with the settings and do multiple production runs before you figure out how to get optimal results. Your 3D printer is slow but reliable in comparison. You have very high confidence that once you tune the printer itself (not the specific injection molding production run) the vast majority of your prints will succeed on first print without you having to do anything. This means you can easily produce one off parts at low cost. It's easy to see why 3D printing is popular. It's cheap and just works both in terms of reliability and the size of the objects you can make.
Meanwhile with injection molding that $12500 machine is barely capable of anything a hobbyist would want and that's without considering that you need to design your own molds and then machine them yourself because if you are going to outsource the mold you might as well outsource everything and who wants to make an article about "hey you can contact these companies to produce injection molded parts"? Everyone already knows that this is something companies do.
1) Injection Molding is far more amazing, interesting, intriguing and challenging
2) There is wider market for home 3D printing than injection molding
It really comes down to what you are trying to do and what you need your parts for. Also, there absolute is a community of home machinists. I have met a couple people with home CNCs, and many more with very capable machine shops.
Yeh, it's slow. But the article is talking about "The ability to build a one-off product such as a boat or small yacht, directly from CAD".
I dunno about you, but I've designed and paid for injection molds, and there is nothing cheap or fast about producing the first one. We were a small company, those molds cost us a substantial fraction of our capital. I would not describe the feelings engendered by unpacking and checking that first one as magical. Words that spring to mind are hope and dread, and eventually relief when we realised it would not be that expensive to move through holes in PCB's by 0.5mm, and adjust metal jigs, and resignation that the aesthetics of the thing were not quite as we expected, but would do.
Now a technology that allowed us to print something in 24 or 48 hours for a few thousand that was actually useable in the field - that would have looked absolutely magical. Being able to print something size of a boat hull that is strong enough to sail is almost unbelievable, even now.
Subtractive manufacturing can give you a higher-quality result and can use a wider range of materials, but the machinery costs more because it needs to be stronger, and the materials cost more because you throw away everything that doesn't go into the final part.
It's relatively easy to re-cast aluminum at home at small scale. I think the biggest challenge for boat-sized would be the massive amount of energy needed to heat all that metal, plus the huge crucible and machinery to pour it.
Another issue with home-cast aluminum is alumina (oxidized aluminum) which will make small inclusion defects in your print. I've had several casts fail because I wasn't able to properly separate the alumina and the high-alumina areas were very brittle. I think most aluminum foundries have the electrolysis capabilities to convert all the alumina back to aluminum, but this is an extremely high voltage hot process that does not seem feasible for garage-scale.
(As an aside, aluminum cans have a ton of oxide because of the high surface area, so you get a ton of dross that must be skimmed off to use the molten aluminum. We would do it in two steps: first melt cans and pour in a muffin tin to make small ingots, then use those higher-purity ingots to cast the desired piece. Probably better in most circumstances to just start with lower-surface-area aluminum materials: better to pay for quality bar stock or ingots rather than spend the same on more charcoal for multiple runs.)
But please research casting safety yourself, I'm no expert. 1200+F temperatures significantly more dangerous than the high temperatures we interact with in our daily lives.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fZ0f_O...
Clean pure plastic chips that just got cut off of a block of new plastic can be made back into pellets and used for new stuff and is worth a little less than plastic pellets.
I'm personally bullish on 3D printing long-term, but FDM mostly still sucks and gets a lot more positive press than actual practical use in industry. It's just the easiest and cheapest of the printing technologies to expand on, so you see a lot of concept projects that sound good on paper.
The thing to be careful about: Don't assume you know what's cheaper: Injection molding or something else. I've had my own assumptions blown away so many times.
But 3d printing is still kind of at the phase that machine learning went through, where every meeting inspires at least one manager to blurt out: "Have you considered using 3d printing for this design?" with the other managers secretly wishing that they had been so clever.
3d-printing is perfect tech for this: the principle is graspable by anyone, it makes for cool stop motion videos, yet it's still rare in practice. Injection moulding is too commonplace: we've cast metal in moulds for thousands of years.
A cool name helps as well, of course. 3D printing is definitely sexier than "additive manufacturing".
I got a 3D printer a couple years ago. It’s pretty amazing. I can recreate broken parts, design improvements to existing things and prototype them without any help. These days with so much emphasis on reducing our environmental footprint, why would be interested in mass production?
Injection molding is a industrial process and isn't really accessible to people.
Also, this happens with virtually every new technology. See AI, blockchain etc. In every company that a given technology potentially impacts/applies to, at some point there is an Executive asking 'what is our strategy for X?' which results in one or more projects related to X being spun up. Eventually most of these efforts will fizzle/fade but there will be a subset of use cases where there will be a (possibly surprising) benefit that offsets the slow speed / limited resolution / whatever that makes 3D printing worth using in real production environments. There are also some instances where 3D printing (whether FDM, SLA, SLS etc) can produce a better result than existing alternatives like injection molding. It's just another tool in the toolbox.
Not if you only need one, which is true for the vast majority of prints.
I do think this is a surprise, injection moulding is a technique as old as dirt (well really plastic). You wanna see crazy coverage for injection moulding go back to the 1910s when the technique was starting to take off.
At the end of the day there just aren’t any big innovations in injection moulding to talk about, it all minor process improvements, may of which are happening behind closed doors, hidden as company secret sauce.
3D printing on the other hand. Is such an comparatively underdeveloped and under-utilised technique that just sneezing next to a 3D printer is a form of news worth innovation.
https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...
Media coverage dominates new technology [3d printing]... SHOCKER I TELL YOU!
Your complaint about media coverage was a whole sentence. Sentence and a half being generous. The complaint itself looks like a related comment at the end rather than the main point. Most of your post was pros/cons which was not clearly linked to media coverage. It really does look like a post about injection molding vs 3d printing.
I know it should be on the reader to fully read a comment, but it's the internet, so I adjust my comments sometimes to make sure my point is across before people jump ship.
Because the appropriateness of rosy media coverage is dependent on the actual potential of 3D printing.
Similar to how news will rather report on unusual building materials rather than run stories to remind people that bricks are cool too. (and if a home buyer insists on using something fancy new over bricks or whatever default would be more appropriate, that's their fault)
That's not to say that defaults actually are boring if you deal with them directly, I find people explaining details of things like injection molding fascinating, but "we improved X in a standard industry process" just isn't as easy to make briefly interesting to mass audience and thus gets reported less.
Apple makes many parts with extremely tight tolerances with almost no visual defects, and within the industry it's understood that it's extremely hard to make your IM parts look like Apple's for that reason.
Whereas "within the industry" is exactly the thing I'm talking about: the threshold for getting into more mainstream media is not necessarily related to actual importance and different from what field-specific or even just enthusiast perception focuses on. E.g. the bits and pieces I know about injection molding mostly come from "maker-type" publications that, while of course also talking about 3D printing a lot, also cover entry-level discussions of what happens if you try taking something to larger-scale production - and "forget about your product looking like an Apple product" is high on that list ;)
IM has been the same old IM for the past 5 decades more or less.
High-strength 3D printing however, of composites / metal, has a much higher market ceiling. Can certainly be cost-competitive with CNC and probably also expendable mold casting in the short-term.
Injection molding for plastic parts is easy and fast, however the current process it takes to make carbon fiber composites is highly energy intensive (one needs huge ovens), time consuming, expensive, and some approaches can even be highly labor intensive. This is also the reason why only the more expensive cars in the market have carbon fiber bodies as opposed to all cars/vehicles in the market.
An example of the process of carbon fiber construction today from Koenigsegg's cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=504I_hJDFck
> ...the usual thing that is done in a particular situation. [1]
[1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/normal-...
This reminds me that there was a link to an interview about a dramatic shift in funding models for content creators. The person being interviewed was really in it for... 1.5 months. The "veterans" were in it for less than a year. Yeah... come back in another year before we can call this some kind of long-term trend.
1. The sheets will make the structure stronger in more directions
2. The mold will result in a 'shiny smooth' surface.
3. Delamination of glass fibre sheets is already a worry/problem with older boats. How well will strands of 3d printed material cope with decades of exposure to salt water and UV light? (ABS has poor UV resilience)
I'm sure CNC/Robotics could be used in creating molds, cutting sheets of carbon fibre, and possibly laying them in molds.
See the huge molds used here: https://www.yachtsinternational.com/owners-lounge/carbon-fib...
Maybe printing a hull buck would be a good move? But you just as easily could CNC foam blocks for that too...
It is shaped like a boat.
If you have a million to spare, the current fiber glass designs, are awesome. But the amount of trouble and maintenance required makes me question if its worth it even owning a new boat. When sailing around the world on cruise ship is so much more luxurious and cheaper.
From watching youtube, the sealants around windows are a constant problem. Algae and barnacles growth on the hull, requires repainting the boat every few years. Its basically a part time job to maintain these things.
It really seems like a lot of prints of mine would be way stronger if it where done at a angle like that that.
note I 3d print everything all the time. My house is speckled with orange printed parts (I like to point out when something was 3d printed).
45 degree printing is very useful for overhangs in a single direction. This is likely why they've utilized it for printing the bow of the boat.
But this makes printing overhangs in the direction of the nozzle impossible, thus not useful in all applications.
The results depend on the forces your object will see. The tensile strength is lower perpendicular to the printing direction, as the adhesion between layers is lower than the continuous filament adhesion. So printing at an angle is better if you need more tensile strength on the Z axis (but then you can rotate it to have that axis flat), but it also reduces the strength on that angled direction.
The object is designed to test out various aspects like bridging, overhangs, holes, etc.
This doesn't seem like the future of boat building to me.
The technical word for this is a torsion box, and you find it everywhere, from doors in your house to aircraft wings.
I think we're now on the tail end of the hype cycle graph and people are starting to find real uses for FDM
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=ssys+stock (set to max time)
-- Full disclosure: I used to (relatively recently) work for a vendor of 3D-printing technology.
It is important to consider the full 'volume' range of manufacturing, when evaluating a particular process or technology. Some will be good for making ONE part; and some for a million+ parts, and some in the middle. It's also important to consider the intended usage: for example, prototypes and military and medical parts may not be cost-sensitive, but, say toys, or consumer electronics are the opposite. Speed of manufacture is a key cost driver, especially in high labor-cost countries. Raw material wastage, and cost of energy can also be key cost drivers in manufacturing.
With regards to 3D-printing (more formally known as: additive manufacturing), I have to admit that I _used to_ be a skeptic, too. I can't tell you the number of: toys, action figures, souveniers, etc. that I saw printed from low-end, plastic 3D printers--and they just struck me as 'junk'. And even a lot of the industrial parts that I saw from middle-tier, plastic 3D printers were...unimpressive. I few years ago, I even thought that I was detecting a 'backlash' against 3D printing, at least at the hobbyiest level. And it is true that there has been some consolidation of vendors of low-end/hobbiest 3D printers.
But, there's also been a gradual, and now accelerating maturity in AM, and also an increasing diversity in approaches, and in uses. In particular, most people only think about 3D printing in plastic. But metal AM, and also directional-composite (e.g., oriented carbon-fiber) printing is really coming along.
In particular, AM lets us create parts that have voids (of controlled size/shape) throughout the part. That may not sound like a big deal, until you think about weight-sensitive transportation usage. If you can get 20-30% of the normal weight out of a part, that's huge for cars; and game-changing for aerospace. Here's one case-study, where they're claiming a savings of 3,180 kg of fuel, per-year, PER-PLANE: https://www.autodesk.com/customer-stories/airbus
I noticed that lots of commentors are discussing how much 'better' injection molding is than 3D printing in plastic. Sure, for anything above prototyping quantities, that's probably true. But, also think about the manufacture of the _molds_ for those machines. What if you could cut your mold production time by 30%, and your mold production cost by 90%? Here's a case study on that: https://www.desktopmetal.com/resources/builtrite-3d-printed-...
What if 3D printing--including in METAL--wasn't a S-L-O-W process. Here's some folks that can do metal AM at very high speed: https://www.digitalalloys.com/ The caveat there is that the resulting part has pretty crude tolerances, so a finish pass (with conventional CNC machining) may be needed. But there's some higher-quality, and pretty high-volume, metal AM processes coming along, for example: https://www.desktopmetal.com/products/production and: https://www.exone.com/
Lastly, AM opens up some design space possibilities, that previously were either wickedly cost-prohibite, or were completely impossible to do. For example, the previously mentioned _molds_ for injection molding machines. Being able to carefully control the mold temperature is a key process parameter. With 3D printing, 'conformable' cooling channels can be designed-in to the mold. And these channels can basically be any geometry that is needed--looking like animal veins, for example, to give optimal cooling.
It's probably going to take a new generation of designers and mechanical engineers, before the full--and I use this word deliberately: disruptive--effects of AM are 'internalized', and used to their best potential. For example, here's a (software) CAD tool that produces 'organic' designs, and ones that would only be practical to manufacture with 3D printing: https://www.desktopmetal.com/products/software/live-parts/
> also directional-composite (e.g., oriented carbon-fiber) printing is really coming along.
I have just enough information and imagination to be really excited about this. We will be able to build truly immense structures. Flying cities... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_%28tensegrity_spher... )