Print a canoe? And the ribs too?

This is a link to a recent Adirondack Life article that might be interesting to this community. Adirondack Life Article - » Old Craft, New Twist (adirondacklifemag.com)
These folks have taken canoe building and boat restoration to a new (and odd) place.
Would you consider printing new decks for your Gerrish or for that matter, printing a Morris?
The Rushton canoes have been copied in modern materials for about 50 years now so presumably this sort of "innovation" is par for the course. For myself, I think it's a definite pass.

 

Make mine wood... where did I hear that?

 

Interesting but not very cutting edge. (large C&N gantries have been around a long time.)

When they can print out full size and in light materials, including wood, then it will be special.

Back a few years ago I worked at Stratasys on a prototype printer. It was designed to be feed with pellets instead of string, and it printed horizontally, so there was no limit to the length of a print. I don't know if they ever sold any but a few prototypes were made and displayed at shows.

And in conjunction with this, they can now print many different materials, including metal, "rubber", concrete and I suspect somebody is doing wood, similar to making parts from "powered metal".

 

Yes...several extraordinarily complex metal parts (as in totally unmachinable) of a prosthetic arm/hand I was involved with producing were only possible using 3D printing. It was pretty mind blowing what was possible. 3D printing has it's place but the run to use it everywhere sometimes flies in the face of practicality.
The canoe that is mentioned in the article needed to be reinforced with glass. What is the point other than to say you did.

 

Do you remember the concrete canoe building competitions? I remember my father working with a group of CE students to build and paddle them for the Nationals.....heavy!

 

Ya, we have the technology. So?
Is it an improvement? Does it represent human progress?

Redunkulous distraction from more important endeavours.

 

I guess someone needed another fancy way to build a plastic boat, but so what?

My experience with 3-d printed medical device parts, made with a variety of plastics, was that they had a high failure rate; they didn't do well under compression or tension, and cracks weren't long in forming, even with 100% fill parts. Tightening mounting bolts and threaded fluidics lines just a tad too much was a recipe for failure. In other words, don't let the canoe hit any rocks, and watch its load capacity. It would be interesting to figure out how long can you be sitting in the boat, rocking in your paddling motion, before stress fractures form between the seat and the hull. But I'll let someone else figure that out.