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Old 01-26-2015, 01:39 PM   #75
Art
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City: SF Bay Area
Vessel Model: Tollycraft 34' Tri Cabin
Join Date: Feb 2011
Posts: 12,569
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marin View Post
If by cored decks and bridge we mean a fiberglass-marine ply-fiberglass sandwich, American Marine/Grand Banks has used this method since day one of their fiberglass boats. A lot of people (including me when we first got our boat) believe that GBs have solid fiberglass decks. They don't. Solid fiberglass hulls, yes. But not the decks.

Regarding 3D printing, Airbus is already talking about the day when airplanle fuselsages are made using 3D printing. And since Boeing and Airbus are virtually the same company when it comes to how we do things, I'm sure we are looking into it, too. We already use 3D printing to make a lot of components for our planes.

And speaking of 3D printing, we just had an application on our boat that has turned out extremely successfully. Our 1973 boat has Levalor venetian blinds in the windows. We much prefer blinds to curtains, so finding the boat had blinds when we saw it for the first time was great.

To keep them from swinging when they are down, the bottom bar of each blind has a plastic fitting tha clips into a metal bracket screwed to the lower window trim. This system works great, but these fittings over the decades grew brittle and began to crack. The previous owner and us wound tape around them to keep them in place but it was a losing battle. And the fittings have not been available from Levalor for ages.

I was pondering making new fittings from wood and a short length of metal rod but hadn't done anything about it.

Then the college-age son of the videographer I use on a lot of my shoots decided he wanted to build a 3D printer. So he did, from scratch. He spent last summer building it (his parents thought this project would be far more beneficial to his ultimate career than a summer job stocking shelves or working in a fast food joint so they let him live at home expense-free last summer). And his printer works.

So more on a whim than anything else, I suggested that perhaps he might be interested in making the venetial blind clips we needed on his printer. He said, sure, he'd give it a shot. He's back in college now (he's also been given a paid internship at one of the area's fasted up-and-coming 3D printing companies) but he had time over the Christmas break to work up our part. We took the prototype to the boat yesterday and it works perfectly.

We need 22 of them so he's going to print us up 30 fittings and our long-standing problem will be solved forever.
Smart boy!... Smart parents! Smart move on your part too!!
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