We have bought a Bambu Lab X1 carbon series 3d printer. It is large, it is heavy (it weighs almost 23kg) and it does not like a humid environment. So, you may ask, what’s the story? Aren’t we trying to lighten this boat?
Picture of our 3d printed winglets that will attach to our rudders on Paikea. This printed section will essentially the the plastic core which we will laminate with epoxy resin and eglass cloth.
The winglets will be designed to be completely adjustable so we can play with placement on the rudder.
Paikea is already a pretty light ship. She weighs 8 tonnes, which is not bad compared to most other modern day designed catamarans.
She does, however, have super skinny hulls. This is great for performance sailing but not so great if we want to live onboard. So even at the relatively light weight of 8 tonnes, she still could do with being much lighter. With Paikea as a lighter ship we could then carry more food, add to our sail inventory, have a fridge AND a freezer, add more solar, carry more water toys. Basically, it would give us more options. This is the main driving factor behind our current interior refit project. It in order to gain more wingdeck clearance and sail comfortably with 5 people living on board, we need to lighten Paikea. And the best way to do that is to replace all the timber furniture and floors with foam and fibreglass.
You would have already seen in last week’s video that this is going to be a lot of work. So getting back to my earlier question, why would we buy this large and heavy 3d printer when we are working so hard to get rid of the weight? Well in ths video, we will try and answer that very question. Join us for a discussion on our 3D printer and show you our plans for the new 3d printed rudder winglets.