Adding a 23kg printer to a boat you’re trying to lighten sounds like a contradiction. It is — but it’s a deliberate one, and this post explains the thinking behind it and what the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon has already made possible, including a project that had been sitting in Shayne’s design files waiting for the right tool to exist.
Why a 3D Printer on a Boat?
Paikea weighs eight tonnes, which is light for a catamaran of her size — but her super skinny hulls mean that even at that weight, living on board with five people is a constant juggling act. Lighter means more options: more food, more sail inventory, a fridge and a freezer, more solar, more toys. It’s the main driver behind the current interior refit.
So why add 23 kilos of printer?
Because the weight it costs is less than the capability it adds. Custom parts that would otherwise be expensive, slow to source, or simply unavailable — brackets, fittings, receptacles, performance components — can now be designed and made on board. The Starlink mount Shayne printed the morning this video was filmed is a good example: version one, trialled, modified, reprinted. No waiting, no shipping, no compromise on fit.
But the Starlink mount isn’t the reason we made this video.
The Winglets
Sitting in Shayne’s design files, waiting for the right moment, was a set of rudder winglets for Paikea. The design was done. The engineering was done. What was missing was a practical way to make the cores.
The 3D printer solved that.
A winglet works by acting as a fence at the tip of the rudder blade. When the rudder generates steering force, there’s a pressure difference between its two faces — high pressure on one side, low pressure on the other. At the tip, water tries to escape from the high pressure side to the low pressure side, curling around the bottom of the blade and creating what’s called a tip vortex. That vortex bleeds off energy and reduces the effective length of the rudder.
A winglet stops that from happening. It keeps the pressure where it belongs and eliminates — or at least minimises — the tip vortex. The practical effect is the same as making the rudder longer, without the penalty of additional draft. For Paikea, which spends a lot of time in anchorages where draft matters, that’s a meaningful gain.
There’s a second benefit too. Paikea is a 40-foot catamaran, and like most cats of her length she has a tendency to hobby-horse — pitching nose-down-bum-up in certain sea states. The horizontal winglets change their angle of attack as the boat pitches, generating a force that resists the movement and helps dampen it. It’s a secondary effect rather than the primary purpose, but a useful one.
How They’re Built
The 3D printed parts are the cores, not the finished winglets. Shayne prints the shape in carbon-filled PLA, lightly sands the surface, then wraps it in e-glass and laminates it — exactly the same process as building the rudder blade itself, just at a much smaller scale. A carbon rod runs through the core, again mirroring how the rudder stock works in the main blade.
Each winglet needs to be capable of taking around 50 kilos of load. That sounds modest, but for a small laminated component it requires getting the layup right. The 3D print is the mandrel. The glass is the structure.
The winglets are designed to be fully removable and swappable — important for a boat that fishes, anchors in shallow water, and occasionally needs to drop rudders for maintenance.
What’s Next
The plan for Valencia is to build a full new set of rudder blades on the carbon stocks Shayne designed and had built by C-Tech. One blade will be CNC cut from a mould, and the hand-shaped Caribbean blade will be replaced at the same time. The winglets will go on the new blades.
In the meantime, the short passage from Barcelona down to Valencia gives an opportunity to trial the winglets on the existing rudders — useful data before they go on the final set.
The printer has other projects in the pipeline too. The luff receptacles — the fittings that hold the luff of the mainsail to the mast track — are due for replacement after two broke on the Atlantic crossing. The originals were printed in ABS by a friend. The new ones will be carbon-filled nylon, printed on board, and potentially available for other sailors to print themselves. More on that when we get there.
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.
This post is part of a Series
To understand the entire rudder project on Paikea, visit Paikea’s Rudders: The Full Story on our Free Resources Page. For more technical detail visit our Members site and → Explore the Members Rudder Page.
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