Boat building is a long-winded and tedious business, even when what is going down the slipway is a small craft made from modern materials such as fibreglass, rather than something nailed together out of planks of wood. Construct a mould. Build up layers of resin and glass fibre inside that mould. Extract the completed structure and finish it. All told, it can take months.
That, though, may soon change. For researchers at the University of Maine are now in the process of testing an 8-metre (25-foot) patrol boat that took just 72 hours to make from scratch. Their trick was to build the vessel using a giant 3d printer. Since they appeared in commercial form in the 1990s, 3d printers have generally been employed in factories to make small things like prototype models, components of jet-engines and dental crowns.
To print the patrol boat, part of an American army project, the team in Maine linked up with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, which helped develop the printing process, and Ingersoll Machine Tools, in Illinois, which built the printer itself. The university reckons that for boat building, a common trade in the state, large 3d printers of this sort will dramatically cut the cost and time required to produce new vessels.
