Although my wife and I have have been rebuilding our schooner for the last four years, I do not consider myself a boat builder. I am a sailor…rebuilding is just the path we have chosen to take for sailing. 3d printing is an option for boat parts that some may not be familiar with for completing your projects. For us, the 3d printer was just what we needed.

One of the last tasks on our rebuild list was to make two identical interior trim pieces that bridged the gap between the ceiling (I’m not sure what it’s called on a boat) and the cabin top where the deck prisms are mounted. We have 2 inches (51mm) of insulation between the two that needed to be bridged.

There are many options for making those parts. One of the options would have been to make them out of wood using epoxy and fiberglass for strength. I imagined that making them out of wood would take me a good part of a full day to get the wood, epoxy, fiberglass, design them, and then start making them. Then, I’d need to sand it, paint it, wait for epoxy to cure and so forth. It probably would have taken three days or more depending on other tasks.

Aboard Glacier Gem, we have very few wooden parts. It was an easy decision to make the prism trim parts out of 3d printed plastic. I used grey colored PLA plastic, because I already had it loaded into the printer and it matched our interior. The 3d print fabrication took 20-25 minutes to measure and draw in a 3d CAD program. It took roughly 10 hours to print, but was accomplished while I was sleeping during the night. It took 5 minutes to install. Now we have two interior trim pieces that would have been time consuming and troublesome for us to fabricate with other methods.

3d printers have a multitude of different materials to use for printing and in all different colors. You can make anything from 3d printed “wood” to metals. In fact, many navies worldwide are using 3d printers (also called additive manufacturing) instead of traditional machining tools like lathes and mills. This saves them the storage of both raw material and spare part inventories. When they need a metal part they simply choose the part they would like to make, and tell the machine to print it. Unfortunately metal 3d printers are way out of the price range of our cruising budget, but we were able to get a reasonably priced 3d printer kit and assemble it ourselves for a different project we have been working on.

Here are some photos of the trim parts attached below: