Guys,
Whats the general concensus of using 3D printed fins in the water? I am guessing they are not going to be strong enough to hold up, right? If not, can they be strengthened to hold up?
Also, how about the concensus of using a 3D printer for making fin boxes? Again, generally is ABS / PLA strong enough?
I’ve surfed 3D printed fins. They work just like a regualr fin until they snap. I printed 2 fins in white ABS both with FCS tabs I printed one vertically (from the tabs up to the tip) and one horizontally (the fin laying flat). Both were completly identical with respect to foil, thickness, etc. The vertically printed fin snaped on the very first wave right where the tabs meet the base. The horizonatlly printed fin I surfed for 3 months before it snapped in the same place. I’ll also qualify that these fins were printed on a professional 3D printer from Stratasys and were the most expensive fins I’ve ever had. That being said think that with a little refinement I could make a fin inexpensively that would hold up, in fact I’m printing one right now!
What’s cool is that when printed vertically the fin has an excellent finish with a slight texture similar to (dare I say it) Sharkskin, it has a fine cross hatch to it that makes an almost iridescent sheen in the right light. Aesthetically it’s the more attractive of the two but the weakest, with much less layer to layer adhesion. The horizonally printed fin has a wood grain appearence and is actually very strong I think I had I made one with a Futures base it would have lasted. In either case you can sand ABS easily and get a perfect finsih but if you not careful you’ll mess up the perfect foil that you designed and printed. The othe rcool bit is that if you draw it right the FCS tabs fit right in teh base with no sanding or modification at all.
I have some photo of the various fins I’ve printed and I can post them (hopefully) if you guys want to see them. I even have some pics of a pretty good sized center fin that I glassed over and surfed for like 8 waves before I lost it. Which was a total bummer becuase that one really really surfed well.
For right now I’m only using ABS but I have a roll of Nylon but the hot end on my printer would melt out before I could get it to Nylon printing temps (dont ask how I know just accept it).
Here’s a 3D printer that uses molten Aluminium…
http://www.springwise.com/desktop-3d-printer-molten-metal/
Lots of possibilities.
Hi DeepC, I am very interested in your tests. What did you use to design the fins? I want to try and build some keel futures, and hope they hold up. I think this is definitely the future.
This will sound like a total PITA but it takes between 5-10 minutes but you’ll need to do some prework but I can help with that probably.
Prework-create a CAD drawing of the Futures base, I have it already done so I could probably email it to you-I also have FCS tabs, Speedfins Gen 1 bases and standard center fin bases built.
For the fin design itself we built an excel spreadsheet that allows you to draw and graph a fin. It works really well in some respects and is lacking in a few areas that we’re trying to work on but the math is pretty difficult actually. In the fin tool you start with a generic fin and set the height from there you can go in and set the leading and trailing curves by adjusting the chord lengths at 10 different spots (on our first try we did 3 and you couldn’t get the curve right) this also allows you to set the rake. The whole fin is constantly being run through a NACA 4 digit formula so the foils stay perfect but you can adjust the taper from the base to the tip (this allows you to create little winglets crazy profiles all sorts of cool stuff). We’ve designed almost every fin you can think of this way centers, keels, skegs, bonzers, mini simmons, etc. so it works pretty well as. The important bit is that it also outputs the Cartesian coordiantes that you then import into a CAD program and that creates a wire frame of the fin you just designed. Then you just loft the surfaces and you have a 3D model. At this point you attach the base to the fin and it’s complete.
Depending on what you want to do and how good you are with a 3D printer you can leave it whole and export it as a .stl file and then print it or some printers will print directly from a Solidworks file or you can split the fin in half and print the left and right sides and crazy glue them togteher.
The draw back to the speard sheet is that you are creating the leading and trailing edges by eye so some times the curves look smooth but aren’t so we’re trying to create a smoothing function that fixes it but the difficult bit is when you purposely want a serrated edge…
Maybe I should start a thread on printed fins.
Heres a hand held scanner…
you swipe it over and around any object < 10ft X 10ft and it connects to a 3-D printer and then prints them out. Instant fin factory !
Do you own one of these? I’d expect to see specifications about the printer at the least. This looks like someone is gift wrapping some cheap clone.