Get Ready for 3-D Printed Yachts
Dutch entrepreneur Maarten Logtenberg is an additive-manufacturing pioneer—a co-founder of Leapfrog 3-D Printers, which introduced its desktop model in 2011. These days, as the director and co-founder of Delft-based CEAD, he’s working on a much bigger scale. In September, Logtenberg unveiled the CFAM, a 15-ton 3-D printer that is more than 16 feet tall. It is the largest 3-D printer in Europe and the largest in the world to incorporate glass and carbon fiber into its designs—an important distinction for CFAM’s intended market. The first two buyers of the roughly €800,000 (US$940,000) machine are yacht builders, and the maritime industry is one Logtenberg targeted from the start.
Traditional yacht manufacturing uses a costly, time-consuming molding process to produce hulls, captain’s chairs, and other equipment, which CFAM can extrude with relative ease; complex, one-off designs and customization now require only CAD models to create. “If someone pays millions of dollars for a yacht, and they want to have a Jacuzzi that no one else will,” Logtenberg says, “now you can just print it.” One thing CEAD hasn’t managed to produce is a snappier moniker for its machine. “We call it CFAM for continuous fiber additive manufacturing,” Logtenberg says, “but if one of your readers comes up with a great name, we’d happily listen to them.
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