That thing looks as heavy as it ugly.   

Wow!  I've seen a lot of amazingly beautiful boats here, but this is the most amazing boat of all.

True, this is the first ugly boat I've seen on this forum.

But even if it were not alone in that class, I feel sure that it would stand alone above all the rest.  Ugliness isn't skin-deep. Most of what makes a boat beautiful is the evidence of the toil and care of the soul that produced it.  No craft will ever reveal a more complete void in that department than this, though I suspect that most will equal it, soon in the future.

   Now if he could do that with wood I might be impressed !

Nick

The future of kayak building? No. We've already seen that with the rotomolded boats. This boat takes too long to make, costs too much in materials and needs too much labor to assemble all the pieces for this style of construction to ever be commercially successful.

Camper, there is a lot of "toil and care of the soul" in this boat. Every one of those pieces had to be individually designed and put into a computer model that the 3-D printer could handle. Every piece had to be individually handled to clean off the flashing, to apply sealer and fasteners. Throw in the construction of the printer itself plus the 42 days it took to actually print the parts and you have enough toil to make both Karl Marx and St. Benedict happy.

It's a cute demonstration of 3-D printing, but a lousy boat.

Laszlo

"Toil and care of the soul."  I've got to use that somewhere...

There are some killer apps for 3D printing in boatbuilding.  Making molds and tooling for small, complicated fiberglass parts comes to mind. (Paddle blades?  Kayak skeg components? Recessed compass mounts?)

3D printing would be fantastic for boat half-models, or full models, for that matter.  

As for 3D printing a full-scaled boat, they've been doing that for years with 5-Axis CNC machines:

Not quite the same thing, I know, but definitely a more realistic application of 3D technology to building boats.  

   That kayak would be nice if you were a Lego Man. I'll stick to the beauty of wood.