© 2024 Maine Public | Registered 501(c)(3) EIN: 22-3171529
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Scroll down to see all available streams.

VIDEO: UMaine Unveils World's Largest 3D Printer — And The Patrol Boat It Printed

Mal Leary
/
Maine Public

Researchers at the University of Maine unveiled the world's largest 3D-printer on Thursday and set 3 Guinness World Records: for the largest printer, the largest solid 3D-printed object and the largest 3D-printed boat. The boat, called the 3Dirigo, is 25 feet long and weighs 5,000 pounds.

Habid Dagher, the executive director of UMaine's Advanced Structures and Composites Center, says the 3Dirigo dwarfs the next largest printed part.

“A 40-pound rowboat on the West Coast of the United States,” Dagher says. “We went from 40 pounds to 5,000 pounds, so hopefully this record will hold for a little while.”

The new 3D printer is designed to print objects as large as 100 feet long, 22 feet wide and 10 feet high, with an eye toward creating a new market for Maine's forest products industry by 3D printing plastics with 50 percent wood. UMaine says the 5,000 pound boat was printed in just 72 hours.

Originally published Oct. 10, 2019 at 3:34 p.m. ET.

Ed is a Maine native who spent his early childhood in Livermore Falls before moving to Farmington. He graduated from Mount Blue High School in 1970 before going to the University of Maine at Orono where he received his BA in speech in 1974 with a broadcast concentration. It was during that time that he first became involved with public broadcasting. He served as an intern for what was then called MPBN TV and also did volunteer work for MPBN Radio.