This project came to life during Christmas holiday 2020. After constructing my first 3D printable air pressured reciprocating engines earlier that year, I decided that I wanted to go further with this concept. Ever since I’ve been a kid I was fascinated by the Titanic and I thought that creating a 3D printable version of her engine would be an interesting challenge for me to solve.
To kick off the project, I started with gathering as much data as possible. Even this turned out to be more complicated than expected. But after quite a few hours, I had enough material that I felt comfortable starting the 3D modeling process. Like every other 3D printing project so far, I opened Blender and started modeling away but after only a few hours, I felt that Blender was not the right tool for the job this time. I saw my father working with Fusion 360 on an unrelated construction project and I figured that I should give it a try too.
The learning curve was quite steep since I have never used a CAD program before, but after the first day or so, I felt that this way of designing was speeding up my construction process significantly.
During the following three weeks I spent about 100 hours to model up as many details as closely to the original plans as possible but always with the idea in mind that it should be 3D printable with as little support material as possible.
Here is a short video of the finished engine running on pressurized air
And a few pictures of the engine in the snow
And a collection of parts that needed design changes 🙂
Also, here is a short video, that shows the Fusion 360 model with all the joints moving:
The files for this project are not published yet, but I plan to revisit this project sometime soon and create a complete guide on how to print and assemble each and every of the 150 parts using some superglue and about 80 M2 screws.
If you have an idea for a unique and practical custom mechanical part that you would like to bring to life, I would be thrilled to help you with the 3D printing process. Please contact me using the linked email address.
