A few weeks ago, Will pulled out his sailboat to try to get it ready for the summer. We had pulled off all the deck fittings last summer to paint the top of the boat, but never got back to putting the fittings back on. His boat is a 16′ lifting keel O’Day Wildfire from the late 1960s. A lot of the hardware isn’t original, and the parts that are show their age.
One of the pieces that were in rough shape were the thru-deck bushings. New ones cost $10-$15 each, so why not play around with the 3d printer and try printing them. Commercial bushings have metal linings, so the printed ones may not last as long. But I had spare resin, so there was no real cost to making the parts. Anyway, we could always replace them with commercial bushings in the future if needed. I spent a few nights designing the part on Fusion 360 and made some test pieces. It would probably have been easier if I had a set of calipers to measure the original, but trial and error works as well. The final design seems to fit the boat and I am in the process of printing four – though I think I could probably fit a few more on the print space. The parts take about an hour to print on our cheap printer.
