Bridgeland Model Boat Club-Midwest Harbor Tug restoration.

I received a hull only of what I am pretty sure is a Midwest Harbor Tug. No cabin or wheelhouse. It did have a Midwest steam engine in it which I don't care to deal with at this time and I am converting this to electric. The outside of the hull was covered with what appeared to be an epoxy coating that was very wavy and uneven. I spent many hours with sandpaper and a sanding block to sand it down to a smooth even surface. I then painted the outer hull with Rustoleum "Rusty metal primer".
This has taken a few years of working off and on and gathering info, pictures and thinking about how to go about building the cabin and how it might look. With advances in my skills with 3D printing and getting a new better printer I decided that I would try to design and print as many of the pieces need to complete the boat and make it into a WW2 Army ST tug. After searching Thingiverse for anything I could use I decided to do all my own design work in Tinkercad. Not really much help that I could find so I just started watching Youtube videos on using Tinkercad and started seeing what I could build just going from photos of WW2 ST tugs and trying to build everything in Tinkercad that looked like the photos and that would fit the Midwest hull. So the design work started and the 3D printing began.

Here are a few photos of the hull as it looks today. And also a stand that I made for it that is 3D printed. I downloaded this stand from Thingiverse, made several modification to it in Tinkercad , then printed it out and put it together. The modification to the stand were adding holes to make it lighter and reduce print time and material. I modified one of the hull supports that goes under the stern of the hull to better fit the contour of the hull. I used stainless sheet metal screws to assemble the stand after printing and added foam padding to the supports.

Here are a few photos of Army St tugs. This is what I am going for and these are some of the photos I have been using to model my 3D designs after. I have been wanting to build a tug like this as I saw several of them in Vietnam while serving on an LST in the Mekong Delta in the late 60's.

Here are a couple of the first parts designed and printed. The forward lower cabin and the roof. I ended up printing a couple of these. The first version came out with some problems so I had to make some corrections and reprint them. I still need to add some doors and porthole details. The portholes I designed and printed are for my Hartman tug so they still need to be resized and reprinted to fit this tug.

More pictures of 3D printed parts. These are the parts of the upper forward cabin and wheelhouse. Some are individual parts and some fitting of the parts together but they have not all been glued together yet.

Here are some more 3D printed parts I designed and printed. These are of the rear cabin.

Pictures of part of the rear cabin ,the smokestack and the roof for the wheelhouse.

Pictures of more parts 3D printed. There are 3 different version of the bollards. One for the stern, one for the bow and 4 that go against the gunwales. The bollards have been painted a semi-gloss black.

The rear deck I did in 2 parts. The base was printed in black and the upper was printed in white and will be painted gray.

The rudder was 3D printed and then covered with epoxy to smooth out the surface. There is a 3/32 brass shaft that goes all the way to the bottom of the rudder and will be epoxied in. The shaft was filed flat a few points where it is inside the rudder to keep it from spinning. I have designed a rudder arm to control the rudder but have not printed it yet. I an going to put a 3/32 Dubro wheel collar into the rudder arm for clamping the arm to the rudder shaft.

Here are a few pictures of the parts test fitted together on the hull to get an idea of how it will all look. It is probably going to take a little sanding here and there to get everything matching up but but its looking pretty good so far. Still a lot of work to do yet but it has been a good learning experience. There were a few things I probably would have done differently but it's what the end result is that counts. Since I was going by photos to do my designing I did some guessing on size of different parts so everything is probably not to scale.

Very nicely done!

She's looking good. What material did you use to print the parts?

I used eSUN PLA+ purchased on Amazon.

Those are some nicely printed parts.Looking forward to more of this build.

Originally Posted by Sailor_Man

I used eSUN PLA+ purchased on Amazon.

I use that too, along with Filacube PLA 2. On my printers (Ender 3 and Kingroon KP3) I find that the Filacube prints a little nicer, smoother. eSun offers a wider variety of colors though.

I ordered this new stuff from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...F3WLZ4BA&psc=1

It's Filacube HT-PLA+, a high temperature PLA with a glass transition temperature of around 85C after annealing. This is higher than even PETG so hopefully it'll survive sitting in the sun or inside a hot car, unlike regular PLA which has a GTT of around 55C.

Thanks for the suggestions on the filament, I'll have to try some. My new printer that I just recently got and was used to print all these parts is the ender 3 V2. So far I have been very pleased with it.