OLD AND NEW

It’s an odd thing, hearing the name Nathanael Herreshoff mentioned in the same sentence as 3D printing. ¶ Herreshoff, of course, is the yacht designer best known for his America’s Cup designs of the late 1800s and early 1900s. He died in 1938, a time when the V-8 engine and the metal-cutting contour band saw were bleeding-edge technology. ¶ The 3D printer wasn’t invented until decades later, in the 1980s. But that’s not stopping the team at the IYRS School of Technology and Trades in Newport, Rhode Island, from using the modern tech to build a Herreshoff. ¶ This past year, the team was creating a replica of a 100-yearold Herreshoff design. Some of the hardware that Herreshoff had specified on the plans was not to standard; it had to be custom-made. IYRS decided to make it with 3D printing, converting the original drawings into files the printer could read. ¶ “They worked them up in CAD and printed a 3D pattern, and the pieces could be made out of bronze,” Bill Kenyon, director of education, says of the team that Jeff Elsbecker leads at the school. ¶ One of those pieces is shown in the photograph below. “It was from a boat built in 1882,” Kenyon says. “We created a piece of hardware that goes on the replica.”