Floating Benchy Project (with keel) - work in progress

About

Well this site is not really a model but just documentation of my work and attempts to make floating benchy with keel.

TLDR;

Does it float? Kinda… It floats a bit but it is submerged almost to the end of it's sides. The model can be drowned very easily. However you can always improve my work and make it more buoyant and stable.

The idea

This project is from over a year but I haven't published it till now because of the Benchy license. Now when the Benchy became open I can share my work.

The idea was to add keel to the Benchy so it can float over the water (well technically all the Benchys can, but they are floating bottom up).

Problems

Unfortunately after adding longer and longer keel with a lot of infill I realized that because PLA density is very similar to water density this isn't going to help with stabilizing the boat. Benchy was just slowly falling on the side.

So for my last attempt i added some indents where i can put up to three m3 bolts. And this worked more or less. The keel now was the heaviest part of the boat and stabilizes it's vertical orientation. However added mass caused that Benchy is almost drowning.

Solutions

As we have something that works we can now focus on improvements. what can be fixed. For sure printing Benchy's upper part as light as it's possible can help. also since we have M3 bolts on the bottom, we can add or remove mass to the keel by adding some magnets (however they will probably rust fast in the water). Another idea is to scale everything up. Maybe 133.3% scale could be good guess since we could use M4 bolts? Any other ideas? let me know in the comment.

What's included in the project:

I have included all saved versions of my floating Benchy I've got. There are 3mf files so you can print them and fusion files so you can edit it. If anyone's interested I can also include step files.

Good luck with this project. Let me know in the comments what do you think.