3D Printing in Perth's Marine and Shipbuilding Industry: The Complete Guide

Summary

Perth's marine and shipbuilding sector is quietly adopting 3D printing to solve a problem unique to Western Australia, its distance from major suppliers. Companies like Austal, Hyperion Systems, BlueZone Group, and Aurora Labs are using additive manufacturing methods like FDM, WAAM, and cold spray printing to produce spare parts, moulds, boats, and even defence components locally instead of waiting weeks for imports. The technology already handles brackets, fittings, and class approved propellers well, though full structural parts and certification standards are still catching up. Real cost savings, sustainability gains from recycled materials, and a growing tie to national defence self sufficiency make this one of the more practical growth stories in Australian manufacturing right now.

Key Takeaways

3D printing is already active in Perth's marine industry, not just a future concept, with real projects running at Austal, Hyperion Systems, BlueZone Group, and Aurora Labs.

Western Australia's distance from major manufacturing hubs makes local, on demand 3D printing especially valuable for reducing part delivery times.

BlueZone Group cut a mold's cost from 1,500 dollars to about 25 dollars using additive manufacturing instead of CNC machining.

Wire arc additive manufacturing, or WAAM, is the leading method for printing large, strong metal marine parts, including class approved propellers like the WAAMpeller.

Printed plastic and composite parts suit brackets, housings, and fittings well, while printed metal parts are increasingly used for demanding structural roles, though full replacement of traditional machining is not there yet.

Classification societies including DNV, ABS, Lloyd's Register, and IACS are actively building certification standards for 3D printed marine parts.

Hyperion Systems prints boats and industrial parts from recycled plastic, connecting the sustainability story to WA's industrial capability.

Austal's work with Curtin University, the AMCRC, and submarine builder ASC ties additive manufacturing directly to Australia's sovereign defence capability.

Real challenges remain, including sporadic demand, workforce training gaps, and high upfront equipment costs, which is why adoption is steady rather than sudden.

Introduction

Western Australia builds warships, patrol boats, and offshore vessels that serve the entire country. But there is a quieter story happening inside the same shipyards. A growing number of Perth companies are now printing parts instead of casting, machining, or importing them.

One local example makes the point well. BlueZone Group, a Perth based additive manufacturing company, has printed moulds for around 25 dollars that used to cost 1,500 dollars when made using CNC machining. That is not a small saving. It is the kind of number that changes how a business plans its supply chain.

This guide breaks down what 3D printing actually looks like inside Perths marine and shipbuilding sector today who is doing it what it can. Cannot do yet and where the industry is heading next.

What 3D Printing Actually Means for Shipbuilding

3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, builds a part by adding material layer by layer instead of cutting it away from a larger block. Think of it as the opposite of traditional machining. Instead of starting with a solid chunk of metal or plastic and removing what you do not need, a printer builds the exact shape you want from scratch, guided by a digital file.

A few different printing methods show up in marine work, and each one suits a different job.

Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM)

FDM melts plastic filament and builds it up layer by layer. It is the most common and affordable method, often used for prototypes, jigs, and lower load plastic parts. For businesses exploring their first project, FDM 3D printing services are usually the easiest and cheapest entry point into additive manufacturing.

Selective Laser Sintering and Multi Jet Fusion (SLS and MJF)

I think SLS and MJF use lasers or heat to fuse material into a solid shape. SLS and MJF produce more durable parts and are common, for parts that need to work in everyday life.

Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM)

WAAM is the one worth understanding properly because it is the method behind the biggest wins in marine 3D printing. Picture a robotic welding arm that builds a metal part by adding weld bead after weld bead, layer after layer, until a full sized component takes shape. It is essentially 3D printed welding. This is how large metal parts like propellers and structural brackets get made, as demonstrated by projects like the WAAMpeller built for the Port of Rotterdam.

Cold Spray Additive Manufacturing

Cold spray printing is a newer method that sprays metal particles at very high speed so they bond without melting. Companies like SPEE3D use this approach to print large metal parts quickly, which is useful when speed matters more than fine detail.

Each method has a place. The trick for any shipbuilder or marine business is matching the method to the part.

Why This Matters More in Western Australia Than Almost Anywhere Else

Perth has a problem that most manufacturing hubs on the east coast do not deal with in the same way. It is far from the major industrial centres. A part that fails on a vessel in Fremantle or Henderson often needs to be sourced from Sydney, Melbourne, or overseas. Even fast freight takes days. For a ship waiting on a single bracket or valve, days matter.

This is exactly the gap that on demand 3D printing fills. Instead of waiting on a supplier three time zones away, a part can be designed from a scan or a CAD file and printed locally within hours or a couple of days.

Perth's marine sector also carries weight beyond commercial shipping. The Australian Marine Complex at Henderson, just south of Fremantle, is home to around 150 businesses across shipbuilding, defence, fabrication, and support industries. Naval vessels, patrol boats, and offshore support ships all move through this precinct. When a region builds this much maritime hardware, the case for local, fast, flexible manufacturing gets stronger every year.

Who Is Actually Doing This Work in Perth

The clearest way to understand where this industry stands is to look at who is doing the work right now.

Austal

Austal, based at the Henderson shipyard, is Australia's largest shipbuilder and a defence prime contractor. Austal has partnered with Curtin University and the Additive Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre on a research project worth around 600,000 dollars. The goal is to build a proper framework for deciding which ship components are good candidates for 3D printing, not just for Austal's own designs but across the wider Australian defence industry. Austal has also signed an agreement with submarine builder ASC to collaborate on additive manufacturing technology and to train up the workforce needed to use it. This work sits inside a bigger picture too, since Austal is currently building eighteen Landing Craft Medium and eight Landing Craft Heavy vessels at Henderson under a major shipbuilding agreement signed in 2025.

Hyperion Systems

Hyperion Systems, a Perth based start up founded by robotics engineer Josh Wigley, has built something called the Factory in a Box. It is a transportable, large scale 3D printing unit that uses recycled plastic pellets to print boats, formwork, and industrial parts, and it can be run on site or managed remotely.Hyperion recently got a 385,000 dollar grant from the government. The funding was matched, which means they received an amount from another source. This allowed them to move into a facility in Henderson. They made this move to better serve clients in the marine, defence and subsea sectors.

David Budge is a co-founder of Aurora Labs, a company that works with metal printing. He was one of the investors in Hyperion. Now he holds the position of Chief Technology Officer, at Hyperion. His role focuses on leading the side of the company and driving innovation.

BlueZone Group

BlueZone Group works with Markforged printers to produce composite and carbon fibre parts for subsea, oil and gas, offshore survey, and defence applications. Their mould cost example, 25 dollars instead of 1,500 dollars, is one of the most concrete return on investment numbers to come out of WA's additive manufacturing scene.

Aurora Labs

Aurora Labs, based in West Perth, focuses on metal printing using laser powder bed fusion technology, largely for defence, aerospace, and industrial clients.

Forge Labs

There are also businesses like Forge Labs, which provides 3D printing and CNC services to Perth's mining, oil and gas, marine, and defence sectors. Forge Labs prints from its Sydney workshop and air freights parts to Perth, usually within 48 hours, with same day options for urgent jobs. It is a useful example of how demand for marine and industrial 3D printing in WA is currently being served partly by interstate manufacturing, which is exactly the kind of gap that local Perth printers like Hyperion, BlueZone, and Aurora Labs are trying to close by building capacity closer to the customer. If your business needs industrial 3D printing services in Perth today while local capacity continues to grow, this is one of the more established options serving the marine sector.

Put these players side by side and a pattern appears. Perth is not just adopting 3D printing here and there. It is building an actual ecosystem around it, anchored by Henderson.

What Is Actually Being Printed Today

It helps to separate what is happening in production right now from what is still experimental.

Already in Everyday Use

Businesses and shipyards are printing spare parts and brackets, mooring lugs, flanges, cleats, and other structural fittings on demand rather than casting them. Moulds and tooling are being printed instead of machined, cutting cost dramatically as BlueZone's case shows. Full sized boats and hulls are being printed from recycled plastic, both through Hyperion locally and through international projects. Naval and defence sustainment parts are also moving into this space. In the United States, Huntington Ingalls Industries installed a 3D printed metal valve component on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, and the same shipbuilder fitted a 3D printed part onto a Virginia class submarine that met the standards required for deep sea operation. These are not WA projects, but they show international navies are trusting printed parts in serious, safety critical roles, which builds the case for programs like Austal's locally.

One of the most famous global examples is the WAAMpeller, a 180 kilogram nickel aluminium bronze ship propeller built using wire arc additive manufacturing by RAMLAB in partnership with the Port of Rotterdam. It was class approved, meaning it passed the same safety and quality checks a traditionally made propeller would need to pass. It remains one of the strongest proof points that large, load bearing marine parts can be printed and certified.

Still Experimental

Fully printed structural hull sections for larger commercial vessels, and printed parts designed to carry major structural loads without any traditional reinforcement, are being researched and tested, but they are not yet standard practice.

Knowing this difference matters. It stops the conversation from turning into hype and keeps expectations realistic for anyone in Perth thinking about using this technology.

Can Printed Parts Actually Survive at Sea

This is the question that separates a useful conversation from a sales pitch, so it deserves an honest answer.

Marine parts face a brutal environment. Saltwater corrodes metal, UV light breaks down plastics, and constant vibration and impact test the strength of anything on board. A 2025 study from Gdynia Maritime University in Poland looked specifically at using FDM 3D printing for emergency replacement parts in the marine industry. The researchers found that printed parts can offer real advantages, including faster production and access to corrosion resistant materials, but they also pointed out that printed parts generally have lower mechanical strength than machined metal components, and post processing steps are often still needed to get them ready for real world use.

In practical terms, this means printed plastic and composite parts are well suited to brackets, housings, moulds, and non critical fittings. Printed metal parts, especially through WAAM, are proving capable of handling far more demanding roles, up to and including class approved propellers. . For now most people who know a lot about this topic say additive manufacturing works along with old ways of making things instead of taking their place completely. Methods that mix printing with old-style machining are getting popular because they use the designs from printing and the strong results, from regular manufacturing.

Getting Parts Certified for Use on Ships

Printing a part is one thing. Getting permission to actually install it on a commercial or naval vessel is another, and this is where a lot of the industry's real work is happening right now.

Classification societies, the organisations that inspect and approve ships and their components, are actively building new rules for additively manufactured parts. The International Association of Classification Societies has published a new recommendation aimed at giving shipyards, equipment makers, and vessel operators a standardised way to bring 3D printed metal parts into marine and offshore use. Major societies including DNV, ABS, and Lloyd's Register are all developing their own standards alongside this.

For a Perth business supplying parts into Austal's shipyard or into the wider Australian Marine Complex, this matters a great deal. Certification is often the actual barrier standing between a good printed part and one that is allowed on board a vessel. As these standards mature, the path to using printed parts in more serious structural and safety related roles is only going to get clearer.

Comparing the Cost and the Wait

Numbers tend to convince people faster than descriptions, so here is a simple side by side look at how traditional manufacturing compares with local 3D printing for a typical marine part in Perth.

Traditional casting or CNC machining for a specialised marine part often means ordering from an east coast or overseas supplier, waiting anywhere from one to several weeks depending on the part and the supplier's backlog, and paying tooling or setup costs that only make sense for larger batch orders.

Local 3D printing, by comparison, can take a digital file or a 3D scan and produce a usable part within hours to a few days, without the need for tooling, and it scales down comfortably to a single unit. BlueZone's mould example shows just how large that saving can be, dropping a 1,500 dollar CNC job down to about 25 dollars using additive manufacturing.

Interstate freight adds its own layer to this picture. Even businesses offering fast turnaround, such as Forge Labs, typically quote around 48 hours for express air freight from their Sydney workshop to Perth. That is a reasonable timeline, but it still cannot match the same day or next day turnaround possible when a part is designed and printed inside WA itself. This is the core argument for building up Perth's own printing capacity rather than relying entirely on interstate supply.

The Sustainability Angle Nobody Is Talking About Enough

Hyperion's approach deserves a closer look here because it connects two conversations that usually happen separately, environmental sustainability and industrial capability.

Their Factory in a Box system prints using recycled plastic pellets, either new or reclaimed material. That means boats, formwork, and industrial parts can be made from plastic waste rather than virgin material. For an industry that has traditionally relied on fibreglass, resin, and other materials that are difficult to recycle, this is a genuinely different way of thinking about how boats and marine equipment get made.

It also fits neatly into a bigger push across Australian manufacturing toward circular economy practices, where materials are reused and waste is minimised rather than sent to landfill. Perth's marine sector, sitting right next to a resources economy that generates enormous volumes of industrial plastic, is well positioned to lead on this if more businesses follow Hyperion's approach.

Why This Ties Into National Defence, Not Just Local Business

There is a bigger story running underneath all of this, and it is one that connects directly to national security.

Austal's collaboration with ASC on additive manufacturing is explicitly framed around building sovereign capability, meaning Australia's ability to design, build, and maintain its own naval assets without depending on overseas suppliers for every part. According to Austal, additive manufacturing can improve the availability of naval ships and submarines by reducing scheduled maintenance downtime and cutting the need for unplanned repairs, while also reducing reliance on overseas suppliers for low volume, customised parts.

This is not a small detail. Australia's naval shipbuilding program, including the vessels being built at Henderson, sits at the centre of a much larger conversation about defence self sufficiency. A shipyard that can print its own replacement valve or bracket rather than waiting months for an overseas order is a shipyard that keeps ships in the water and ready for duty. Perth, through Austal and its research partners, is quietly becoming part of that national conversation.

The Honest Challenges Holding the Industry Back

It would be easy to write this as a purely positive story, but that would not be accurate or useful to anyone actually considering the technology.

According to reporting from defence publication Janes, an Austal spokesperson noted that private sector investment in additive manufacturing capacity remains slow because demand across the industry is still sporadic and uncertain. In plain terms, businesses are hesitant to invest heavily in printers and training when they are not confident there will be a steady stream of work to justify the cost.

Other real challenges include a shortage of workers trained specifically in additive manufacturing techniques, the certification hurdles covered earlier, and the simple fact that upfront equipment costs for industrial grade printers remain high. None of these challenges are unusual for an emerging technology, and none of them are unsolvable, but they are the reason adoption is happening steadily rather than overnight.

Where This Is Heading

The direction is clear even if the pace varies. Austal's framework for assessing which components suit additive manufacturing is designed to apply across all Australian defence programs, not just Austal's own vessels, which means its impact could stretch well beyond Henderson.Hyperions Factory in a Box model is built to scale. Can be set up at any site where it is required. Hyperions Factory in a Box model fits well with remote WA operations. As classification societies continue to refine their standards, for parts more items that are now experimental will become part of everyday use.

Perth is not the loudest name in global 3D printing conversations, and it probably never will be compared to hubs in Europe or the United States. But for a mid sized manufacturing and shipbuilding hub with a genuinely difficult geography problem to solve, it is doing something quietly important. It is building the local capability to keep its own ships, boats, and offshore equipment running without waiting weeks for a part to arrive from somewhere else. If you are exploring whether 3D printing suits your own marine or industrial project, Forge Labs' Perth 3D printing services is a good starting point for quotes and material guidance while WA builds out more local capacity.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can 3D printed parts actually be used on ships?

Yes, though the type of part matters. Plastic and composite printed parts are already used for brackets, housings, and fittings. Metal printed parts made using wire arc additive manufacturing have been used for structural components including class approved propellers, and the US Navy has installed printed metal parts on an aircraft carrier and a submarine.

What is WAAM and why does it matter for shipbuilding?

WAAM stands for wire arc additive manufacturing. It works like a robotic welder building a metal part layer by layer using wire instead of a solid block of material. It is the leading method for printing large, strong metal marine components like propellers and structural brackets.

Is 3D printing cheaper than traditional shipbuilding methods?

For certain parts, yes, and often by a large margin. BlueZone Group's example of a mould costing about 25 dollars to print compared to 1,500 dollars using CNC machining shows how significant the saving can be for tooling and low volume parts, though large structural components still often rely on traditional methods.

Who is doing 3D printing for the marine industry in Perth?

Key players include Austal, which is researching additive manufacturing with Curtin University and the AMCRC, Hyperion Systems, which prints large scale parts and boats from recycled plastic at Henderson, BlueZone Group, which produces composite parts for subsea and offshore work, and Aurora Labs, which focuses on metal printing for defence and industrial clients.

Are 3D printed marine parts approved by classification societies?

Some are. The WAAMpeller propeller project achieved class approval, and organisations including DNV, ABS, Lloyd's Register, and the International Association of Classification Societies are actively developing standards to make certification more consistent for printed marine parts going forward.

Where can I get marine or industrial 3D printing done if I am based in Perth?

Local options are growing, with businesses like BlueZone Group and Hyperion Systems printing within WA, and services like Forge Labs available for a wide range of prototype and low volume production needs with fast turnaround to Perth.

Conclusion

3D printing is not a future promise for Perth's marine and shipbuilding industry. It is already happening inside real shipyards, workshops, and research labs across the city right now. Austal is testing which naval components can be printed instead of cast. Hyperion is turning recycled plastic into boats and industrial parts at Henderson. BlueZone is cutting mould costs by more than 90 percent. Aurora Labs is pushing metal printing forward for defence work. None of this is happening in isolation. It is building into a genuine local ecosystem, one that plays directly to Perth's biggest weakness, its distance from the rest of the country, and turns it into a reason to manufacture closer to home instead of further away.

The technology still has real limits. Printed parts are not yet a full replacement for traditional machining, certification standards are still catching up, and investment remains cautious because demand has not become steady yet. But every one of those challenges is the kind that fades as more shipyards, suppliers, and researchers put the technology to work. Classification societies are already writing the rules that will make certified printed parts far more common. Workforce training is catching up. And every successful project, from a 25 dollar mould to a class approved propeller, gives the next business a reason to try it too.

For a shipbuilding hub built around vessels that need to be fast, reliable, and ready for service, that kind of local, on demand manufacturing capability is not a nice to have. It is quickly becoming a competitive advantage. Perth might not be the place for 3D printing but in its own calm way through Henderson, Austal, Hyperion and the companies working with them it is showing that it is one of the more useful and hopeful places, in the country to see this technology develop.