Sigh, if this guy had an actual 3D printer he would realize those doors and windows are a no-go :-) More seriously, there are unsolved issues in printing unsupported structures, the current best solution is a second 'support' material that can be dissolved/blown away once the part is completed but that rules out voids which are part of what you hope to make with this sort of thing.
Also as others point out this is just the frame (and if you do the robotic crane thing you can add a roof. You might also be able to use your robotic crane to do joists for overhangs but the finish suffers as your joist material is exposed on the underside.
No doubt solvable problems but they take away from some of the 'magicalness' of fused deposition printing. Stereo lithography where the part is neutrally bouyant in the construction fluid doesn't have those issues but it has other issues associated with strength and material choices that can be laser activated.
For now doing a concrete lay-up would be pretty killer but building the forms on site isn't that hard and in both cases you need to transport the concrete at the last minute.
Bottom line I think the stuff that BluHomes [1] is doing is much more creative than trying to do this with 3D printing.
Sigh, if this guy had an actual 3D printer he would realize those doors and windows are a no-go :-)
If you notice guy obviously competent and expeirienced in the field presenting something stupid it's more likely than not that you are missing piece of knowlege that is required for understaning why it actually isn't stupid.
Just watch the movie. It shows how to deal with doors and windows.
Just read the info on the "Why Blu" page as the photos look intriguing, but as soon as the page mentioned "pre-fab", it became a non-start for me in the SoCal market.
The problem is that pre-fabricated or pre-manufactured homes are a very specific category of homes and require specific disclosures when selling and financing. It's basically a derogatory term used to describe cheaply built structures that are a step above mobile homes.
Home being one of the most valuable assets a typical family holds. In SoCal and many other places, land makes up the bulk of the value. Place a structure on that land that then detracts from the value doesn't seem very prudent. Not to mention difficult to finance, as banks do not look favorably on that class of building.
So, unfortunately, innovation has to deal with current market and regulatory frameworks. 3D printing as proposed (though my not be valuable), would probably fall under the "custom house" label, which is the most valuable classification. Even if it's just a tract home, it's still a lot better than being considered pre-fab/pre-manufactured.
Kevin revisits David and Greta Iredale, who replaced their original house which they designed and built themselves with a German built, precision engineered Huf Haus.
Esher, 2004
Kevin McCloud follows a couple who have built houses before, but never on this scale. Their new 'Huf Haus' is designed and made in Germany but delivered for assembly in Surrey.
We toured their factory they set up at Mare Island. The 'pre-fab' thing is interesting. They design them so that their components unfold, and they can be shipped by truck. The primary use case seems to be places where there are short building seasons (cabins in the mountains for example) and where on-site work is cost prohibitive. A friend of ours bought one and put it up on land near Johnsville in the Sierras. It neither feels nor looks like a 'mobile home' or 'prefab' home, but of course it was prefabricated. It took less than a week to go from prepped foundation to cosy house. That was pretty neat.
Prefab and preamnufactured homes are different. Premanufactured homes are also known as mobile homes. There are probably a lot of prefab homes around you that you never knew about.
The above definition lumps them together and unfortunately if there isn't something that makes the home not fall under that definition, you are going to have to disclose this at sale and financing will be a PITA...
TEDx, at least. TED itself is usually (but not always) fairly well vetted. TEDx on the other hand is almost anything goes.
"The event featured talks on crystal therapy and Egyptian psychoaromatherapy and, according to the schedule, closed with the chanting of mantras and songs for Gaia."
If you pay attention to the video, the door and window lentil's are prefab picked up and placed where they need to be and then printed over with additional cement.
(Disclaimer: I'm just an amateur 3d printer and just hack with my printer and what I can get my hands on)
The thing that intrigues me about fiberous ceramics for deposition printing is that no printers currently take advantage of the (albeit tiny) tensile strength of the deposited filament.
For plastic printing, this isn't very useful, but potentially for this new construction compound you could effectively (or nearly so) bridge gaps with little droop or sag.
I do think from an engineering perspective that placing blanks underneath is the best bet, but on the order of a 20-hr print, I don't think its unreasonable to have someone walking around with the machine placing single layer "blanks" at each opening at each level.
No doubt, if you are into carpentry however you would call it a "header" rather than a plank :-) The more salient bit though is that the header has to be able to support the weight that the missing wall underneath it would have supported, had that wall been there. Since we're building with concrete (in this hypothetical example) you're looking at a lot of weight. That puts you in the 4 x 12 category of header, maybe two if you are doing a longer space. But that has an issue that concrete doesn't adhere to wood (which is why they make forms out of it) and so now you're looking at a more engineered beam that you can have concrete form around. Except that isn't really very strong unless it is prestressed (which is what they do with the concrete under bridges and roadways, and for that you really want to pull some iron through it which you release after it solidifies (the iron trys to contract and it keeps pressure (aka stress) on the concrete). So now you are 3D printing part of the building, then pausing so that your ironworkers can set up some rebar for the door and window headers, and then you put that concrete in and they come back and trim those. (this looks better than the threaded rod through the concrete with nuts on both sides to add the compression.
My point is not that the problems are not addressable, they are, rather its that "3D Printing" and "Homes" isn't a good fit yet given what we know. This neither invalidates 3D printing as a pretty revolutionary way to manufacture, nor the notion that there might be better ways to build homes, just that this particular thought experiment is a pre-mature at best, and potentially forever impractical.
They do show in the video the robot putting down steel beams for those lintels to be fair, so they have obviously planned for it.
Along the same lines I have been sketching designs for a robot to lay down 2-part foam, wire mesh and shotcrete, though I have been trying to work out if I can get it to climb its own wall, rather than needing a giant crane.
Depends on the build speed. It could "print in" holes into the wall and use a scissor action ... but I don't think that would work. You want the whole concrete/ferro cement to setup at once. An overhead cement pump and a much smaller more precise placement head/nozzle would probably be a better choice. Anything you can reuse from existing construction tech the cheaper.
Comments
Sigh, if this guy had an actual 3D printer he would realize those doors and windows are a no-go :-) More seriously, there are unsolved issues in printing unsupported structures, the current best solution is a second 'support' material that can be dissolved/blown away once the part is completed but that rules out voids which are part of what you hope to make with this sort of thing.
Also as others point out this is just the frame (and if you do the robotic crane thing you can add a roof. You might also be able to use your robotic crane to do joists for overhangs but the finish suffers as your joist material is exposed on the underside.
No doubt solvable problems but they take away from some of the 'magicalness' of fused deposition printing. Stereo lithography where the part is neutrally bouyant in the construction fluid doesn't have those issues but it has other issues associated with strength and material choices that can be laser activated.
For now doing a concrete lay-up would be pretty killer but building the forms on site isn't that hard and in both cases you need to transport the concrete at the last minute.
Bottom line I think the stuff that BluHomes [1] is doing is much more creative than trying to do this with 3D printing.
[1] http://www.bluhomes.com/
If you notice guy obviously competent and expeirienced in the field presenting something stupid it's more likely than not that you are missing piece of knowlege that is required for understaning why it actually isn't stupid.
Just watch the movie. It shows how to deal with doors and windows.
They use a crane to lift a beam across the top of the windows/doors, and then continue printing over that.
http://youtu.be/JdbJP8Gxqog?t=4m50s
Just read the info on the "Why Blu" page as the photos look intriguing, but as soon as the page mentioned "pre-fab", it became a non-start for me in the SoCal market.
The problem is that pre-fabricated or pre-manufactured homes are a very specific category of homes and require specific disclosures when selling and financing. It's basically a derogatory term used to describe cheaply built structures that are a step above mobile homes.
Home being one of the most valuable assets a typical family holds. In SoCal and many other places, land makes up the bulk of the value. Place a structure on that land that then detracts from the value doesn't seem very prudent. Not to mention difficult to finance, as banks do not look favorably on that class of building.
So, unfortunately, innovation has to deal with current market and regulatory frameworks. 3D printing as proposed (though my not be valuable), would probably fall under the "custom house" label, which is the most valuable classification. Even if it's just a tract home, it's still a lot better than being considered pre-fab/pre-manufactured.
That's a shame, because some pre-fabricated houses are very high quality. See, for example the Huf Haus in an episode of the UK show "Grand Designs".
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/episode-gui...
We toured their factory they set up at Mare Island. The 'pre-fab' thing is interesting. They design them so that their components unfold, and they can be shipped by truck. The primary use case seems to be places where there are short building seasons (cabins in the mountains for example) and where on-site work is cost prohibitive. A friend of ours bought one and put it up on land near Johnsville in the Sierras. It neither feels nor looks like a 'mobile home' or 'prefab' home, but of course it was prefabricated. It took less than a week to go from prepped foundation to cosy house. That was pretty neat.
Prefab and preamnufactured homes are different. Premanufactured homes are also known as mobile homes. There are probably a lot of prefab homes around you that you never knew about.
While I agree that it's not exactly the same, the only definition I could find is the one for manufactured homes in CA: http://law.onecle.com/california/health/18007.html.
The above definition lumps them together and unfortunately if there isn't something that makes the home not fall under that definition, you are going to have to disclose this at sale and financing will be a PITA...
This is TED. The majority of stuff presented there requires antimatter spherical cows in vacuum to work. At best.
TEDx, at least. TED itself is usually (but not always) fairly well vetted. TEDx on the other hand is almost anything goes.
"The event featured talks on crystal therapy and Egyptian psychoaromatherapy and, according to the schedule, closed with the chanting of mantras and songs for Gaia."
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/10/3751786/ted-pseudoscience...
If you pay attention to the video, the door and window lentil's are prefab picked up and placed where they need to be and then printed over with additional cement.
(Disclaimer: I'm just an amateur 3d printer and just hack with my printer and what I can get my hands on)
The thing that intrigues me about fiberous ceramics for deposition printing is that no printers currently take advantage of the (albeit tiny) tensile strength of the deposited filament.
For plastic printing, this isn't very useful, but potentially for this new construction compound you could effectively (or nearly so) bridge gaps with little droop or sag.
I do think from an engineering perspective that placing blanks underneath is the best bet, but on the order of a 20-hr print, I don't think its unreasonable to have someone walking around with the machine placing single layer "blanks" at each opening at each level.
if this guy had an actual 3D printer he would realize those doors and windows are a no-go
Is easily solvable though by having the robot drop a plank across the gap before printing the lintel, so I don't think that is a showstopper.
No doubt, if you are into carpentry however you would call it a "header" rather than a plank :-) The more salient bit though is that the header has to be able to support the weight that the missing wall underneath it would have supported, had that wall been there. Since we're building with concrete (in this hypothetical example) you're looking at a lot of weight. That puts you in the 4 x 12 category of header, maybe two if you are doing a longer space. But that has an issue that concrete doesn't adhere to wood (which is why they make forms out of it) and so now you're looking at a more engineered beam that you can have concrete form around. Except that isn't really very strong unless it is prestressed (which is what they do with the concrete under bridges and roadways, and for that you really want to pull some iron through it which you release after it solidifies (the iron trys to contract and it keeps pressure (aka stress) on the concrete). So now you are 3D printing part of the building, then pausing so that your ironworkers can set up some rebar for the door and window headers, and then you put that concrete in and they come back and trim those. (this looks better than the threaded rod through the concrete with nuts on both sides to add the compression.
My point is not that the problems are not addressable, they are, rather its that "3D Printing" and "Homes" isn't a good fit yet given what we know. This neither invalidates 3D printing as a pretty revolutionary way to manufacture, nor the notion that there might be better ways to build homes, just that this particular thought experiment is a pre-mature at best, and potentially forever impractical.
They do show in the video the robot putting down steel beams for those lintels to be fair, so they have obviously planned for it.
Along the same lines I have been sketching designs for a robot to lay down 2-part foam, wire mesh and shotcrete, though I have been trying to work out if I can get it to climb its own wall, rather than needing a giant crane.
Depends on the build speed. It could "print in" holes into the wall and use a scissor action ... but I don't think that would work. You want the whole concrete/ferro cement to setup at once. An overhead cement pump and a much smaller more precise placement head/nozzle would probably be a better choice. Anything you can reuse from existing construction tech the cheaper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_pump
if you watched the 8 minute video you would see the actual concrete printer in action.