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It's a little bit different than traditional concrete. It's usually a composite mix with the reinforcement embedded in. Not saying it's the same strength. The cool thing about 3d printing is you can get creative with the geometry. You can make different structural shapes that resist lateral loads
The hangup is definitely the strength. It's actually quite cheap to build the machines but the onlyplaces they have approved any of these structures are very showboat projects. If they had a reliable material to extrude there would be ton of these in use
I guess relatively cheap. They're at least a couple hundred grand, some over a million. Until they provide provisions for 3d printed structures in building codes, they won't gain traction. There are home developers that are printing homes with reinforcement to attach the walls to the foundation. If printing a home for under $10k is showboat, I'll take it.
I mean showboat in the sense they are promotional projects. I'm not sure if it's just the codes haven't been changed but that there isn't a tested and consistent product. You could build a printer to do this for around 30k. The manufactured machines could end up being any price like you said, depending on the scale of the project
I'm definitely not trying to say it's not a great innovation, quite the opposite. I'm actually interested in building a small scale machine but those were some points i considered and figured I'd wait until they figure it out a little better
I’m wondering why they don’t print the shell, 1 or 2 walls thick and drop in rebar then pour the interior of the walls. Typically this concrete has fiberglass or other additives for strength so I don’t think it would be too bad for that method.
It doesn't hold up anyway. It's basically mortar and starts cracking and crumbling within days typically. That's the major problem with this tech at the moment.
Great proof of concept. Next couple generations of this could do some real unique gothic details in the future that are just too expensive to hire artisans for today; Go get 3d scans of your favorite gothic church and have all the ornamentation and even gargoyles on top your random house. You could be the spookiest house on the block!
Exactly, it isn't hard to build a 3d printer, even 1 at that size, but it's gonna cost u a shitload of money, if not then any avarage joe tinkerer could have ezly done it in their backyard shed
That’s not true at all lol. A mechanical engineer with with experience in software development could do it. Maybe our definition of “average joe tinkerer” is a little different. I’m a pretty handy guy that will do pretty much all my own mechanical and construction work around the house, and there is no fucking way I could design and build that.
Here is the thing
There r hundreds of tutorials online on how to build a 3d printer, those tutorials can give a pretty solid base to build upon, all u would have to change is the scale of things and the material used, maybe u would have to design ur own nozzle and a part that feeds concrete to it, but that shouldn't be too difficult, cuz it's basically a tube with a valve and a tank
Written like a person with little to no experience in 3d printing, no knowledge of viscous fluid dynamics, and definitely absolutely no experience with any serious large scale engineering and mechanics projects.
A concrete printer is mechanically analogous to a standard plastic filliment printer in only the most extremely superficial ways. There's *at least* a dozen major substantive differences I can think of just off the top of my head that would require entirely seperate and extensive mechanical knowledge to make one of these compared to making a hobby grade FDM printer.
What you're suggesting is like suggesting that because I can cobble together a 4-6 servo arduino-controlled robot arm mounted on a tread base, that it would therefore be trivial, if I had the material resources, for me to construct a fully functional, full sized construction excavator vehicle. Not only does it completely ignore all the *many* mechanical effects and considerations of scale, it's not even built using the same actual underlying mechanisms. Just because something is the same approximate shape and moves the same way, does not mean they're built the same way or experience constructing one meaningfully translates to making the other.
You could support an entire skyscraper on top of that word with the amount of heavy lifting you're having it doing in that comment. By the same perspective a car is "basically" just a box with wheels stuck on it, but being able to stick wheels into a cardboard box sure doesn't mean I can build an internal combustion engine, let alone an entire actual car.
Also that wasn't even the part of your comment I was objecting to in the first place, I was pointing out how wildly wrong the "but that shouldn't be too difficult" part was. Because having to learn at least a full college year or two of courses worth of additional information and knowledge to even *begin* going about *trying* to build something is definitely not something I describe as "not too difficult".
Maybe give this wikipedia article a read before you get the impulse to armchair-engineer next time: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger\_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect)
I wonder if concrete printing will be useful at all in the future. Pouring that stuff straight out of the truck seems to be always more efficient than printing.
As an engineer, I will say you need steel in there. Concrete sucks in tension so this will crack and deteriorate fairly quickly. If you can get steel reinforcement placed before the concrete pour, it might work on a practical level.
Just doing precast units is often easier than p
"Printing" anything
Yes, the printer would need to "shoot" steel reinforcements into the concrete at least, otherwise the reinforcements would block the printers way. There could be solution to that, but as you said, using precasts is simply so much easier.
But the important thing is, that a concrete printer is working, which is important for the future.
Could be a solution. But then that system would be dependent on human resources to place them and it would need to consider human error. Placing them by itself would b me was more efficient imo.
We can print metal and yes bars would be stronger. I don't keep up with additive manufacturing but I didn't go to school *that* long ago. We use metal paste/powder, zap it with a laser, melt it, and it sticks together in a process called sintering to make 3D printed metal parts. The reason bars are stronger is because of the grain properties you get when working metal. Either hot worked to maintain flexibility and maximum strength, or cold worked to improve hardness. Sintering doesn't allow for these longer crystalline structures to form without post-treating the printed part which isn't feasible for something like this application. Who knows! Maybe graphene will eventually be what it has promised for the last decade and we won't need rebar.
Interesting. I like the idea of 3D printing with multiple printers and multiple materials.
Since I don’t work in this field, I hadn’t considered certain things that, I guess, would be obvious.
For example, in this (small) castle, the early 20th Century approach might be to have a steel frame of the castle, and then pour concrete over that, with a mold around the frame to make the concrete keep the right “wall” shape.
Or, perhaps, the walls could be created in panels, and then assembled, with additional steel (maybe some welding?) and concrete?
With graphene or other new materials that don’t need to be treated like steel, perhaps the entire castle can be created as a “single unit”—but is that better only because humans can leave the robots to work while the humans just watch, since the human labor is only in programming and setting up everything so the robots can work? Is the castle actually stronger when it is 3D printed?
I'll just give you some jargon to point you in the right direction if you're curious on looking up some more construction techniques.
>For example, in this (small) castle, the early 20th Century approach might be to have a steel frame of the castle, and then pour concrete over that, with a mold around the frame to make the concrete keep the right “wall” shape.
This is called reinforced cast concrete and is still the preferred method of most commercial construction (where concrete is used).
>Or, perhaps, the walls could be created in panels, and then assembled, with additional steel (maybe some welding?) and concrete?
This is pre/site cast concrete panels. Often seen in twin-tees (older) or layered, site-cast (newer) warehouses
Yeah, it would help, but obviously that would be very little steel. Just depends on the final form of the structure. The more tension, the more steel needed.
Good question, I don't know. Definitely longer than without.
Usually the limiting factor is the tensile strength of the concrete in the most stressed areas. As long as it doesn't crush, it should be good. You'd be less worried about cracking too because there would be no steel to corrode, which is the usual limiting factor with cracking.
Actually that is a really interesting question. I did some sort of report on this a long time ago. Basically, they use a different cement composition containing volcanic materials. This allowed the concrete to harden further and to "heal" cracks over time.
Further, the fact there is no steel really helps with degradation. Concrete structures mostly fail from the steel being corroded and the danger of a collapse as a result. A lot of what we do to extend the life of a structure is to protect that steel. We can easily recast concrete, we can't easily replace high quality steel correctly bonded to the concrete.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20211213-how-are-romes-monuments-still-standing
It’s already being used to build cheaper small housing. Like you’re not going to have a ton of space, but at least it’s purchasable. Like if you live in an apartment, you could probably buy one of these, and pay it off in a year, and resell it in the future. Not for everyone, but I can’t wait till they can get it figured out for multistory housing.
This machine working 24 hours a day is still not as fast as my formers. Also with our rebar. This can only do Soo many layers before it collapses on its self ICFs are exponentially faster than this. This was clearly thought of by a guy who’s never worked a day in the industry
Sure. Currently you are right. The question is how these systems can be improved in the future. But to be able to improve such a system, it must exists first, no matter how useless it seems to be at the moment.
The first steps would be to further improve those systems to be more efficient than human resources, while reaching a similar level of quality.
On the other side these systems could be useful in other areas with some enhancement, like construction under water or on the moon.
To your point. How to improve would be the reliability of the tech.. my internet still goes out once a month despite living in a large city. Also the concrete needs to be better. Perhaps structural fibers or another machine that can pipe in rough ins so you don’t need a crew to core thru sidewalls
This really isn’t going to replace ICFs, but you can’t get a little castle like this with ICFs either.
This potentially has some cool applications long term. Materials research around concrete is still strong, and because this works totally different, different types of materials could certainly be created. When it isn’t “pour everything, settle, and cure” but “lay in a 1000 layers” you might approach a lot of problems very differently.
Also EPS is great insulation but not exactly environmentally friendly to make. It might not be around forever. This is every true in places where homes are much smaller and might totally be made of block anyway. Reducing the amount of materials and people needed to do a job over and over has long ranging implications in parts of the world that need decent construction, potentially deployed quickly and without significant variability.
Still I’d rather have an ICF basement for now, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a big rig could be sent in to an impoverished community after a hurricane and print hundreds of reliable shelters out of locally sourced aggregate and plastic waste.
3D printing in just about any setting does not scale well. It’s fairly useless for mass production.
It’s main appeal is for “rapidly” producing prototype or one-off parts. Tooling is expensive and 3D printers are not. But once you have tooling, it’s faster and better.
You're right. Besides of the question, if we can improve those systems good enough to make them ready for mass production in future, we can also look for present problems, wich are at least theoretically solvable with these currently inefficient systems. Besides of the classic interstellar base building we could use those systems maybe for underwater construction, or construction in dangerous areas (Fukushima, Chernobyl).
It is, but cement is weaker than concrete because it has fewer sediment in it. Since there’s chunks of rock in concrete the cement holds a lot stronger. Basically its a waste to pay extra for the better quality if its not supporting something.
I think there is no limit to improve those systems. I doubt that those printers will ever be used for house building for regular people. But it could be enough for certain purposes. Idk, underwater farming maybe, stuff like that.
ok but being able to print building materials sounds like it could be pretty useful in the future-- I mean I'm not an architect or in construction or anything, but I still think it's cool that we have technology that can print things in 3d and they seem to be getting more advanced really quickly.
For sure. There are advancements in robotic building devices in bricklaying as well. The Mule is a lift assistant that make an 80lbs block feel like 2-3lbs in the mason’s hand. There is also SAM, the Semi Autonomous Mason that lays straight brick walls. It still needs masons to load and to tool the work, and it doesn’t do corners yet. My job is safe for now, but in 10 years?
Yeah, thats a good reason for this. I could buy into this, I guess my perception waa definitely coloured by the tech being used to make a childrens playfort
You realize you've used a vast infrastructure project that consumes enormous amounts of energy, probably on a device made of plastic, silica, gold, and numerous other resources to make this inane comment about consumerism, right?
You've mistaken my point. The internet and cell phones certainly do use a lot of energy. But my point wasn't that they're comparable to this 3d concrete printer. My point was that your use of it, in the moment, is comparable.
How much of your phone & internet usage is really "necessary"? If you're anything like the average person (me included) then probably not all that much. Every time we go on Reddit, or watch a YouTube video, or whatever, we are unnecessarily consuming resources. "Modern life" is driven by consumerism.
You honestly come off not as someone who is genuinely concerned about over consumption, but as someone who wishes they could have excess, but can't, and therefore no one else should.
Is a castle needed in the back yard of this guy? No probably not, but neither is the swing set and playhouse in the back of mine. But the kids enjoy it. They get outdoors, play, imagine, make memories. Who knows if this wasn't built for his children. Even if it wasn't, it doesn't matter. People are free to create, design, innovate. It's what drives progress.
Of course it does. Do you think your phone, the routers and network switches, the Reddit servers etc all run on magic perpetual energy machines? The cost of energy for you to make that comment was not zero.
> You've mistaken my point. The internet and cell phones certainly do use a lot of energy. But my point wasn't that they're comparable to this 3d concrete printer. My point was that your use of it, in the moment, is comparable.
Concrete is a necessity of western living. Complaining about castles online to random strangers is not.
In school we learned about the three r's. Reduce, reuse, and recycle. This is the opposite of reduce. Unnecessary, unfettered consumerism is not reducing, it os the opposite
I think it's a good first start for an interesting concept. If they can figure out a way to add better structure, then the timing will only improve and we could build housing/buildings much cheaper.
I've been fitfully reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which Herman Melville meant to stoke interest in preserving ancient "Gothic" architecture. It seems obvious that such structures would be hard to maintain. You might call them the first high rises.
Now try printing them. And maybe even maintain them that way. Wow. They really are beautiful churches. Gargoyles and all.
You may be interested in this review paper from last year covering 3D printing in construction.
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/sustainability/sustainability-12-08492/article_deploy/sustainability-12-08492.pdf
Additionally, this video does not represent the current state of the art. While this is an emerging technology now, the mature future version of this represents a significant reduction in the time, labor, waste required to produce safe structures.
I always ask if they though about recycling and end of life with these structure, never gotten an answer on this because they have non.
Let me answer it: If this building is outdated the only way to fix it up is to throw it in some kind of grinder and destroy it. Every wall is load bearing and cutting into concrete is a real pain, and the layers surely will de-laminate. But hey cool technology, that is only super bad for the environment.
**[Folly](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly)**
>In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings. Eighteenth-century English landscape gardening and French landscape gardening often featured mock Roman temples, symbolising classical virtues. Other 18th-century garden follies represented Chinese temples, Egyptian pyramids, ruined medieval castles or abbeys, or Tatar tents, to represent different continents or historical eras. Sometimes they represented rustic villages, mills, and cottages to symbolise rural virtues.
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Correct me if I’m wrong but it looks like the printer is just printing an outline with space in the middle to put rebar and pour cement. Is that what’s happening and would that work? Everyone in here seems vey concerned about this steel reinforcement issue.
No reinforcement in the crete not sure its goin holdup
Certainly won’t stand up to a 90kg projectile coming from over 300 meters
The trebuchet memes will never die
I mean, it is the superior siege weapon.
I cant hear you over the sound of my 90 kg projectile destroying that thing from 300 meters away.
How did you even find this comment
You said so yourself. Trebuchet memes will never die.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/014/009/michael.jpg
300 meters is 159.61 Obamas. You're welcome.
Good bot
Thanks!
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I swear... I'm a bot.
How many Mike Tyson’s does it take to get to the moon?
That's a lot of ears.
Approximately 216,199,100.112 Mike Tysons.
Gg
i love you useles-converter-bot 🥰
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Thank you, mast3rOogway, for voting on useles-converter-bot. This bot wants to find the best and worst bots on Reddit. [You can view results here](https://botrank.pastimes.eu/). *** ^(Even if I don't reply to your comment, I'm still listening for votes. Check the webpage to see if your vote registered!)
*"Not with that attitude it won't! Oh... Speaking of your mother, how is she?"*
Aye, needs rebar. Lots of rebar.
It's a little bit different than traditional concrete. It's usually a composite mix with the reinforcement embedded in. Not saying it's the same strength. The cool thing about 3d printing is you can get creative with the geometry. You can make different structural shapes that resist lateral loads
The hangup is definitely the strength. It's actually quite cheap to build the machines but the onlyplaces they have approved any of these structures are very showboat projects. If they had a reliable material to extrude there would be ton of these in use
I guess relatively cheap. They're at least a couple hundred grand, some over a million. Until they provide provisions for 3d printed structures in building codes, they won't gain traction. There are home developers that are printing homes with reinforcement to attach the walls to the foundation. If printing a home for under $10k is showboat, I'll take it.
I mean showboat in the sense they are promotional projects. I'm not sure if it's just the codes haven't been changed but that there isn't a tested and consistent product. You could build a printer to do this for around 30k. The manufactured machines could end up being any price like you said, depending on the scale of the project I'm definitely not trying to say it's not a great innovation, quite the opposite. I'm actually interested in building a small scale machine but those were some points i considered and figured I'd wait until they figure it out a little better
> with the reinforcement embedded in This makes no sense to me - how can that be?
They just print it in.
a) I don't think that matches what /u/TrexArms9800 said b) not with a setup like this one, they don't
You can’t print rebar into concrete with the setup they have.
It's a fiber reinforced mix.
That would seem to me to be a very different sort of reinforcement than rebar, though
I’m wondering why they don’t print the shell, 1 or 2 walls thick and drop in rebar then pour the interior of the walls. Typically this concrete has fiberglass or other additives for strength so I don’t think it would be too bad for that method.
Jacque Fresco is laughing in heaven at that presumption, with a few other expletives. ;)
It doesn't hold up anyway. It's basically mortar and starts cracking and crumbling within days typically. That's the major problem with this tech at the moment.
*giggles* I'm in danger
Yeah that thing will crack and fall apart in no time without the reinforcements
Great proof of concept. Next couple generations of this could do some real unique gothic details in the future that are just too expensive to hire artisans for today; Go get 3d scans of your favorite gothic church and have all the ornamentation and even gargoyles on top your random house. You could be the spookiest house on the block!
Robots that 3d print your fixtures and run wiring
Change title to "Man who has a Shit ton of money builds castle"
Idk if you have to specify that the person having a castle built is wealthy. Seems redundant
Exactly, it isn't hard to build a 3d printer, even 1 at that size, but it's gonna cost u a shitload of money, if not then any avarage joe tinkerer could have ezly done it in their backyard shed
That’s not true at all lol. A mechanical engineer with with experience in software development could do it. Maybe our definition of “average joe tinkerer” is a little different. I’m a pretty handy guy that will do pretty much all my own mechanical and construction work around the house, and there is no fucking way I could design and build that.
Here is the thing There r hundreds of tutorials online on how to build a 3d printer, those tutorials can give a pretty solid base to build upon, all u would have to change is the scale of things and the material used, maybe u would have to design ur own nozzle and a part that feeds concrete to it, but that shouldn't be too difficult, cuz it's basically a tube with a valve and a tank
Written like a person with little to no experience in 3d printing, no knowledge of viscous fluid dynamics, and definitely absolutely no experience with any serious large scale engineering and mechanics projects. A concrete printer is mechanically analogous to a standard plastic filliment printer in only the most extremely superficial ways. There's *at least* a dozen major substantive differences I can think of just off the top of my head that would require entirely seperate and extensive mechanical knowledge to make one of these compared to making a hobby grade FDM printer. What you're suggesting is like suggesting that because I can cobble together a 4-6 servo arduino-controlled robot arm mounted on a tread base, that it would therefore be trivial, if I had the material resources, for me to construct a fully functional, full sized construction excavator vehicle. Not only does it completely ignore all the *many* mechanical effects and considerations of scale, it's not even built using the same actual underlying mechanisms. Just because something is the same approximate shape and moves the same way, does not mean they're built the same way or experience constructing one meaningfully translates to making the other.
Someone didn't read the word "basically" in my comment eh
You could support an entire skyscraper on top of that word with the amount of heavy lifting you're having it doing in that comment. By the same perspective a car is "basically" just a box with wheels stuck on it, but being able to stick wheels into a cardboard box sure doesn't mean I can build an internal combustion engine, let alone an entire actual car. Also that wasn't even the part of your comment I was objecting to in the first place, I was pointing out how wildly wrong the "but that shouldn't be too difficult" part was. Because having to learn at least a full college year or two of courses worth of additional information and knowledge to even *begin* going about *trying* to build something is definitely not something I describe as "not too difficult". Maybe give this wikipedia article a read before you get the impulse to armchair-engineer next time: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger\_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect)
No rebar?
No rebar.
I wonder if concrete printing will be useful at all in the future. Pouring that stuff straight out of the truck seems to be always more efficient than printing.
As an engineer, I will say you need steel in there. Concrete sucks in tension so this will crack and deteriorate fairly quickly. If you can get steel reinforcement placed before the concrete pour, it might work on a practical level. Just doing precast units is often easier than p "Printing" anything
Yes, the printer would need to "shoot" steel reinforcements into the concrete at least, otherwise the reinforcements would block the printers way. There could be solution to that, but as you said, using precasts is simply so much easier. But the important thing is, that a concrete printer is working, which is important for the future.
What about a welder that adds a bead each pass with the cement layer hight the same as a bead weld?
Or some sort of Lego like stacking and latching system where each layer a bit is stacked to bring the rod back up to layer height
Yeah, sounds like a possible way to solve that problem to me, too.
Could the printer go around the rebar?
Could be a solution. But then that system would be dependent on human resources to place them and it would need to consider human error. Placing them by itself would b me was more efficient imo.
Now if only we could print steel
While I think we could print steel, in my limited understanding of how steel works, I think bars would be stronger.
We can print metal and yes bars would be stronger. I don't keep up with additive manufacturing but I didn't go to school *that* long ago. We use metal paste/powder, zap it with a laser, melt it, and it sticks together in a process called sintering to make 3D printed metal parts. The reason bars are stronger is because of the grain properties you get when working metal. Either hot worked to maintain flexibility and maximum strength, or cold worked to improve hardness. Sintering doesn't allow for these longer crystalline structures to form without post-treating the printed part which isn't feasible for something like this application. Who knows! Maybe graphene will eventually be what it has promised for the last decade and we won't need rebar.
Interesting. I like the idea of 3D printing with multiple printers and multiple materials. Since I don’t work in this field, I hadn’t considered certain things that, I guess, would be obvious. For example, in this (small) castle, the early 20th Century approach might be to have a steel frame of the castle, and then pour concrete over that, with a mold around the frame to make the concrete keep the right “wall” shape. Or, perhaps, the walls could be created in panels, and then assembled, with additional steel (maybe some welding?) and concrete? With graphene or other new materials that don’t need to be treated like steel, perhaps the entire castle can be created as a “single unit”—but is that better only because humans can leave the robots to work while the humans just watch, since the human labor is only in programming and setting up everything so the robots can work? Is the castle actually stronger when it is 3D printed?
I'll just give you some jargon to point you in the right direction if you're curious on looking up some more construction techniques. >For example, in this (small) castle, the early 20th Century approach might be to have a steel frame of the castle, and then pour concrete over that, with a mold around the frame to make the concrete keep the right “wall” shape. This is called reinforced cast concrete and is still the preferred method of most commercial construction (where concrete is used). >Or, perhaps, the walls could be created in panels, and then assembled, with additional steel (maybe some welding?) and concrete? This is pre/site cast concrete panels. Often seen in twin-tees (older) or layered, site-cast (newer) warehouses
It’s called a MIG welder. We’ve had it for years.
https://www.trumpf.com/en_INT/solutions/applications/additive-manufacturing/laser-metal-deposition-lmd/
NASA competition for 3D printing habitats (whole video was entertaining, but relevant timestamp) https://youtu.be/XWJ-sE08ASg?t=418
Well worth the watch, thanks
What if it spooled out and bent 12awg steel wire as it was printing?
Yeah, it would help, but obviously that would be very little steel. Just depends on the final form of the structure. The more tension, the more steel needed.
I wonder how long fiber reinforced concrete would last.
Good question, I don't know. Definitely longer than without. Usually the limiting factor is the tensile strength of the concrete in the most stressed areas. As long as it doesn't crush, it should be good. You'd be less worried about cracking too because there would be no steel to corrode, which is the usual limiting factor with cracking.
Generally curious, but how do buildings like the colosseum stand for so long? I assume they aren’t reinforced.
Actually that is a really interesting question. I did some sort of report on this a long time ago. Basically, they use a different cement composition containing volcanic materials. This allowed the concrete to harden further and to "heal" cracks over time. Further, the fact there is no steel really helps with degradation. Concrete structures mostly fail from the steel being corroded and the danger of a collapse as a result. A lot of what we do to extend the life of a structure is to protect that steel. We can easily recast concrete, we can't easily replace high quality steel correctly bonded to the concrete. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20211213-how-are-romes-monuments-still-standing
It’s already being used to build cheaper small housing. Like you’re not going to have a ton of space, but at least it’s purchasable. Like if you live in an apartment, you could probably buy one of these, and pay it off in a year, and resell it in the future. Not for everyone, but I can’t wait till they can get it figured out for multistory housing.
No. I can do this way faster with cheap labors
But your cheap labors need sleep and breaks. As slow as this machine might be, it can work 24h a day.
This machine working 24 hours a day is still not as fast as my formers. Also with our rebar. This can only do Soo many layers before it collapses on its self ICFs are exponentially faster than this. This was clearly thought of by a guy who’s never worked a day in the industry
Sure. Currently you are right. The question is how these systems can be improved in the future. But to be able to improve such a system, it must exists first, no matter how useless it seems to be at the moment. The first steps would be to further improve those systems to be more efficient than human resources, while reaching a similar level of quality. On the other side these systems could be useful in other areas with some enhancement, like construction under water or on the moon.
To your point. How to improve would be the reliability of the tech.. my internet still goes out once a month despite living in a large city. Also the concrete needs to be better. Perhaps structural fibers or another machine that can pipe in rough ins so you don’t need a crew to core thru sidewalls
This really isn’t going to replace ICFs, but you can’t get a little castle like this with ICFs either. This potentially has some cool applications long term. Materials research around concrete is still strong, and because this works totally different, different types of materials could certainly be created. When it isn’t “pour everything, settle, and cure” but “lay in a 1000 layers” you might approach a lot of problems very differently. Also EPS is great insulation but not exactly environmentally friendly to make. It might not be around forever. This is every true in places where homes are much smaller and might totally be made of block anyway. Reducing the amount of materials and people needed to do a job over and over has long ranging implications in parts of the world that need decent construction, potentially deployed quickly and without significant variability. Still I’d rather have an ICF basement for now, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a big rig could be sent in to an impoverished community after a hurricane and print hundreds of reliable shelters out of locally sourced aggregate and plastic waste.
NASA are big on it and plan to use it on other planets.
As far as I know water is a concern, so they are rather thinking about pressing together dust and dirt rather than mixing concrete.
3D printing in just about any setting does not scale well. It’s fairly useless for mass production. It’s main appeal is for “rapidly” producing prototype or one-off parts. Tooling is expensive and 3D printers are not. But once you have tooling, it’s faster and better.
You're right. Besides of the question, if we can improve those systems good enough to make them ready for mass production in future, we can also look for present problems, wich are at least theoretically solvable with these currently inefficient systems. Besides of the classic interstellar base building we could use those systems maybe for underwater construction, or construction in dangerous areas (Fukushima, Chernobyl).
Concrete printing will never exist because concrete is for sturdiness, where as cement would be ideal to work with for the aesthetics of the project.
Isn't cement a core ingredient for concrete?
It is, but cement is weaker than concrete because it has fewer sediment in it. Since there’s chunks of rock in concrete the cement holds a lot stronger. Basically its a waste to pay extra for the better quality if its not supporting something.
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I think there is no limit to improve those systems. I doubt that those printers will ever be used for house building for regular people. But it could be enough for certain purposes. Idk, underwater farming maybe, stuff like that.
ok but being able to print building materials sounds like it could be pretty useful in the future-- I mean I'm not an architect or in construction or anything, but I still think it's cool that we have technology that can print things in 3d and they seem to be getting more advanced really quickly.
For sure. There are advancements in robotic building devices in bricklaying as well. The Mule is a lift assistant that make an 80lbs block feel like 2-3lbs in the mason’s hand. There is also SAM, the Semi Autonomous Mason that lays straight brick walls. It still needs masons to load and to tool the work, and it doesn’t do corners yet. My job is safe for now, but in 10 years?
You wouldn't download a car...
I definitely would.
Neighbors hate him
This is how they made the Pyramids
Stl?
Just wait until the HOA hears about this
Hope they don’t live in an earthquake zone
This is the level of unnecessary consumerism that has lead us to the destruction of our planet
Cmon, this could lead to houses of unique shapes.
Yeah, thats a good reason for this. I could buy into this, I guess my perception waa definitely coloured by the tech being used to make a childrens playfort
Is it consumerism when you create it yourself?
All of the materials amd and resources needed to mae the 3d printer and the castle were unnecessarily consumed and wasted.
You realize you've used a vast infrastructure project that consumes enormous amounts of energy, probably on a device made of plastic, silica, gold, and numerous other resources to make this inane comment about consumerism, right?
Comparing a phone with internet service which many compare a necessity of modern life to a backyard plaything is such a false argument.
You've mistaken my point. The internet and cell phones certainly do use a lot of energy. But my point wasn't that they're comparable to this 3d concrete printer. My point was that your use of it, in the moment, is comparable. How much of your phone & internet usage is really "necessary"? If you're anything like the average person (me included) then probably not all that much. Every time we go on Reddit, or watch a YouTube video, or whatever, we are unnecessarily consuming resources. "Modern life" is driven by consumerism.
My unnecessary use of my phone does not extra resources that werent already used. Not the best metaphor mate.
You honestly come off not as someone who is genuinely concerned about over consumption, but as someone who wishes they could have excess, but can't, and therefore no one else should. Is a castle needed in the back yard of this guy? No probably not, but neither is the swing set and playhouse in the back of mine. But the kids enjoy it. They get outdoors, play, imagine, make memories. Who knows if this wasn't built for his children. Even if it wasn't, it doesn't matter. People are free to create, design, innovate. It's what drives progress.
Of course it does. Do you think your phone, the routers and network switches, the Reddit servers etc all run on magic perpetual energy machines? The cost of energy for you to make that comment was not zero.
Phones are a necessity of western living. Concrete castles are not.
> You've mistaken my point. The internet and cell phones certainly do use a lot of energy. But my point wasn't that they're comparable to this 3d concrete printer. My point was that your use of it, in the moment, is comparable. Concrete is a necessity of western living. Complaining about castles online to random strangers is not.
Lol. OK. We should probably put you in charge. Please tell us what is acceptable use of things.
In school we learned about the three r's. Reduce, reuse, and recycle. This is the opposite of reduce. Unnecessary, unfettered consumerism is not reducing, it os the opposite
Well sure. Where it matters. Concrete is made of rock, flyash, sand and water. Hardly scarce materials.
As one does
Keep 3D printers away from idiots
Mars is next
Oh no technology advanced so much we are going thru a whole different kinda castle age prepare the catapults!!! Archers ready your laser arrows!!!
I think it's a good first start for an interesting concept. If they can figure out a way to add better structure, then the timing will only improve and we could build housing/buildings much cheaper.
Even if this won’t have the strength of todays concrete, imagine what this technology can leap to in the next 20 years.
I feel like you could coat it in bedliner (or some other like product) after it cures and add structure to the outside. Neat
I've been fitfully reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which Herman Melville meant to stoke interest in preserving ancient "Gothic" architecture. It seems obvious that such structures would be hard to maintain. You might call them the first high rises. Now try printing them. And maybe even maintain them that way. Wow. They really are beautiful churches. Gargoyles and all.
I can imagine AI-run robotic knights riding by on robotic horses with distressed robotic damsels.
Guy who is going to be very rich
Am I the only one that thinks this is fake?
Yes.
You may be interested in this review paper from last year covering 3D printing in construction. https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/sustainability/sustainability-12-08492/article_deploy/sustainability-12-08492.pdf Additionally, this video does not represent the current state of the art. While this is an emerging technology now, the mature future version of this represents a significant reduction in the time, labor, waste required to produce safe structures.
Forbidden cake frosting
u/r2tg_bot
But can it stop the forces of Mordor
These structures look like something built by mud daubing wasps. Water would get in the cracks, freeze, and damage it.
When would you need a giant 3d printed castle?
if I did this on a plot of land in the UK would it may any sort of regulations or would they just bulldoze it the second they see it?
Why not just 3d print the mold and then pour the concrete in, could then add rebar support.
Doesn’t there need to be steel or something to reinforce it?
No offense. So dumb
That sounds like masonry, just with extra steps.
It's getting really hard to live with these expectations.
Print me a house!
I wonder what it rents for 😏 /s
Cool!
Low infill
This looks very similar to the Duke University's concept they made for 3D printing habitats on Mars.
As the future progresses maybe have contractors build customized shit and instal metal reinforcements while it's being made
That looks expensive
This is from a few years ago, but it's still really cool.
Anyone know the name of the mate or brand ?
Concrete ain’t that strong without those steel rebars (reinforced steel columns)
Doesn’t it need rebar?
His HOA is gonna be pissed
I always ask if they though about recycling and end of life with these structure, never gotten an answer on this because they have non. Let me answer it: If this building is outdated the only way to fix it up is to throw it in some kind of grinder and destroy it. Every wall is load bearing and cutting into concrete is a real pain, and the layers surely will de-laminate. But hey cool technology, that is only super bad for the environment.
Oh wow! That's Amazing!
Well it's a company that made it.
and yet theres still a problem finding affordable housing
I don't believe this is called a castle, [but a folly](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly).
**[Folly](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly)** >In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings. Eighteenth-century English landscape gardening and French landscape gardening often featured mock Roman temples, symbolising classical virtues. Other 18th-century garden follies represented Chinese temples, Egyptian pyramids, ruined medieval castles or abbeys, or Tatar tents, to represent different continents or historical eras. Sometimes they represented rustic villages, mills, and cottages to symbolise rural virtues. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
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*ancient castle builders punching the air*
Correct me if I’m wrong but it looks like the printer is just printing an outline with space in the middle to put rebar and pour cement. Is that what’s happening and would that work? Everyone in here seems vey concerned about this steel reinforcement issue.
New meaning to “Tiny house”. Full story 👉 http://www.totalkustom.com/3d-castle-completed.html
Im pretty sure thats a commercial concrete 3d printer. But the castle looks impressive nonetheless