3-D Printing

Very cool! Such a simple idea - I wonder why nobody thought of this before?

Decades ago, before the very first true additive-manufacturing object (made from a photoresist intended for circuit board manufacture) in the early 1980's, someone built a house or building using a process not unlike the "new" one. The material was a plastic foam, and it was dispensed at the end of an arm that went around and around, building the structure a layer at a time. One of the magazines showed it, I think in the very late 1950's or early 60's. Simple polar-coordinate mechanisms would build a sort of igloo, essentially a hemisphere, this way. Switching to a Cartesian system is straightforward. See Patent Number: 4575330 - Issue date: Mar 11, 1986 - This is Chuck Hull's core stereolithography patent describing the process. It showed a turntable (polar coordinate) system and the "cup", "goblet", or "chalice" that was the first object so produced. The magazine was probably Popular Science for the house-building system, but I haven't located it.

I expect that they'd have sheathed the foam with either conventional materials, or by applying stucco to handle weather, but that's been a long time . . .

I never thought about it but the Eskimos have been 3D printing igloos for centuries.

I think that this is the house I was thinking of in my earlier post: http://retrorenovation.com/2011/06/15/energy-efficient-1964-dome-house-built-of-styrofoam-by-robert-schwartz-a-student-of-buckminster-fuller/. Note that this foam dome was built in 1964 using a spiral generating machine.

I wonder when building a house this way in 20 hours will meet building regs? Concrete takes time to set, and there are regulation times for setting, and number of brick layers per day to allow drying time/ foundation settlement/ etc. Can 3D printing build pipework which is not porous? Or steel reinforcement with sufficient strength? Nice idea, but prefab would be more suitable, imo.

While it is a much more mundane use, I used to get wax 3-d models which I could then invest in ceramic, burn out the wax and cast a metal prototype for my customer. It saved a lot of time and expense over building a metal mold to produce the wax and then make the prototype especially at the early experimental stage.

Wow!

Should be more use made of this technique.

And, showing it to family and friends indicates very strongly that there is such a thing as "timeless fashion".

Some of the fitout fashion is a hit still, today.

Am enthused to build one myself, but probably won't get the chance.

Cheers,

Stu.