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Printing a Home: The Case For Contour Crafting
ambermichelle wrote in with a link to a story about the possibility that the home of the future might be printed instead of built. "It can take anywhere from six weeks to six months to build a 2,800-square-foot, two-story house in the U.S., mostly because human beings do all the work. Within the next five years, chances are that 3D printing (also known by the less catchy but more inclusive term additive manufacturing) will have become so advanced that we will be able to upload design specifications to a massive robot, press print, and watch as it spits out a concrete house in less than a day. Plenty of humans will be there, but just to ogle. Minimizing the time and cost that goes into creating shelters will enable aid workers to address the needs of people in desperate situations. This, at least, is what Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering and director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies, or CRAFT, at the University of Southern California, hopes will come of his inventions."
So this will finish the outside. That goes up pretty fast. The slow part of a custom home is the plumbing, the wiring, the trim and the painting and finishing. I don't see this as a big game changer.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So in addition to shipping in concrete, insulation and wiring, etc, you have to bring in the gigantic robot that runs on rails(it looks like)? and power it?
There's a reason a lot of things are still done by hand, and a lot of the time, the reason is money.
You can make a concrete house in BFE with only concrete, rebar, water, and humans, with some plywood for forms. Doesn't even need electricity, but that would speed it up. Seems to me that would be considerably easier to mobilize during a disaster, than a huge robot... no?
Something like this would be more suited to printing trailers in a factory (but not concrete..), or possibly a whole new subdivision, I'd think. But I'm sure the guys hanging out in front of home depot will do it cheaper.
When you can just come over to Ireland and there are plenty of unused homes to choose from and just as few jobs as there are in the US?
A proper built home will last 100+ years, feck it the one I'm in now lasted about 400 years before it needed to be rebuilt, 6 weeks or humans doing the work is not a big deal, its just that shoddy construction is a big problem or at least was until the recession hit. Now people want things to last and are more careful with resources.
Not that I have anything against 3D printing but I don't think a house is the ideal application for it. I'd much rather print the stuff that currently comes out of China or out of large automated factories. Hopefully one day everyone will be able to print open source objects like engine parts, electronic components and the like. A massive house-printing robot will most likely be owned by some megacorp who will charge you the same and ensure the construction is just as shoddy as a Mexican-built house except they'll make more money from it.
The construction companies are tied into the building licensing/standards agencies. See how easy it is to get a building permit and bank loan for a dome.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
... We'll be building these houses on the moon.
I'm an advocate of 3D printing, but wouldn't it me more effective to build container sized housing components in a factory and ship them to the building site? It seems like a lot of work to ship in the concrete and its printer. A typical 2000 sqft house in the US could be put together from six standard 40' containers, all wired, plumed and finished at the factory.
This is assuming that a house's wall is a singular item, which is a silly thing to think. Walls contain space for insulation, space for water to drain, wiring, plumbing and HVAC space. Yes, we could build a shelter with this machine, but 3d printing a house would be like 3d printing a maker bot. It may look similar, but until you have the insides built, it won't function. There's also a big issue with reinforcing the concrete. The walls will be primarily in compression which is fine, but if you tried to create multiple levels, the floors in tension would quickly crack under their own weight.
I'm not saying that we'll never 3d print a house, but their proposal shows a lack of understanding of the basic premise.
That's the rub with these 3D printers. People see some form or other of extrusion printing of various objects then jump to irrational ideas. The most common being that it will either scale easily, and/or that adding the ability to print wiring, plumbing, circuits, etc. along side and within the structure is trivial (complete buildings, machines, self-replicating robots and such). Nothing can be further from the truth. Material properties seldom scale, and going from layering plastic/metal/etc. to fashion an object to fashioning a fully functional machine, house, etc. is a bit like discovering flammable liquids for the first time then going on to implement the internal combustion engine. Inventing present day 3D printers was the easy part not the hard part.
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