Never been one to let the carrier drop

One of the projects I ponder from time to time is making a 3D printer big enough to print a house. I’m really curious whether it would be possible to take this technology further than it’s already been taken – in particular I’m interested about the possibility of having the printer I electrodeposit or just plain insert rebar at appropriate places, and I’m also curious, how cheap could you make such a beast?

Obviously it’s going to have some expensive parts – a high pressure concrete pump – but mostly it’s just some ropes, some big gear motors, and some sort of scaffolding to hang the whole thing off of.

Another project I have joked about many times – the ConeDrone, a series of remote controlled cars to move around traffic cones so we don’t spend a hour before every construction project shutting down the road and another hour bringing it back online – involves precision locating via RF, which would also figure largely in a 3D printer big enough to print a house.

I should probably start out by making a *small* 3D printer just to get a sense of the problems involved. It looks easy enough, but I suspect like so many things of that nature, the devil is in the details.

I do also sometimes ponder subtractive 3D printing i.e. CNC – watching the amazing work on the Marble Machine 2.0 has made me really appriciate how far this technology has come, and I may get some subtractive 3D gear for the solar tracker project.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2020 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.