3D printing Archives

The idea of building houses using massive 3D printers is nothing new…but it hasn’t moved beyond the idea stage…until now. In China, the WinSun Decoration Design Engineering company has developed a machine to print ten sample structures, each about 200 square meters in size (they didn’t invent the machine, but are the first to really do something on this scale). The printer extrudes a concrete-like material to build up the walls layer by layer; printing the sloped roof is possible if the house is done in slices that are then rotated up into position (or you can print the walls in their normal orientation, and add a roof using other construction methods). The video below shows the process well. I’d be curious in seeing an environmental comparison of this process versus traditional wood frame houses – concrete is not eco-friendly, but it does have the potential to last much longer.

Who would have thought…a 3D printer that uses yarn? It uses a needle to piece and entangle the newly placed yarn with the material below, so you end up with more of a ‘lump’ than woven fabric. But, pretty cool stuff. Check out the video below to see it in action.

Graphene, a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms, is truly a ‘super material’, though one that’s still mostly existing only in labs and not everyday life. Yet. American Graphite Technologies is working on extrudable graphene which could then be used in 3D printers to enable new manufacturing possibilities for this fantastic material. Just how good is it? Well it conducts electricity well, conducts head extremely well, and is 200 times stronger than steel. It’s also virtually transparent. Pretty cool stuff, and regardless of whether they pull off this 3D printing, expect this material to become a part of your life soon.

(via Inhabitat)

There’s a pretty cool 3D scanner project active over on Kickstarter right now. It hits a couple key features as I see it…interfaces to an iPad for portability and ease of use, and is a reasonable cost ($329). I think this will be cool for capturing rough cad data of large objects and I look forward to trying it out with SolidWorks when it ships in 2014.

Not surprisingly, people are freaking out about the 3D Printed Gun design that was released a few days ago. The US State Department sent a cease and desist letter to the person who posted the plans online, demanding that they be removed. He complied (though has hired a lawyer to fight this), but to even make such a request shows incredible ignorance of the information age we live in. The plans were downloaded around one million times and are available elsewhere online. Governments cannot suppress information…to attempt to do so is futile. Lawmakers in California and other areas of the country are trying to ban 3D printed gun technology. Meanwhile, efforts to implement mandatory background checks for gun purchases have failed in Congress. So, you can’t print your own single-shot gun that might explode in your hands when you try to use it and at has horrible accuracy, but it’s OK to go buy an AR-15 with high capacity magazine, armor piecing rounds, and body armor. Does anyone else see the lunacy in this?

Tag: 3D printing

3D printed buildings

3D printing with yarn

3D printing with Graphene?

3D scanner on Kickstarter

3D Printed Gun stirs up controversy…and idiocy