Bigger Scale Printing!
It’s on our agenda to someday make MakerBots that will be able to print you furniture and houses. These folks are pushing forward on that!
Layers of sand are bound together to create a marble-like material, in effect turning it back into solid stone. The process includes internal curves, ducting and interior partitions. Here, hollow columns are being constructed from the base up.
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3 Comments so far
paul
What’s the tensile strength on this stuff? Stone is great in compression, but without reinforcement masonry is lousy in tension and shear. Maybe it you have hollow spaces you could post-tension.
davidbuzz
what’s the strength really matter – they are hollow, so you can “fill” the objects with whatever reinfiorcing you like. Perhaps they drop steel reinforcing rods into the smaller holes, and fill concrete around them? that’s take almost zero concrete/binder. Perhaps you could just pour in a slurry made of glass fbres and 2 epoxy. whatever you like.
paul
The tensile (and compressive, now we mention it) strength matters because the usefulness of a process like this (for other than sculptural stuff) depends a lot on the amount and cost of the additional work needed once the basic volume has been fabbed. If it’s too much work/cost you might as well go conventional. Certain shapes e.g. thin curved members might also be effectively unreinforceable because any tension member you put inside them is going to try and bend straight, and will destroy its covering as it does.
I think things like this are really cool, but also that they have to be well understood.