We can 3D print wood now | Hacker News Reader

We can 3D print wood now

3dprintingindustry.com

86 pointse-brake57 comments

When I see epoxy I start to get suspicious about whether this product/process is as sustainable as claimed. Can I throw the whole thing in a compost bin? Or is this just a fancier plastic that will inevitably end up in our oceans?

I thought something similar when I found out that the "transparent wood breakthroughs" are, as far as I can tell, all epoxy based.

They say the end product biodegrades. Even if the epoxy part wouldn't, that would be the least fraction in terms of mass and would be a win over just plastic.

Not if it replaces wood products that fully biodegrade (even tho many are chemically treated in other ways). That'd be a net loss, and I could see it being huge in terms of additional mass of plastics being added to the environment.

Biodegrades is too fuzzy. What's the time horizon for that? What conditions are needed?

Unfortunately biodegradable isn't the same as compostable. Plastic can be biodegradable, and will/can biodegradable into microplastics, with all the issues microplastics are known for.

So I always take it with a pinch of salt when a brand toots the "biodegradable" horn a bit too loudly, come back when it's compostable.

Some sort of mucilage-based glue would be cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucilage

It seems there's a tension between being biodegradable and being durable.

Today in "GPT-3 ramblings or marketing spiel":

> "We are honoring the cellulose and lignin of the trees by rearticulating them into assets for present and future generations. By allowing millions of trees to remain in place in their forests, Forust is launching a highly evolved technology for the circular technosphere.”

hmmkay hmmkay, so you're making money off wood waste, that's cool...

FWIW, I've met McDonough, and a friend did a bunch of work with him. He's an interesting person and has done some genuinely interesting projects. And not in terms of big fancy ultra expensive ones, he's been on the "sustainability" theme for a very long time, it's genuine. But he's always spoke like that, no doubt reinforced by trying to speak in ways that would convince movers and shakers to give a shit. Bunch of us got a huge laugh when we saw this, someone thought "gee that looks like something he'd be interested in" then lo and behold, there it was, and same flowery funny language as always.

Anyway, just a random anecdote that that kind of language long predated GPT-3. It learned from somewhere :).

It really is cool, but what I don't understand is why do we need all this techno-babble-esque wording around the idea of "3D printed wood", just call it that.

I see way too many simple but cool concepts bogged down by an epic written collectively by the marketing dept. muddying the true concept of things.

    We re-use wood-waste to 3D print objects.

So simple, to the point and just as cool.

Investors, plain and simple. Many investors don’t know tech, or have a limited knowledge about it, so pitching things in terms and phrases that impress them works.

Really? I’d have thought investors were busy people, asking questions like “so what does it actually do”? Like, for example, my management rarely cares about the brilliance of my code. They want to know what it accomplishes —- before they’re off to a different meeting.

What is it? "a highly evolved technology for the circular technosphere"

What does it accomplish? "It allows millions of trees to remain in place in their forests".

How does it do that? "By rearticulating cellulose and lignin into assets for present and future generations."

It's a pretty coherent description of the technology, aimed at people who only care about the impact instead of the technology itself

Evaluating pitch decks semi-regularly, I certainly want to grab founders and shake them while yelling "what does it actually do?" fairly regularly. A lot of founders clearly think they need to try to bamboozle investors with pointlessly vague and buzzword laden language.

But part of that is because they get told it works and/or experience themselves that trying to explain the actual technology is an exercise in pulling teeth in many cases.

I had a phone conversation with one pair of founders about a company that we actually ended up investing in where it took 3-4 tries before I got them to give me a meaningful answer because they didn't realise I actually understood the subject and wanted to understand if they did because of the amount of buzzwords in their pitch deck.

Sometimes in conversations like that you can hear the relief when they realise they can actually speak normally. In the case I mentioned the founders went from tensely trying to figure out what I actually wanted to know to excited about being able to expand on details instantly.

Other times you can sense the panic as someone realises the bullshit isn't working.

I would honestly hazard a guess that there's no marketing person on the team yet. If the founder is in charge of the content of the site, which could very well be the case, they are more likely to use technical terms because it's natural to them. Plus, it's the more boujee option.

Because people who don’t know anything are moved by technobabble and underwhelmed by reality.

Kind of a tangent, but I've noticed a recent tendency to compare people's writing to GPT-3 output as a way of saying something like "I didn't understand that" or "I found the style hard to follow".

I gotta say, I find it rude. It's one short step away from calling someone a name, eh? "You sound like a inanimate algorithm imitating a human." Mean.

Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of it's information content, eh?

In this case, sure, the language is flowery, but the underlying meaning is clear, and the subject is, arguably, important. (So, not to put too fine a point on it, in this case, saying it sounds like GPT-3 kinda makes you sound, um, less sophisticated than you might be going for?)

>Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of it's information content, eh?

Yes, in the "information as irreducible data" sense. No in the "information as non-obvious truths about the world" sense. A message's unpredictability seems independent, or possibly anti-correlated with its truthiness (as the recipient may already have the true information, or be able to predict it from other knowledge).

The rudeness is an interesting point. It is rude, or would be a at a party. At the same time, if the goal of internet forums is to exchange information (as in truths), honest efforts to distill information from noise could be accepted as good faith effort at public service in the way that identifying shill reviews is. It will be interesting to see how internet culture evolves as the ubiquity and awareness of widespread GPT-3 noise grow (or if forums are just doomed).

Honestly, I was just trying to point out without being rude myself that, if something someone says here on HN seems difficult to understand, it might be because one is just too stupid, not that the poster is a robot.

In any event, the point about the unpredictability of a message comes from Shannon's Information Theory.

Although, see also Robert Anton Wilson's writing about W. Burroughs' "cut ups". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique

I think the criticism is more that the way things are being articulated is the same kind of language that’s being used by people to make things sound more interesting than they actually are.

At least, that’s how I interpret it. I don’t think at all it has anything to do with being stupid. On the contrary, it’s usually the smarter people that can see through the smoke screen and realize “oh he’s just talking about 3D printed wood”.

It's a fair criticism IMO just done in a rude way (again, IMO.)

- - - -

To me "just" in that sentence would be (IMO) a signal that the speaker hadn't thought things through deeply enough. The jargon word "circular" is the clue. It's not just about the 3D printing of wood, or biodegradable glue, it's about a sea change in our economy and technology to be in harmony with (for lack of a better word) Nature (and therefore durable on large (10K to 1M years) timescales.)

OK, I’ll bite: what’s a “circular technosphere”?

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy

The "technosphere" is the thing with the lights that you see from orbit when the Sun is on the other side of the Earth.

Bio-epoxy my b**. We should stop using difficult or impossible to recycle materials, just for minor convenience or arguably aesthetic improvements, only when its the best option for something meaningful. I like binder jetting production method and the possibilities it will bring to us but, as happens with other production methods, we should use it with responsibility. Many of the examples show should be do it with normal wood.

Wooden crafts (turned bowls, cutting boards, small sculptures, etc.) typically rely for their uniqueness on features of natural woods that this 3D printing method can't replicate. That includes unusual grains and burls, live edge, and gluing up multiple species.

From the few examples in their store, it looks like their main esthetic tool is lots of piercing. I wonder if their minimum hole size is small enough to improve on hand-held sandalwood fans?

The wood propellas seem to have natural wood features. Are they just painted on to it?

A change of extruding temperature changes the color of the wooden filament and produces features like natural wood would have.

It's binder jet technology, so they are using some different way to vary the color or density.

They use a RAM 336 for printing it seems that the color modulation takes place in the curing process so heat is involved. In my experience there is no way to switch between different sands in process.

I had the same thought. The answer is actually in the text, took a while to find it:

"Forust’s 3D printed parts support a wide variety of wood grains at launch, including rosewood, ash, zebrano, ebony, and mahogany. The parts also support a range of wood stains such as natural, oak, ash, and walnut."

Yeah it seems it's just painted. So now you can't even trust wood anymore. Very tacky.

I mean. I'm no woodworker. I make some shed-type stuff out of timber.

But how is this not just MDF in a different shape?

That's what it is, but since the shape can be anything, it does open up new possibilities. Must be amazingly expensive compared to mdf though.

Hasn’t there been wood-based filament for many years already? Given that this just reads as a press release, it doesn’t says what’s new or original about their method.

Yes

It's mostly marketing for their printer which uses a different method to SLA filament-based printers.

These are huge commercial sized machines, on par with HAAS CNCs etc, so this is aimed at an entirely different market to hobbyists using wood filament.

Minor point of clarification, SLA, or stereolithography, is resin printing. I use it to make super high detail D&D minis. It uses liquid UV sensitive resin and some way of masking the resin to print (like an LCD screen).

The printer type that uses filament, and that most people associate with a “regular” 3D printer is of type FDM, or fused deposition modeling. FDM printers can use the wood filament, although it’s kind of a pain from what I’ve heard because the wood can wear down the extrusion nozzle.

What is your SLA setup like? I don't have a good workspace so I've been printing outside in a cardboard box (to avoid the deadly rays), and thinking about building a proper fume extractor to run in an extra bedroom.

I keep the SLA printer, my Phrozen Sonic Mini 4K, on a table in an unused room at the back of the house. I keep it out of direct sunlight from the window, as I ruined a print when the sun shone in, which wasn’t a problem until winter ended. Our house is pretty big but even still if I leave the door open my wife will complain about the smell.

I also run a space heater in that room at the 85F setting, which I’ve found helps keep the prints more consistent. The viscosity of the resin is reduced by the higher temperature.

I’ve been having a hard time finding good, affordable resin, i tried Matterhackers resin which was a disaster, I could never dial in the settings. Yousu resin worked really well and it’s $26 per liter with free shipping, but my second order I placed a month ago still hasn’t even shipped. Elegoo is consistently good but I end up paying $13 more per liter with tax which is frustrating.

Both 3D printers are running pretty much 24/7 to crank out Dungeons and Dragons miniatures and terrain for the game I’m running. I quit video games last year and found a new, more tangible obsession. I’m really excited about Apple coming out with really amazing AR glasses in the next few years that will revolutionize tabletop gaming.

Yeah sorry there was supposed to be an “or” between “SLA” and “filament based”, but I’ll leave it unedited so your comment still makes sense.

I have a few FDM printers and have used wood filament and quite like it, it has a nice effect. It supposedly does wear down the nozzle like you said but I haven’t noticed anything yet (though I’ve only used one roll sporadically so far).

Wood based filaments would contain a lot less wood per mass and behave a lot less like actual wood. They are much more like plastic.

This is effectively printing MDF, which is very different from what most people consider "wood". The novelty is in using binders with fusion jet printing instead of pre-bound FDM filament as has been available for some time. It's an interesting alternative to traditional powders used with fusion jet printing. Personally, I'd much rather CNC real wood to maintain the fiber structure of something like a propeller, but this is nice for aesthetic pieces.

Pictures look stunning.

I wonder how durable etc it is. Really, does it have the properties of wood or the epoxy resin.

Lacking grain, it probably only has the texture and general color of wood, but not the properties provided by the wood grain, nor its aesthetics.

It probably feels like plastics. Look at forust.com. You can see bigger res pictures there and the wood look "sandy".

Edit: https://www.forust.com/store

It feels like wood but like a fresh sanded piece without any post processing.

Did you touch it yourself? Can you like sand it without pieces coming off? Their samples that are not the vases seems better.

Yeah, you can sand it, depends a lot on your nozzle size and if your printing fully infilled or with thicker fringe. If you are printing with full infill you can basically do whatever you do on normal wood/press board.

I assume it would be similar to MDF wouldn't it? It's wood dust/fibres mixed in a glue.

Yeah makes sense. So not particularly strong or attractive compared to real wood.

We 3D printed wood in 2012. There are lots of filaments available this is just a fluff piece.

Can you point me to filaments that are produced from wood and contain no petroleum and are heat sensitive sufficient to be able to print wood grain coloration?

This article is not about wood composite filaments for FDM machines, they're putting sawdust in binder jetting machines. There's at least some level of novelty here.

The end product of this process here has a much higher wood-content per mass than those printed with wood-based filaments on FDM printers.

You are totally right but the headline is misleading.

It looks like MDF with extra steps. Also, eco-friendly like "PLA is biodegradable" (which is technically true but practically false)? With epoxy? I don't think so.

Print a gold bar shaped wood with imprints 9999, is worth more than gold now.

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