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Comment by ternnoburn | Hacker News Reader

If you have the ability to pump concrete, and a gantry across the whole site, why wouldn't you pick and place concrete blocks or other materials rather than concrete the whole thing on site?

Also, aren't these walls significantly more CO2 unfriendly than lumber, and more difficult to renovate? What if I need to get a builder in to do repairs, is there a concrete wall guy who knows how to repair them?

Can it print multi family housing?

It takes four weeks to print, which seems long to frame a single story three bedroom house. If the home buyer isn't feeling savings, what's the draw here.

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It’s mechanically less complex than using existing materials and allows for a new range of possible shapes. Moving a printer head around a gantry vs highly precise manipulation of objects.

3D printing homes is currently a terrible option, but the result is visually distinct which should help sell the homes. It doesn’t need to be good to make someone money.

For me it would not be about being cheaper but about being super customizable. I'd make mine look like a huge dragon.

The benefit of 3D printing is making unique things. If you make the same thing over and over there's way better options.

Is it purely that this robot never takes vacation and never asks for a raise? Feels a lot like this permits building a home largely without human labor, which I'm sure the VC class would be very excited about.

This only helps with the framing and cladding. You still need all the labor for interior finishings, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, roofing, foundation, and site prep. That’s 80%+ of the cost. Assuming the 3D printed walls are even cheaper than wood frame, which is doubtful.

Not only that but also quality is consistent, more so than with human builders.

The quality of timber framed houses can vary considerably depending on who built them.

If you happen to live in a flood plain, concrete is much less susceptible to water damage than a traditional timber frame building.

I would also imagine that a home with a concrete exterior (with appropriate roofing) would be more likely to survive a wildfire, in areas susceptible to those.

It’s a gimmick. There is no point other than marketing.

"It’s a gimmick"

Early attempts always look gimmicki.

Putting a camera in a phone, crazy, who needs it, just a gimmick. I use my phone to dial numbers and make calls.

This looks like it has a lot of room to grow and adapt. Materials change.

Just look at how 3d printers have changed in 10 years.

3d printers haven’t changed that much… they’ve gotten easier to use, sure, but the materials and quality we’re printing is about the same as 10 years ago.

Maybe it was 20? I just remember they took expense fluids, hard to keep, fragile. Then month ago I was in a Micro Center, and there were dozens of very fancy printers that could take dozens of types of line feeds.

Feels like 3D printers have changed. A slicer from 10 years ago is not going to generate as good a print as one from today. And it feels like the variety of filaments from 10 years ago has greatly changed.

3d printers have changed significantly. They used to be very finicky and hard to get a decent print. Lots of tweaking and it was different for every printer.

They have evolved into true click and forget machines.

I tear apart medical and other machines to recycle parts. I do often see 3d printed parts inside commercial machines, probably because they are making so few of them and it's more economical to just print a couple specialized parts.

How can you tell that they're 3d printed? Because they don't have a part number or the manufacturer's name and logo on them?

I don't have a 3d printer myself so maybe it'd be obvious if I printed some.

Most 3D printed parts have a telltale texture resulting from the layer-by-layer deposit of material. The same goes for many milled/CNCed parts bearing evidence of tool marks. Once you've seen and held enough, it's relatively easy to identify whether a given part was printed, cast, milled, lathed, etc.

I say most because there are finishing methods which can largely obscure these details and make it less obvious as to which method produced a given part.

They had the layer lines you see on FDM prints.

Survivor bias helps a lot here. For every thing that sticks you have thousands of absolute flops that we all forget very quickly

That is true.

When I look at 3d printing advancements, I have hard time not thinking that with scaled up to houses, they wont have similar advancements, with time and resources.

Kind of like Steam Engines. After the Steam Engine was invented, it took many decades to dial it in to the large 'more' efficient models we are familiar with. It seems like large 3d printing will take a similar time period to grow to industrial levels.

Even the Iphone, wasn't that great at the beginning.

Maybe my overall point. They have made an entire neighborhood with a 3d printer. That seems to be now over the hump of proof of concept, and now there can be steady improvements.

You coulx print a thermite mound like passive cooking system into the house?

Because you can just run the electrical wiring and plumbing and cover it all in concrete (?)

That seems like a huge drawback? Running new electrical and plumbing and doing repairs becomes much more difficult.

Yes, plan in advance ...

Every home builder is planing in advance, the problem is that down the line you'll realize mistakes you didn't think about, 100% of the time. You also can't plan failures in advance that good, and if you do care about that you certainly won't encase all your utilities in concrete

Well, I guess the idea is that if anything fails you just print yourself a new home ;)

Blessed be the developer who has never had to refactor anything.

Things change. Sometimes a lot and radically. I happen to live in the house I renovated 30 years ago. I had to change a lot of things during these years since then.

Welcome to Germany.

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