Man builds 3D printed concrete castle in his own backyard | Hacker News Reader

Man builds 3D printed concrete castle in his own backyard

3ders.org

212 pointse15ctr0n60 comments

While 3D printers and great and there's fantastic possibilities for their use ahead, I have a hard time seeing the printing of entire houses as one.

We already have great modular, mass-producable and cheap elements for assembling houses: Bricks and concrete slabs.

It's possible to assemble the basic structure of a house in days with prefabricated elements.

Where I do see a need for 3D printers are in products that aren't mass producable, items that need special fitting, items with a unique design.

Prefab is labor and gas intensive. The advantage to this technology is that you can do all the assembly in place and don't need trucking and all the other headaches to get stuff there. As a tool for building dwellings in remote places, I think this tech has a bright future .. I can see it being used to rapidly build refugee homes in deserts and so on..

You'd still need to move around the input materials to the printer. I fail to see how it would be less gas intensive.

I agree about labor though.

One advantage might be that you could have all the materials delivered in one go from a single supplier (a concrete manufacturer), instead of having multiple deliveries from different places for the different materials (brick, concrete, cement, rebar, etc).

Prefab houses already largely solve this problem.

All materials are delivered to the prefab factory, in bulk, the prefab house is assembled complete in about a week (including internal finish), and the house is delivered in a single delivery.

If you locate your prefab factories along convenient bulk shipping routes (railroads, rivers, canals) and order houses from the closest factory, you've reduced your shipping costs considerably.

the problem is that prefab houses are not very hurricane / tornado proof. A good cement printed house could be made to withstand a lot better conditions. I think this is something very important for the future.

I do really like this idea. I believe something like this, with some prefab parts that are automatically mounted could really get us one step closer to something like what Jacque Fresco envisioned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacque_Fresco. I especially like his automated building tech which could combine prefab with foundations etc being built by a machine like this. http://thevenusproject.com/technology/construction

There are shoddy prefab homes and good prefab homes and shoddy custom builds and good custom builds.

This manufacturer says No Manufactured Home built to the new Florida Building Codes implemented in 1999 went down in any of the hurricanes of 2004-2005.

http://www.leecorpinc.com/leecorp-faqs.htm#9

That's just the first interesting link I found searching on "hurricane double wide", and of course it is promotional, but what is important is whether the building is built to stand up to the storm.

I worked for a construction company once, and spending some time on site while buildings are going up makes a couple of things very clear:

Walls are easy, cheap, and extremely fast to build.

Almost all the effort in construction goes into putting the fittings into the rooms.

There are interesting things you could do with 3d-printed concrete, like creating complex structures on-spec, but labour-saving just isn't going to be one of them - the labour costs of brick walls are minimal. It's the plumbing and electrics that get you every time.

I don't see a problem with printing plumbing. Just switch from concrete to PVC for the tubes.

Electric wires might be a bit tricky to "print". But I can imagine a machine that inserts the wires into the right places...

One day, you'll print a house with curtains and wooden floor included.

If you could build a 3d printer that could lay down PVC pipes to heating/hot-water spec, that would revolutionise construction in the way that a concrete printer seems unlikely to do.

If you could do walls/floors/plumbing/electrics in one machine in one pass, it would change the world in ways that are hard to imagine - this would completely change the economics of construction projects.

Nobody's done those yet, sadly. They seem difficult things to design.

Yet is the key word.

While it might be possible to print PVC pipes that are waterproof at the same level of reliability as traditionally manufactured ones, this seems rather overly optimistic. Bringing in pre-made pipes will probably be required for quite some time, before the printing technology is reliable enough for that.

I work in construction.

The issues I'm seeing are: no insulation, no interior framing for drywall and vapour barrier, no exterior framing for sheathing, insulation, building wrap or siding material. No plumbing, gas lines, wiring or ductwork.

The best this does is create an external shell that's still going to require a lot of processing to make it a commercially viable product. Minimum you would need to install a rigid foam, to apply a stucco coating, with construction adhesive just to be able to make it attractive as a home.

You can't even build a house from the foundation up with this. There's weeping tile and underfloor drainage that needs installing. There's water barrier that needs to go on the basement, there's damp coursing that needs to go on to prevent moisture travelling up the structure (rising damp) and there's adequate venting that needs to be installed in any masonry or concrete wall to ensure proper breathability so it doesn't rapidly deteriorate and cause damp in the insulation or rotting/rusting of the interior studs.

This is cool sure, but without the machine being able to install PVC and PEX piping for plumbing and conduits to run the electrical after, you're going to be waiting on humans to do all the work still and you might as well have two crews working rather than have a machine just idiling waiting for the meat sacks to be done.

A well coordinated house project goes very quickly. The issue is most projects are subcontracted and its waiting on a contractor to be available.

I recently had a fantasy of building my own house, so I did my research and realized that meeting the code and housing bar is fairly difficult.

So... I bought a house to learn other skills.

This project is a fantastic proof of concept. The problems you listed could be solved with appropriate planning.

The open question is whether or not this has a market. If the cost is right, then this could be a great toy for children... or even in parks. Or just large scale art.

My dream is to buy 50 acres of land and build my own house.

I'm starting my own company, so hopefully in over a decade I'll have it to a point I can take a hiatus to build my own house. I figure I can draft my son like my dad did when I was a teen (renovated a 1600s French farm house).

You can use insulated concrete forms[1] blocks. I've helped a friend build a house this way, it's like putting together lego blocks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulating_concrete_form

How do you know this method isn't more efficient without looking at prices? It might be especially relevant in countries where a large part of the cost of building a new house is labor costs.

For my part, I can't tell if this new method is more efficient without this team selling or leasing their printer, so we can know how much it costs to build a house with their machine vs laying bricks manually (for various countries).

He has a decent shot at this being less expensive than prefab panels/modules, or even conventional poured concrete construction which requires building and removing forms.

There are several factors that could throw that off, though: How to do headers, thermal properties, plumbing and wiring, etc. At a steady pace, he's still years away from selling a house to anyone not able to sustain a total loss if Bad Things happen.

The article mentioned rebar, but I didn't see any rebar in the photos or video. A significant concrete structure is going to need rebar.

The castle itself is pretty cool.

What I would be interested in are the numbers in terms of cost saving (when implemented at scale). The printer seems to replace some of the labour of building in say brick or wood, but of course the labor to build the walls is only one of the costs involved.

Consider the major cost areas; land, earthworks, foundations, structure materials, structure labour, windows and doors, plastering, plumbing, electrics, painting, bathrooms, kitchen, floors.

Clearly this optimizes one of the processes, and it may make construction timeless and if you like the finish you can avoid plastering etc, but given that you only save the labor, not the materials,I'm not sure what the eventual monetary saving would be.

Architecturally though it can do things your regular brickie probably can't do - curves for example - so that may end up being the true value of the printer.

With a second printer head added, it should be possible to deposit thermal insulator right within a wall. The insulator just needs to be semi-liquid (small balls are ok).

Sprayed insulation is already a thing. Additionally, there are additives (aerogels maybe? I can't remember but aerogels can do anything) you can add to concrete to raise its insulating value significantly.

Boring old styrofoam is a major one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_polystyrene_concrete

What about using these to make prefab components?

There are already prefab "components" that one can assemble into a bare-bones house. The production of this prefab parts can utilize traditional manufacturing processes. 3D printing is typically more expensive than traditional solutions.

Are there building codes that allow for full structures built with non-reinforced concrete?

Probably not. I wondered the same thing.

There are some codes that allow for fiberglass-reinforced concrete in certain applications but I don't think load-bearing walls are one.

If you read towards the end of the piece he admits he had to use rebar in the walls. That's not shown in any of the photos though.

I can't remember at the moment where I read it, but there is a university in the states that is going to attempt a full house 3D print with concrete with rebar in the print process.

EDIT: Found it! http://3dprint.com/12034/3d-printed-house-pool-ny/

"New York City architect/contractor Adam Kushner begins construction of the first ever 3D printed estate, which features a 3D printed swimming pool, 4-bedroom, 2400 square foot home, and more. The 3D printer which will be a modified version of Enrico Dini’s D-shape printer, will, if all goes as planned, eventually be able to automatically place rebar within the 3D printed house, as it prints."

This is interesting experimentation. However everything I see in 3D-printed houses seem very much built for the sake of being 3D-printer built. Technology in search of a problem to solve. And this is probably not far off the truth at this stage. Many people are also dismissive that see the productions and don't have enough imagination to see things possible here that are disruptive compared to what you do today.

Later years I have begun to see and appreciate the handcraft gone into masonry. The results are very decorative and the material used is very modular. You buy standard size bricks (but sometimes cut them). I would love to see 3d-printing include bricks in the process. And then advance them so much that the machines can build arches. This is just my idea. I think architects that are less interested in the 3D-printing technology and more interested in amazing architecture need to be involved and use it as a component in construction.

Well, there are brick laying robots already (although not combined with 3D printers): https://plus.google.com/photos/+Construction-robotics/albums...

Glad to see that, however this is not very sophisticated. We used to build houses where the loading walls were thick brick walls, and from what I understand it was mostly given up because of the costly skilled labor requirements. I dream of technology enabling us to construct houses like those again, and of course more beautiful architecture.

I've seen some other brick laying robots, one that built prefab segments where fine distance and rotation of the bricks made a complicated pattern. And there is also those robots that lay brick roads.

Super awesome! Love the striated colors. I see this having a future. Possibly much more than 3-D home printers.

He claims he's building the first functional 3D printed house, but the Chinese seem to be way ahead: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-27156775. Still pretty cool though.

I think this might be a better system than 3D printing for houses though: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2683192/Could...

Technically it is 'mortar'. 'Concrete' implies the use of gravel. It would be interesting to know if the mixture was heavily modified with chemical additives to give and maintain that particular flowability and to extend/reduce the setting times. Very cool project.

> 'Concrete' implies the use of gravel.

Really? Concrete to me implies a mix of cement and aggregates, and he's using sand as the aggregate.

You raise an interesting point: Cement is the expensive part and you lower cost by using bigger aggregates.

A mostly cement house is, environmentally, pretty horrific.

Tried to leave this comment on the target page where there is discussion of smoothing the ridged surface:

There's another option for a smooth finish, or a finish with a different texture: stucco. The printer could easily create nubs, or short spines, at regular intervals that would act as supports for another coating.

That coating could be sprayed concrete, or it could be stucco applied traditionally with a trowel. Masons can create a wide variety of surface textures quickly with a trowel.

So the proposal here is to let the printer do the structural part, and details like cornices and dentillations, but leave the finish of broad surfaces to professionals with skills.

I'm curious why they don't have some kind of trailing shroud on the print head to better form the material. The round sides of each layer seem like wasted material. If those were formed into squared edges, via a shroud, would that provide a small increase in strength? Or even the same mount of strength with less material?

In other words, if you shaved off the round sides you'd be better off because of less weight and same strength, no?

I'm not sure the material is viscous enough for that, it might have a certain degree of roundness regardless.

In my head the shroud is directional, which means you'd need another actuator at the nozzle. If he's using off the shelf cnc software that could actually be complicated to implement.

Very true. Corners would require some very careful orchestration.

The jargon you're looking for is an 'extrusion die'.

I would like to hear form someone that is good with statics what he/she thinks about this.

Great idea. I wish they would have included a picture of the whole printer.

This is pretty neat. How cool it would be if this could also start printing things on the inside like the bathroom tub, sink, and all the other fittings too.

Concrete without rebar? I am in doubt about longevity of this structure.

If you read through the article, it does say he uses rebars. They go into the empty space in between the walls, to be filled with additional concrete. And watching the video, there seems to be horizontally lied wires as well.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome

Are the hollow walls filled with anything?

From the article:

  Rudenko therefore resorted to including rebars in the bottom and top walls. 'They
  are needed during the pouring of a variety of cementitious filling materials inside
  the printed walls.' The cement used, however, is just a regular cement mix with a
  few additives. 'It is possible to use a special quick-setting concrete to speed
  up the process, but it will affect the cost, and I don't see much reason to build
  a house extremely fast at the expense of higher cost and lower quality.'

The project form is disappointing. Unprecedented building methods should result in a building that looks like nothing that came before it.

Ironic too that the building was designed on paper with such romantic rendering of the elevation.

Perhaps making something familiar helps people see and understand the underlying technology better?

If you look at the first iron bridges in the world, you will see that they were all built the way wooden bridges were built -- expect using iron. The [Iron Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Bridge) is built with woodworking joints.

It took us a lot of years to master and discover new construction techniques.

We didn't have computers to do static analysis or form-finding. Construction with new materials was necessarily conservative.

Concrete (or cement in this case) is hardly a new material. The method of assembly is, and the fact remains that this tech has the potential to do amazing things. I'm not sure what this Disney recreation is trying demonstrate.

Now that the difficult challenge of getting the device working has been met, I hope the inventor will tackle more...for instance, how does the device actually create an enclosure.

'The more important advances of this technology lie in its architectural possibilities and energy-efficiency. Architects have waited many years for this technology, and now that it's here, this opens up a whole window of possibilities; soon, we will see new kinds of architecture used to construct new structures.'

I don't know which castles you've seen, but they tend not to look like horizontal corduroy.

lt that too. The proportions were all wrong, wrong for what it was trying to be. It reminded me of some chintz pots you get from garden centres, in the gnomes section. Yes it is easy to criticise, however I feel that is 'fair' to do if one's dream of a 3D printed house turns out, well, ugly.

It should be possible to work with the stripes and other materials to create wonderful shapes, as if e.g. a small, habitable part of Bryce/Zion/Arches National Park landed at your door.

Glad that everyone seems to agree with me!

Brilliant mind

This man is my hero.

Big deal, we've been "3D printing" buildings by hand for centuries.

How does 3D printing work? You lay down layers of grains of your material and sinter or otherwise stick them together, and build up an arbitrary structure that way.

Well in the building case, you use grains called "bricks", stick them together not by sintering but with mortar, but you still build an arbitrarily-shaped (within the limits of what will stay up) structure from a uniform store of material. Just replace the printing head with a bricklayer, who is probably just as fast and cheaper than a robot anyway.

The Byzantines managed to 3D print the Hagia Sofia in three years nearly seventeen centuries ago, and it's still standing.

Ah, I see we're still doing the "top dismissive comment" thing around here. Good to know.

Computers? Bah! We've been "computing" for centuries.

How does it work? You take a pencil and paper -- or a pen (should you be feeling bold), and you write out the computations one by one, and build up a result that way.

Pythagoras managed to compute that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, and that rule still stands.

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