Topic: Would you live in a house built by a 3D Printer?

[Johnny]

Apparently this could be the future of construction:

3D printer can build a house in 20 hours

I think houses built like this could actually be better than the sheetrock and wood used to build normal houses. That 3D Printer material is pretty tough and could probably protect pretty well from the elements.

[X]

I'd be really impressed if it could withstand a category 5 Hurricane, a Fujita 5 Tornado, and a Tsunami rolling in at over 200 mph. That would be the ultimate test. As for earthquakes, I think it could easily withstand them, but I'd still like to see a 9.9 'Richter' scale test all the same.

[Intersection]

As for earthquakes, I think it could easily withstand them, but I'd still like to see a 9.9 'Richter' scale test all the same.

I wonder if the house could withstand it if 10 Belmonts were attacking it... 
(Sorry, but I had to make that joke)

[X]

I wonder if the house could withstand it if 10 Belmonts were attacking it... 
(Sorry, but I had to make that joke)

LOL, hence the 'Richter' scale 

[Pfil]

3D printer?
I mean, I can print whatever I want?
Is that true?

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Anything you have a CAD file for that's a 3D Water-tight model or mesh.
I make a living making these, but usually they're jewelry pieces.

I'm not doing too hot these days, though.  Grah, need more work (Freelance is tough).

[Lelygax]

What kind of material you can use in a 3D printer? It can print parts with joints? Like a action figure? It would be cool for RPG

[Pfil]

Yes, I still don't follow... how can a printer make a 3D object?
She does it out of what materials?

And you read my mind Lely, I was thinking about the exact same thing 

[Mooning Freddy]

Yes, I still don't follow... how can a printer make a 3D object?
She does it out of what materials?

Special foam. I suppose it's some sort of plastic. People are already worried about people abusing those printers to illegally make guns.

Amazing 3D Printer

I'd be really impressed if it could withstand a category 5 Hurricane, a Fujita 5 Tornado, and a Tsunami rolling in at over 200 mph. That would be the ultimate test. As for earthquakes, I think it could easily withstand them, but I'd still like to see a 9.9 'Richter' scale test all the same.

Probably not, but it could possibly be better than most clay and cardboard houses millions of people still live in in Africa and Eastern Asia, and used as temporary housing for natural disaster survivors. It's the kind of innovations that could make our world better for a fairly cheap price.

[Johnny]

Anything you have a CAD file for that's a 3D Water-tight model or mesh.
I make a living making these, but usually they're jewelry pieces.

I'm not doing to hot these days, though.  Grah, need more work (Freelance is tough).

That's pretty damn cool Jorge. But yeah I think in general its just tough these days as far as work. I have been looking for a job in my own field of study and its been pretty rough. But hey who knows maybe you could build cars, houses etc. someday with a 3D Printer as a steady job.

[Kale]

3d printers don't have to use foam... I remember a guy that used to work for google saying in an interview that he used it to make noodles.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Technically 3D Printers use a Plastic Resin.
Here's the way some of these work:

1. You have a vat of liquid resin.  This resin 'hardens' when exposed to a certain wavelength of light.
2. The printers blasts  lasers at a point in 3D space.  At that point, the proper light wavelength is formed a piece of the resin is hardened.
3. This process continues from the bottom up, essentially 'growing' a solid resin inside the liquid, from the bottom up.  Sometimes you have to design supports, which you will then break off.

An example (and video) of such a machine can be found here:
**clicky**

This is the opposite of the conventional method of manufacturing models, which is milling, where:

1. You have a solid stock of a material (let's pick wood, this time)
2. you have a machine with an endmill (like a drill-bit tip, only it's round so it can cut across as well as in/out), which starts milling the material out from the stock.  The arm of the machine moves in specific movements, called a 'tool path', which pass over the wood, removing a little each time.
3. Eventually, enough material is removed from the stock to have a 'roughing' pass of the model.  Either a tool change happens to a smaller endmill, or a second 'finishing' pass happens, which makes the model resemble the CAD mechanical.

To answer Lelygax's (and Pfil's) questions: The way you make a piece with joints is, you design a 3D CAD model of separate pieces, and have someone assemble them once they're done.  Another way is to design the piece so that it has pieces you can break off, and use them as supports for the thing you're growing... but that's really unorthodox.

Let it be known that, at least in manufacturing (and definitely jewelry manufacturing), a 3D Printer is good for making the prototyping and production models, which are then sprued, and they themselves are used to make a rubber mold (the sprue is where you shoot the wax to make wax models).  The rubber mold is used to mass-produce thousands of wax models, which are then wax-glued to a wax vein and used in Investment Casting (imagine a wedding ring made of wax, now imagine if each piece were a leaf in a wax tree... someone uses wax to glue these leaves to the wax branches of a tree, then the tree is dipped upside down in an investment... usually a material similar to cement).  You put the investment in an oven upside down, which hardens the investment and melts/removes the wax.  Once the wax is completely removed, you remove the mold from the heat, and using the same hole where the 'tree root' of the wax was, you begin to fill the chambers leftover from the wax with your true material - in this case, melted gold, or silver - and then leave it to set.

Once it's set and the gold/silver is solid, you 'break the mold' leaving a pretty gold 'tree' with rings for branches.  You cut the rings from the branches, re-melt the branches and stump, and tumble/polish/work the rings for production.  Using this method, you can use one model to make thousands of rings.

Here's a webpage explaining how Investment Casting works:
**Clicky**

I would imagine the best way to build a 'house' would be to design interlocking models and join them together after the fact.  A 3D printer is not a very large device.  I would imagine, at most, you'd be able to build something the size of a computer monitor or a large block or something.  They don't make house-sized 3D printers (that I know of).

[Pfil]

Thanks for the explanations!
Now I understand 

So, in order to build a house you would still need a lot of people who puts the parts together.

Anyway, I still want to have one and download models for printing 3D anime action figures!

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

They did that for Final Fantasy characters.
And Square-Enix shut them down, I think.

They can also do it for Minecraft models, which I'm IMMENSELY interested in.
I could make my Castlevania castle into a true object, hehehe... and maybe sell it! LOL
But I think Gravity might make that Castle Keep a bit of a problem (unless I go SotN/HoD and put a post under it).

[X]

I could make my Castlevania castle into a true object, hehehe... and maybe sell it! LOL

You don't need a 3D printer for that since we already have LEGO.