Most homes in the world are built from brick and mortar or wooden blocks – in essence they are built block by block.
However, a company in the United States has built a new demo house in Calverton, New York that was not constructed in the traditional manner but was made by scanning. The walls of the home were constructed at one go suing a huge three-dimensional printer.
The American construction firm SQ4D is behind the unique venture of building the demo house from 3D printing and the aim of the company was to exhibit its technology and to showcase what is possible using the technology. After the successful completion of the demo house, the company is now actually putting up one for sale – a similar home that is yet to be built in the nearby town of Riverhead and the company has listed the yet to be built house on the property site Zillow, pricing it at $299,000.
This house for sale will have a total space of about 1,400 square feet (130 square meters) and the garage of the house will be detached from the main building. The giant 3D printer of the company would be used for digitally printing all of the elements of the home including the building’s footings, foundation and slab as well as its walls.
“We instruct the machine to go around and follow your floor plan each pass as we go by. We’re constantly building up,” said Kirk Andersen, the director of operations for SQ4D.
In order to fulfil their house-sized dream, designing and building of their own printer had to be done by Andersen and his colleagues.
“We took the idea of a plastic 3D desktop printer and wanted to make it much larger and spit out concrete,” said Andersen. “We set tracks on each side of the structure where we plan to print. We set up our giant gantry, our large scale printer goes back and forth, extruding these layers one by one, stacking, building all your walls,” he added.
For the demo house, the company had taken only 48 hours to complete the actual printing for building the walls, Andersen said. On the overall, the entire home took a total of eight days to complete using the unique printing machine.
He said that that time taken to build the house using 3D printing technology is significantly lower in terms of time and costs compared to building a home using the standard and conventional construction methods where manual labour is needed to tow in and stack the building blocks.
“We show up with a printer. We can replace the labor-intensiveness of those guys and extrude concrete much faster than they can lay the bricks,” he said.
However he said that use of this new technology has not impressed many in the construction industry and the company has received mixed feedback about its construction process. In particular older tradesmen have expressed scepticism about the process.
“I think people are just unprepared for how this is going to change construction,” said Andersen. “This is the beginning. This is just scratching the surface right here.”
(Source:www.investing.com)
However, a company in the United States has built a new demo house in Calverton, New York that was not constructed in the traditional manner but was made by scanning. The walls of the home were constructed at one go suing a huge three-dimensional printer.
The American construction firm SQ4D is behind the unique venture of building the demo house from 3D printing and the aim of the company was to exhibit its technology and to showcase what is possible using the technology. After the successful completion of the demo house, the company is now actually putting up one for sale – a similar home that is yet to be built in the nearby town of Riverhead and the company has listed the yet to be built house on the property site Zillow, pricing it at $299,000.
This house for sale will have a total space of about 1,400 square feet (130 square meters) and the garage of the house will be detached from the main building. The giant 3D printer of the company would be used for digitally printing all of the elements of the home including the building’s footings, foundation and slab as well as its walls.
“We instruct the machine to go around and follow your floor plan each pass as we go by. We’re constantly building up,” said Kirk Andersen, the director of operations for SQ4D.
In order to fulfil their house-sized dream, designing and building of their own printer had to be done by Andersen and his colleagues.
“We took the idea of a plastic 3D desktop printer and wanted to make it much larger and spit out concrete,” said Andersen. “We set tracks on each side of the structure where we plan to print. We set up our giant gantry, our large scale printer goes back and forth, extruding these layers one by one, stacking, building all your walls,” he added.
For the demo house, the company had taken only 48 hours to complete the actual printing for building the walls, Andersen said. On the overall, the entire home took a total of eight days to complete using the unique printing machine.
He said that that time taken to build the house using 3D printing technology is significantly lower in terms of time and costs compared to building a home using the standard and conventional construction methods where manual labour is needed to tow in and stack the building blocks.
“We show up with a printer. We can replace the labor-intensiveness of those guys and extrude concrete much faster than they can lay the bricks,” he said.
However he said that use of this new technology has not impressed many in the construction industry and the company has received mixed feedback about its construction process. In particular older tradesmen have expressed scepticism about the process.
“I think people are just unprepared for how this is going to change construction,” said Andersen. “This is the beginning. This is just scratching the surface right here.”
(Source:www.investing.com)
