Last weekend the office here at CASA was taken over by the RepRap 3D printer build. The PayItForward team - a group of altruistic people who have RepRap machines, printing parts and gifting them to people who want to make a RepRap machine with the requirement that once the 3D printer is running, they print off a set and pass them on in the same fashion - came in and 24 hours later we had a 3D Printer. Below is a timelapse of the event:
The whole process was documented, it was fascinating to see it coming together:
Three hours in and things were taking shape:
5am in the office and team were still going strong (well most of them):
A huge note of thanks to the build team, Dave Flanders (his site is where a lot of this post is blatantly lifted from), Steven Gray from CASA who did the timelapse and worked over 24 hours on the build without sleep, Ben o-Steen and Graham Klyne. What was our role? merely to provide pizza and beer....
The 3D printer is a thing of beauty, the next 24 hour build party is to be announced soon, watch the PIF3D announcement page and if you’d like to host your own print party sign up on the PIF3D wiki.
The great promise of 3D printing for architecture and city design has begun to fade recently, mainly due to the price of the print media. Rather than becoming the ultimate tool for decision making in design they have been restricted to marketing models often brought out at trade shows.
Step forward the latest innovation from Mcor Technologies, a 3D printer that uses plain old A4 paper as its media. The use of standard A4 paper, of the type currently sat in your laser printer, dramatically cuts the cost of production, the house above comes in at around £1.
Models have a 'wood like' feel to them and as such the system seems almost perfect for 'planning for real' exercises, public consultation and printing from system such as ArcScene, 3D Max or SketchUp.
No word on the price of the actual printer yet however... take a look at Mcor Technologies for more information.
In our previous article on 3D Architectural Printing we looked at the use of commercial 3D printing for the creation of physical city models thanks to those nice people atSweet Onions Creations. We would argue that we are at the start of a revolution in home based manufacture using these machines, within the next 10 years design files will be shared as much as music files are today to print out new objects in the home.
Central to this is the Fab@Home project, 3D Printers or Fabbers as they are known are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefully depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer.
Slowly but surely, with the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques.
A fabber can allow you to explore new designs, email physical objects to other fabber owners, and most importantly - set your ideas free. Just as MP3s, iPods and the Internet have freed musical talent, we hope that blueprints and fabbers will democratize innovation.
While several commercial systems are available, their price range - tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of dollars - is typically well beyond what an average home user can afford. Furthermore, commercial systems do not usually allow or encourage experimentation with new materials and processes. But more importantly, most - if not all - commercial system are geared towards making passive parts out of a single material.
The goal of the Fab@Home project is to explore the potential of universal fabrication: Machines that can use multiple materials to fabricate complete, active systems.
New Scientist have uploaded onto YouTube a 5 minute long interview with Evan Malone a co-founder of the Fab@Home project. The clip is well worth a look at it provides examples of the home based 3D printer to date as well as an insight into the future when these become part of everyday life:
The system is starting to get into the hands of other research labs and individuals, a Google MyMaps project has been set up to map the spread of the Fabber with the locations so far embedded below:
