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If you could own a $10000 dollar machine where you add concrete and a sd-card... then it printed a new room for your house, wouldn't that be revolutionary? I d

If you could own a $10000 dollar machine where you add concrete and a sd-card... then it printed a new room for your house, wouldn't that be revolutionary? I don't know how much these machines will cost in the future, but I do know that I would love to have one. Construction is very expensive even for houses that are basically sticks and stucco. I would like to buy some land and print a house with modules for plumbing, electrical, etc. This enables a complete rethink of how we currently build homes.

derefr 7y ago
I would note that this “machine” is 10% extrusion apparatus, and 90% a CNC crane. CNC + crane = very expensive (since you can’t just retrofit a regular crane; regular cranes efficiently rely on momentum, whereas this thing presumably needs to step linearly into place.) You could own the extrusion setup, but I don’t think you’d enjoy owning the crane. Which is not to say you couldn’t get a hold of one. I’d guess that, when the tech matures, you’d be able to rent one from your local maker-space :)
joshuaheard 7y ago
For $10,000 you could easily hire someone to build a cement cinder block building. The high costs come from the other trades: electrical, plumbing, HVAC. Making all of these pieces modular would be revolutionary. I think a prefab 4' x 8' section of steel frame and foam wall that could be bolted together with channels for interconnecting utilities would make truly plug-and-play style housing.
paleontocracy 7y ago
No. In that sense, you can already just give a guy at the Home Depot $500 to “add a new room to your house”. Are you living the revolution? If construction is labor-intensive and expensive, stick framing is the cheapest and easiest part. If you come up with an automated solution that replaces the need for expensive interior finishing processes, you’ll have a huge market... finishing out existing stick-framed construction. No one selling houses wants this. If you want to use modern technology to mass-produce homes with less labor, that’s called prefabricated construction and it’s a process that’s only about a thousand years old. Someday robots will do it all automatically on-site but we’re no where near doing that in the foreseeable future, in part because the demands on houses are predictably rising at pace with the capabilities of robots. I don’t mean to be snide, but this is a little like dropping by a homebuilding forum and they’re all talking about how some day soon desktop PCB fabrication is going to replace all of Silicon Valley, because they don’t quite know the difference between a chip and a circuit board. It’s just embarrassing, y’all.
- baybal2 7y ago
  > If you come up with an automated solution that replaces the need for expensive interior finishing processes There is already a large panel prefab process, which is highly automated, including finishing, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere near "revolutionising" the industry. The thing is, in North America the preference for single family houses is so strong that making people care about extra $100k is really hard.
rasz 7y ago
You cant even get a decent forklift for under $10K. Try $100K if said machine would be manufactured in volume, like medium sized excavators are today.

derefr 7y ago

I would note that this “machine” is 10% extrusion apparatus, and 90% a CNC crane. CNC + crane = very expensive (since you can’t just retrofit a regular crane; regular cranes efficiently rely on momentum, whereas this thing presumably needs to step linearly into place.) You could own the extrusion setup, but I don’t think you’d enjoy owning the crane. Which is not to say you couldn’t get a hold of one. I’d guess that, when the tech matures, you’d be able to rent one from your local maker-space :)

joshuaheard 7y ago

For $10,000 you could easily hire someone to build a cement cinder block building. The high costs come from the other trades: electrical, plumbing, HVAC. Making all of these pieces modular would be revolutionary. I think a prefab 4' x 8' section of steel frame and foam wall that could be bolted together with channels for interconnecting utilities would make truly plug-and-play style housing.

paleontocracy 7y ago

No. In that sense, you can already just give a guy at the Home Depot $500 to “add a new room to your house”. Are you living the revolution? If construction is labor-intensive and expensive, stick framing is the cheapest and easiest part. If you come up with an automated solution that replaces the need for expensive interior finishing processes, you’ll have a huge market... finishing out existing stick-framed construction. No one selling houses wants this. If you want to use modern technology to mass-produce homes with less labor, that’s called prefabricated construction and it’s a process that’s only about a thousand years old. Someday robots will do it all automatically on-site but we’re no where near doing that in the foreseeable future, in part because the demands on houses are predictably rising at pace with the capabilities of robots. I don’t mean to be snide, but this is a little like dropping by a homebuilding forum and they’re all talking about how some day soon desktop PCB fabrication is going to replace all of Silicon Valley, because they don’t quite know the difference between a chip and a circuit board. It’s just embarrassing, y’all.

baybal2 7y ago
> If you come up with an automated solution that replaces the need for expensive interior finishing processes There is already a large panel prefab process, which is highly automated, including finishing, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere near "revolutionising" the industry. The thing is, in North America the preference for single family houses is so strong that making people care about extra $100k is really hard.

rasz 7y ago

You cant even get a decent forklift for under $10K. Try $100K if said machine would be manufactured in volume, like medium sized excavators are today.