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That was a great use of a huge magnifying glass. If he can somehow mass produce this, it would bring the cost of making planting pots to almost nothing. One pr

That was a great use of a huge magnifying glass. If he can somehow mass produce this, it would bring the cost of making planting pots to almost nothing. One problem with this design is that the light would deflect off the center particle and melt other sand around it. In the video, pretty much everything in 1cm radius gets melted. Unless he can somehow make it print in greater details, I can't think of a better use for this other than producing planting pots.

Swannie 15y ago
Combined with hand finishing, lathe finishing, 4 or 5 axis CNC milling, or any combination of the above - and there are a lot more uses.
pyrhho 15y ago
Scale it up and build a solid stone building? Anything else medium to large and stone, really. Giant statues?
- cowkingdeluxe 15y ago
  I'm curious about this as well. I wonder how effective it would be at building a strong home cheaply.
- phlux 15y ago
  GLegos. Glass LEGO made from sand and printed out. The machine needs to be scaled and cheapened - but it MUST be made to make bricks - over time, the bricks will be refined and they will be available for sale in the Organic or Fair Trade aisle of Home Depot. A smaller version shall be made and refined to allow girls in west africa to make beads and cups and such.
primitur 15y ago
>That was a great use of a huge magnifying glass. If he can somehow mass produce this, it would bring the cost of making planting pots to almost nothing. This technology could be used to make water sills and collectors in the desert. If you spend a week out there making water collectors, a couple weeks later you may find you have enough water for a village or two. Glass-forming in the desert could be the basis of an extraordinary micro-permaculture effort to build oases and gardens in otherwise impossibly hostile environments. This, plus a lot of water harvesting, could solve a lot of very difficult problems. If SunCutters can be made to make more SunCutters, and if templates for the SunCutter can be easily made, then I say once this tech is available to the desert masses, it could very much revolutionize restoration of these difficult lands.
regularfry 15y ago
Even if all it could do was make plant pots, being able to print a pot design which could grow a given crop while using half the water of open irrigation would be huge. That's well within the range of sub-irrigation systems, and the beauty of 3d printing is that prototyping and experimenting with new designs is trivial once the system is set up.
kragen 15y ago
Imaging optics are limited in how small a spot they can make from the sun, unless you occlude part of the sun. I suspect the 1cm radius comes from that, not from light spreading through the sand. (If it's the latter, you could add a small amount of crushed charcoal to solve the problem.) I think there are lots of uses for coarse-scale 3-D printing of fused quartz. (Did he mix in any lime to lower the melting point, or is that more or less pure quartz sand?) Furniture, coarse parts of machinery, sculpture, buildings, and the like.

Swannie 15y ago

Combined with hand finishing, lathe finishing, 4 or 5 axis CNC milling, or any combination of the above - and there are a lot more uses.

pyrhho 15y ago

Scale it up and build a solid stone building? Anything else medium to large and stone, really. Giant statues?

cowkingdeluxe 15y ago
I'm curious about this as well. I wonder how effective it would be at building a strong home cheaply.
phlux 15y ago
GLegos. Glass LEGO made from sand and printed out. The machine needs to be scaled and cheapened - but it MUST be made to make bricks - over time, the bricks will be refined and they will be available for sale in the Organic or Fair Trade aisle of Home Depot. A smaller version shall be made and refined to allow girls in west africa to make beads and cups and such.

primitur 15y ago

>That was a great use of a huge magnifying glass. If he can somehow mass produce this, it would bring the cost of making planting pots to almost nothing. This technology could be used to make water sills and collectors in the desert. If you spend a week out there making water collectors, a couple weeks later you may find you have enough water for a village or two. Glass-forming in the desert could be the basis of an extraordinary micro-permaculture effort to build oases and gardens in otherwise impossibly hostile environments. This, plus a lot of water harvesting, could solve a lot of very difficult problems. If SunCutters can be made to make more SunCutters, and if templates for the SunCutter can be easily made, then I say once this tech is available to the desert masses, it could very much revolutionize restoration of these difficult lands.

regularfry 15y ago

Even if all it could do was make plant pots, being able to print a pot design which could grow a given crop while using half the water of open irrigation would be huge. That's well within the range of sub-irrigation systems, and the beauty of 3d printing is that prototyping and experimenting with new designs is trivial once the system is set up.

kragen 15y ago

Imaging optics are limited in how small a spot they can make from the sun, unless you occlude part of the sun. I suspect the 1cm radius comes from that, not from light spreading through the sand. (If it's the latter, you could add a small amount of crushed charcoal to solve the problem.) I think there are lots of uses for coarse-scale 3-D printing of fused quartz. (Did he mix in any lime to lower the melting point, or is that more or less pure quartz sand?) Furniture, coarse parts of machinery, sculpture, buildings, and the like.