We’re Going to Need a Bigger Printer

There are times when I worry about some of the crazy ideas people get about technology. Of course, I worry about people in general, and given some of the things I have seen in my travels – people who actually believe that you could use a fax machine to send someone three-dimensional objects, for example – I’m not sure you can blame me. Technically, I suppose, it might be possible to fax 3-D objects, if you had a sufficiently powerful scanner on one end and a 3-D printer capable of working in some medium that could duplicate the original object on the other. However you still couldn’t transport an actual object, and you certainly couldn’t send someone a hot meal or a cold drink using such a method using the current printer technology. Moreover, given how expensive most of the 3-D printers are to use, there’s very little point in trying to make larger constructs using such a method. After all, as one of the designers behind the Star Trek franchise put it, if you can create starships at the push of a button, you probably don’t need to…

The same may not be true of buildings, however, if an article that turned up on the Wall Street Journal site last week is correct. According to the article, a Chinese firm called Winsun had developed what appears to be a very large version of a 3-D printer; one with nozzles that spray concrete instead of ink or sugars (or whatever), and which uses glass fibers for reinforcement. Using this giant printer, the company was able to pre-assemble enough parts to build 10 houses of 200 square meters each (about 1,460 square feet, if I’ve done my math correctly) in only 24 hours. The company is working on other applications for the system, including commercial properties, office buildings and so on. So far there is no word on how long it will take them to generate larger prefab elements, or how large a structure can get before this method will lack the structural strength to stand on its own…

Now, we should probably note that Winsun isn’t exactly putting a template for a house into a three-D printer and just pressing the “go” button. What they are assembling are effectively prefabricated sections for a building made entirely out of reinforced concrete, and there are definite limitations to how useful an all-concrete structure is going to be for residential/non-industrial applications. It’s also worth noting that anything you could actually call a “house” will also require glass for the windows, wiring for the outlets, doors that you could actually open (as opposed to ones made exclusively out of reinforced concrete), plumbing and fixtures made out of porcelain (or the equivalent), lighting, kitchen appliances, and a host of furnishings. Having the structure spring up in matter of hours – or however long it takes the concrete in the prefab sections to cure, anyway – would speed up the process, but it is debatable how much it would lower the cost. Despite what the article would have us believe, this is more “advanced prefab building technique” than it is “super high-technology magic…”

On the other hand, it is hard to deny that there are lots of useful things you can build out of reinforced concrete – and that if Winsun is actually successful in adapting the printer to use whatever salvaged materials come to hand in building its prefab sections, they might be able to overcome the cost issue. You’d still need the rest of a construction company to finish off the buildings, but there is some real potential here. And if someone applies the same technology to other building materials (there are already smaller printers that work with composite laminates, for example) there doesn’t appear to be any reason why you couldn’t fabricate all of your building components this way. Maybe we should keep an eye on this story going forward…

A Very Advanced Place

What do lottery games and cement mixers have in common? Well, usually nothing, but today I found myself being surprised, if not amazed, by both of them. We’re camped out in the family room of our house, waiting for our moving van to navigate its way here from Chicago, which will not be easy, since the road maintenance crew from the city has reduced all of the streets in our subdivision to dirt roads and dug a ten-foot-deep pit directly in front of our place. On the plus side, the odds of the van getting stuck in traffic on the way here are essentially non-existent, since in just over a month here we’ve yet to see anything that would be considered a traffic jam by Los Angeles Standards. Traffic in East Lansing means that you have to drop below 70 mph on the Interstate…

Most of Greater Lansing isn’t quite as extreme as our street is right now, but we’re living in a state with a smaller population than the city I grew up in, and a city smaller than Redondo Beach all by itself. Which makes technological advances like the ones I saw today all the more remarkable. Consider, for example, the “front discharge” concrete transport trucks (also known as cement mixer trucks) that we’ve seen all over the Lansing metro area. My wife and I had never seen such a device in California, or any of the other states we have journeyed through, for that matter, but it turns out that these vehicles are far more advanced than the “rear discharge” versions with which we had been familiar. It seems that the older style trucks require a crew of at least two (a driver and a “chute man” who controls the discharge of the cement) to operate, while the new “front discharge” models can be operated by a single crewman…

The newer trucks also have six axels, three of which can be can be hydraulically lifted when the mixer is empty, or engaged when its full, to lower the vehicle’s ground pressure. This increases the truck’s fuel efficiency and lowers the wear on half of the tires (when empty) and allows the vehicle to avoid getting stuck in the mud or damaging the roadway (when full). They may look a bit strange when you first see one, but these new trucks are much more advanced than anything you will see in California, a state noted for being obsessed with ground transportation. The lower road-wear alone would make these a godsend to the folks in Los Angeles…

As if that wasn’t enough, we then went into the Meijer to purchase a few bathroom items, and there, in the lottery ticket vending machine, were $20 scratch-off tickets. We’ve all seen the original $1 cards, and the California Lottery had gradually introduced $2, $3 and $5 games, but this is by far the most advanced means of separating people from their money by means of impulse buys I have ever seen, short of a Las Vegas casino. I should probably explain that a Meijer is a Midwest chain known as a “hypermarket,” sort of like the larger Wal-Mart locations, including a warehouse-style supermarket with a gigantic general merchandise store, including a pharmacy, a garden center, and in some cases, a gas station. In theory, you should be able to purchase almost any non-specialty merchandise you will ever need in a Meijer (it’s pronounced “Mayer” and is named after the guy who founded the company). It’s at least as amazing as the trucks or the scratchers…

I kid, of course, but in truth we have been impressed with our new home. East Lansing takes a bad rap from a lot of people, especially those in Ann Arbor and those in large cites out west, as being much like Detroit, only in miniature. My take on East Lansing after my first month, on the contrary, has been more of groves of lush green trees, flocks of wild geese and ducks flying (and waddling) free, colorful songbirds (cardinals, finches, robins, warblers, etc.) perching on our pine trees, and state-of-the-art television, DSL, Wi-Fi and telephone services. Not to mention cutting-edge concrete trucks and really amazing lottery games. It’s a beautiful place, and very advanced…