Giant 3D Printers

01/31/13 21:43:00    

By Michael Mealling

Yesterday's article on Deep Space Industry's Microgravity Foundry got me curious about large scale 3D printing.

As with most things dealing with 3D printing these days there are professsionals and hobbyists. Sadly all require gravity at the moment.

Anyone who has been to a televised football game recently will recognize this method being developed at MIT


The most interesting aspect of this system is that there is no limit to the size of the area being printed. Although the larger the system the longer the guidelines which means more slack and slop in the system. Multiple printheads would help.

For better precision there are multiple gantry based systems that take the same basic design of small scale systems put them in an embigenator:




 
Or this monstrous arm based system:

 

Untitled from Dirk Vander Kooij on Vimeo.

Then there is Caterpillar. Instead of additive forming of the final product, Caterpillar does subtractive shaping on truly massive scales:


And yes, Caterpillar does plan on doing this in space.

Maybe I'll print my next house…

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