Getting started 3D printing houses

[pizzalord]

This is an area of fascination with me

The way I see it there are a number of ways to get started

A cost effective option might be to source a manufacturer of panels in say the far east, get them shipped and re-assemble the other side in lego fashion

Does anyone know of any companies I can approach here?

If I was to do it myself, how would I go about sourcing both the printer and materials?

What are the other major considerations here?

[Feign]

To my knowledge, the only Western companies even considering sales of house-scale printers are BetAbrahm and WASP, with D-Shape talking a lot about offering printing services.

And there's still only one guy actually printing a house. His second actual printed building at that, and it looks like it's going to be a big house indeed.

[awerby]

If you're in the US, the Uniform Building Code might be something to consider. As far as I know, it doesn't yet contemplate the use of 3D-printed panels used "in lego fashion" to construct buildings for people to occupy. What with the price of shipping and all, that doesn't sound like a particularly cost-effective route anyway, if you care about that.

If you want to make a Lego-like block to use instead of regular brick or concrete blocks to build houses from, that might be allowed in certain circumstances, once you had them certified by a testing lab. Making the master using 3D printing and taking molds from that to actually produce them with would be cheaper and much faster than trying to print each one.

Andrew Werby
Computersculpture.com

[Davo]

http://www.everblocksystems.com

Something like that?

[Feign]

Actually, building codes apply more for when you want to sell a building (or use it for anything public).

A house for personal use can be built without any kind of code, but it's not generally seen as a good investment of time and effort since you could never sell it. Also, the code is much more concerned with what is disallowed than what is allowed, so printed in-place buildings not having been contemplated yet isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Marm]

The OP sounds more like prefeb than printing.