[HN Gopher] We can 3D print wood now
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We can 3D print wood now
Author : e-brake
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-05-08 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (3dprintingindustry.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (3dprintingindustry.com)
| stephenr wrote:
| I mean. I'm no woodworker. I make some shed-type stuff out of
| timber.
|
| But how is this not just MDF in a different shape?
| Grustaf wrote:
| That's what it is, but since the shape can be anything, it does
| open up new possibilities. Must be amazingly expensive compared
| to mdf though.
| mdorazio wrote:
| This is effectively printing MDF, which is very different from
| what most people consider "wood". The novelty is in using binders
| with fusion jet printing instead of pre-bound FDM filament as has
| been available for some time. It's an interesting alternative to
| traditional powders used with fusion jet printing. Personally,
| I'd much rather CNC real wood to maintain the fiber structure of
| something like a propeller, but this is nice for aesthetic
| pieces.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| When I see epoxy I start to get suspicious about whether this
| product/process is as sustainable as claimed. Can I throw the
| whole thing in a compost bin? Or is this just a fancier plastic
| that will inevitably end up in our oceans?
| BariumBlue wrote:
| I thought something similar when I found out that the
| "transparent wood breakthroughs" are, as far as I can tell, all
| epoxy based.
| carapace wrote:
| Some sort of mucilage-based glue would be cool.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucilage
|
| It seems there's a tension between being biodegradable and
| being durable.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| They say the end product biodegrades. Even if the epoxy part
| wouldn't, that would be the least fraction in terms of mass and
| would be a win over just plastic.
| FranOntanaya wrote:
| Not if it replaces wood products that fully biodegrade (even
| tho many are chemically treated in other ways). That'd be a
| net loss, and I could see it being huge in terms of
| additional mass of plastics being added to the environment.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Biodegrades is too fuzzy. What's the time horizon for that?
| What conditions are needed?
| DeliriumTrigger wrote:
| We 3D printed wood in 2012. There are lots of filaments available
| this is just a fluff piece.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Can you point me to filaments that are produced from wood and
| contain no petroleum and are heat sensitive sufficient to be
| able to print wood grain coloration?
| opencl wrote:
| This article is not about wood composite filaments for FDM
| machines, they're putting sawdust in binder jetting machines.
| There's at least _some_ level of novelty here.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| The end product of this process here has a much higher wood-
| content per mass than those printed with wood-based filaments
| on FDM printers.
| DeliriumTrigger wrote:
| You are totally right but the headline is misleading.
| misnome wrote:
| Hasn't there been wood-based filament for many years already?
| Given that this just reads as a press release, it doesn't says
| what's new or original about their method.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Wood based filaments would contain a lot less wood per mass and
| behave a lot less like actual wood. They are much more like
| plastic.
| sen wrote:
| It's mostly marketing for their printer which uses a different
| method to SLA filament-based printers.
|
| These are huge commercial sized machines, on par with HAAS CNCs
| etc, so this is aimed at an entirely different market to
| hobbyists using wood filament.
| wincy wrote:
| Minor point of clarification, SLA, or stereolithography, is
| resin printing. I use it to make super high detail D&D minis.
| It uses liquid UV sensitive resin and some way of masking the
| resin to print (like an LCD screen).
|
| The printer type that uses filament, and that most people
| associate with a "regular" 3D printer is of type FDM, or
| fused deposition modeling. FDM printers can use the wood
| filament, although it's kind of a pain from what I've heard
| because the wood can wear down the extrusion nozzle.
| vangelis wrote:
| What is your SLA setup like? I don't have a good workspace
| so I've been printing outside in a cardboard box (to avoid
| the deadly rays), and thinking about building a proper fume
| extractor to run in an extra bedroom.
| sen wrote:
| Yeah sorry there was supposed to be an "or" between "SLA"
| and "filament based", but I'll leave it unedited so your
| comment still makes sense.
|
| I have a few FDM printers and have used wood filament and
| quite like it, it has a nice effect. It supposedly does
| wear down the nozzle like you said but I haven't noticed
| anything yet (though I've only used one roll sporadically
| so far).
| Buxato wrote:
| Yes
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Print a gold bar shaped wood with imprints 9999, is worth more
| than gold now.
| avaldes wrote:
| It looks like MDF with extra steps. Also, eco-friendly like "PLA
| is biodegradable" (which is technically true but practically
| false)? With epoxy? I don't think so.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Pictures look stunning.
|
| I wonder how durable etc it is. Really, does it have the
| properties of wood or the epoxy resin.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It probably feels like plastics. Look at forust.com. You can
| see bigger res pictures there and the wood look "sandy".
|
| Edit: https://www.forust.com/store
| DeliriumTrigger wrote:
| It feels like wood but like a fresh sanded piece without any
| post processing.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Did you touch it yourself? Can you like sand it without
| pieces coming off? Their samples that are not the vases
| seems better.
| DeliriumTrigger wrote:
| Yeah, you can sand it, depends a lot on your nozzle size
| and if your printing fully infilled or with thicker
| fringe. If you are printing with full infill you can
| basically do whatever you do on normal wood/press board.
| almog wrote:
| Lacking grain, it probably only has the texture and general
| color of wood, but not the properties provided by the wood
| grain, nor its aesthetics.
| sen wrote:
| I assume it would be similar to MDF wouldn't it? It's wood
| dust/fibres mixed in a glue.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Yeah makes sense. So not particularly strong or attractive
| compared to real wood.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Today in "GPT-3 ramblings or marketing spiel":
|
| > "We are honoring the cellulose and lignin of the trees by
| rearticulating them into assets for present and future
| generations. By allowing millions of trees to remain in place in
| their forests, Forust is launching a highly evolved technology
| for the circular technosphere."
|
| hmmkay hmmkay, so you're making money off wood waste, that's
| cool...
| xoa wrote:
| FWIW, I've met McDonough, and a friend did a bunch of work with
| him. He's an interesting person and has done some genuinely
| interesting projects. And not in terms of big fancy ultra
| expensive ones, he's been on the "sustainability" theme for a
| very long time, it's genuine. But he's always spoke like that,
| no doubt reinforced by trying to speak in ways that would
| convince movers and shakers to give a shit. Bunch of us got a
| huge laugh when we saw this, someone thought "gee that looks
| like something he'd be interested in" then lo and behold, there
| it was, and same flowery funny language as always.
|
| Anyway, just a random anecdote that that kind of language long
| predated GPT-3. It learned from somewhere :).
| sas41 wrote:
| It really is cool, but what I don't understand is why do we
| need all this techno-babble-esque wording around the idea of
| "3D printed wood", just call it that.
|
| I see way too many simple but cool concepts bogged down by an
| epic written collectively by the marketing dept. muddying the
| true concept of things. We re-use wood-waste
| to 3D print objects.
|
| So simple, to the point and just as cool.
| melomal wrote:
| I would honestly hazard a guess that there's no marketing
| person on the team yet. If the founder is in charge of the
| content of the site, which could very well be the case, they
| are more likely to use technical terms because it's natural
| to them. Plus, it's the more boujee option.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Because people who don't know anything are moved by
| technobabble and underwhelmed by reality.
| torgian wrote:
| Investors, plain and simple. Many investors don't know tech,
| or have a limited knowledge about it, so pitching things in
| terms and phrases that impress them works.
| refactor_master wrote:
| Really? I'd have thought investors were busy people, asking
| questions like "so what does it _actually_ do"? Like, for
| example, my management rarely cares about the brilliance of
| my code. They want to know what it accomplishes --- before
| they're off to a different meeting.
| vidarh wrote:
| Evaluating pitch decks semi-regularly, I certainly want
| to grab founders and shake them while yelling "what does
| it _actually_ do? " fairly regularly. A lot of founders
| clearly think they need to try to bamboozle investors
| with pointlessly vague and buzzword laden language.
|
| But part of that is because they get told it works and/or
| experience themselves that trying to explain the actual
| technology is an exercise in pulling teeth in many cases.
|
| I had a phone conversation with one pair of founders
| about a company that we actually ended up investing in
| where it took 3-4 tries before I got them to give me a
| meaningful answer because they didn't realise I actually
| understood the subject and wanted to understand if _they_
| did because of the amount of buzzwords in their pitch
| deck.
|
| Sometimes in conversations like that you can _hear_ the
| relief when they realise they can actually speak
| normally. In the case I mentioned the founders went from
| tensely trying to figure out what I actually wanted to
| know to excited about being able to expand on details
| instantly.
|
| Other times you can sense the panic as someone realises
| the bullshit isn't working.
| wongarsu wrote:
| What is it? "a highly evolved technology for the circular
| technosphere"
|
| What does it accomplish? "It allows millions of trees to
| remain in place in their forests".
|
| How does it do that? "By rearticulating cellulose and
| lignin into assets for present and future generations."
|
| It's a pretty coherent description of the technology,
| aimed at people who only care about the impact instead of
| the technology itself
| [deleted]
| carapace wrote:
| > The idea of circular flow for materials and energy is not
| new, appearing as early as 1966 in the book by Kenneth E.
| Boulding, who explains that we should be in a "cyclical"
| system of production. For its part, the term "circular
| economy" appeared for the first time in 1988 in "The
| Economics of Natural Resources".
|
| ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy#History_and_
| a...
| carapace wrote:
| Kind of a tangent, but I've noticed a recent tendency to
| compare people's writing to GPT-3 output as a way of saying
| something like "I didn't understand that" or "I found the style
| hard to follow".
|
| I gotta say, I find it rude. It's one short step away from
| calling someone a name, eh? "You sound like a inanimate
| algorithm imitating a human." Mean.
|
| Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of
| it's information content, eh?
|
| In this case, sure, the language is flowery, but the underlying
| meaning is clear, and the subject is, arguably, important. (So,
| not to put too fine a point on it, in this case, saying it
| sounds like GPT-3 kinda makes you sound, um, less sophisticated
| than you might be going for?)
| perpetualpatzer wrote:
| >Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure
| of it's information content, eh?
|
| Yes, in the "information as irreducible data" sense. No in
| the "information as non-obvious truths about the world"
| sense. A message's unpredictability seems independent, or
| possibly anti-correlated with its truthiness (as the
| recipient may already have the true information, or be able
| to predict it from other knowledge).
|
| The rudeness is an interesting point. It _is_ rude, or would
| be a at a party. At the same time, if the goal of internet
| forums is to exchange information (as in truths), honest
| efforts to distill information from noise could be accepted
| as good faith effort at public service in the way that
| identifying shill reviews is. It will be interesting to see
| how internet culture evolves as the ubiquity and awareness of
| widespread GPT-3 noise grow (or if forums are just doomed).
| carapace wrote:
| Honestly, I was just trying to point out without being rude
| myself that, if something someone says here on HN seems
| difficult to understand, it _might_ be because one is just
| too stupid, not that the poster is a robot.
|
| In any event, the point about the unpredictability of a
| message comes from Shannon's Information Theory.
|
| Although, see also Robert Anton Wilson's writing about W.
| Burroughs' "cut ups". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-
| up_technique
| glial wrote:
| OK, I'll bite: what's a "circular technosphere"?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I think the criticism is more that the way things are
| being articulated is the same kind of language that's
| being used by people to make things sound more
| interesting than they actually are.
|
| At least, that's how I interpret it. I don't think at all
| it has anything to do with being stupid. On the contrary,
| it's usually the smarter people that can see through the
| smoke screen and realize "oh he's just talking about 3D
| printed wood".
| Buxato wrote:
| Bio-epoxy my b**. We should stop using difficult or impossible to
| recycle materials, just for minor convenience or arguably
| aesthetic improvements, only when its the best option for
| something meaningful. I like binder jetting production method and
| the possibilities it will bring to us but, as happens with other
| production methods, we should use it with responsibility. Many of
| the examples show should be do it with normal wood.
| skymer wrote:
| Wooden crafts (turned bowls, cutting boards, small sculptures,
| etc.) typically rely for their uniqueness on features of natural
| woods that this 3D printing method can't replicate. That includes
| unusual grains and burls, live edge, and gluing up multiple
| species.
|
| From the few examples in their store, it looks like their main
| esthetic tool is lots of piercing. I wonder if their minimum hole
| size is small enough to improve on hand-held sandalwood fans?
| thomasahle wrote:
| The wood propellas seem to have natural wood features. Are they
| just painted on to it?
| DeliriumTrigger wrote:
| A change of extruding temperature changes the color of the
| wooden filament and produces features like natural wood would
| have.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| It's binder jet technology, so they are using some
| different way to vary the color or density.
| DeliriumTrigger wrote:
| They use a RAM 336 for printing it seems that the color
| modulation takes place in the curing process so heat is
| involved. In my experience there is no way to switch
| between different sands in process.
| Grustaf wrote:
| I had the same thought. The answer is actually in the text,
| took a while to find it:
|
| "Forust's 3D printed parts support a wide variety of wood
| grains at launch, including rosewood, ash, zebrano, ebony,
| and mahogany. The parts also support a range of wood stains
| such as natural, oak, ash, and walnut."
|
| Yeah it seems it's just painted. So now you can't even trust
| wood anymore. Very tacky.
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