Minnesota Man Has Printed a Real Castle
Back in April, we broke a story about a Minnesota man, named Andrey Rudenko, who had been working on a 3D printer capable of printing in concrete. He is planning to 3D print a house. Rudenko, who has a background in engineering, showed off what his printer could do on smaller scaled designs. He also informed us that he had plans to 3D print a small castle prior to advancing on to print the full scaled house. He wanted to experiment first on something a bit smaller before taking on what is probably going to be the project of his life.
Rudenko has almost finished the 3D printing of this small castle that he proposed months ago.
“While other teams are also working on respectable projects in 3D printing construction technology, I have developed a product that is ready for actual-size construction rather than miniature prototypes,” Rudenko said.
Rudenko had a goal of 3D printing his full sized house sometime this summer, and although that still appears to be possible, he is a bit behind in the process. “Had to deal with a lot of different small problems,” Rudenko told us last month. “Now I have just started printing the small castle.”
The ability to print a smaller building would be able to provide him with enough confidence to advance onto the 3D printing of his house. He hopes that he will learn from and make improvement upon the entire process, while 3D printing his small castle.
“It took some time to prepare the printer for printing outdoors since I had to figure out all the cables and waterproof all the switches,” Rudenko explained.
Now, a month and half later, Rudenko has something to show, and the result of his work is quite amazing. The castle which is large enough for people to walk and stand inside of is almost complete. The dark area being approximately 50 cm high (see photo) is 8 hours worth of 3D printing. “It was important for me to check the structure’s ability to stand (and not collapse) if I printed 50 cm in a row, since I am using regular cement,” Rudenko said. “Experiments have shown that I can print even more – looks like around 75-100 cm would work just fine in warm temperatures.”
Warm temperatures are quite abundant this time of year in Minnesota, about 35 °С. Rudenko has also experimented with random pigmentation of the concrete. You can tell that the quality of his printer is very high, with the precision that is seen in each of these layers. It far surpasses the print quality of other 3D house printers that we have seen in the past.
“I still have some imperfections, mostly when I stop the printer,” Rudenko said. “But if I print nonstop, the layers look great. Though I’m not completely finished with this structure yet, from the current progress, I can already see that I am ready for the next step.”
Before moving onto 3D printing the house, Rudenko plans to make a few improvements to the printer and redesign a few parts of the house. It is quite evident that Rudenko should be able to accomplish the 3D printing of a full sized home in the near future. And we will keep you up to date with the news.
