3D Concrete Printer Prototype

Hey guys. My bestfriend and I have spent the last couple of years working off and on a low-cost 3d concrete printer. Including the $2,000 concrete pump, the total build cost us a bit over $5,000. The current print dimensions are somewhere around 6ft in each direction, but it was designed as much as possible to be extended out. We have been pretty detailed with documenting all of our parts, costs, and basically as much of the process as we could.

3d printing concrete structures or buildings has been advancing slower than I think many people expected. High cost proprietary 3d concrete printers could be a major contributing factor to the slow progress. We want to toss our initial design out there as an opensource project for anyone to make and improve on. What would be the first steps in getting our starting design designated as open source?

Sorry if the pictures are a bit busy, we've literally been building this in his garage. So far we have been calling it the Kraken Mark 0. All the wiring runs back to the toolbox so it's mostly self contained except for a power cord and a usb cable that needs to be plugged into a laptop. Overall it moves around pretty nicely. We are currently fine tuning the concrete mixture and tweaking the nozzle extruder.

We are also happy to answer any questions you guys have.

How long would it take to print a breeze block?

... not big enough, to build complete houses, but should be capable of substantial parts to "puzzle" it together -- looking forward to see some results!

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Off the top of my head I think we are printing somewhere in the range of two or three gallons a minute. The layer height is around 1cm to 1.5cm so free standing breezeblocks might be too rough around the edges. If you are just using the printer to fill in forms for the breezeblocks you should be fine.

It's not the biggest yet, but our plan is to dial it in printing storm shelters before we expand it.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/15/2021 07:06PM by bluenovajinx.

I was asked about the board, so here is an overview.

We are using an Arduino Mega 2560 with RAMPS 1.4.
We installed Marlin firmware and tweaked it to work with cold concrete extrusion and send a simple extrude/no extrude signal to our pump with a relay.
We are using NEMA 34 motors (big but can still dissipate heat) that are powered by Gecko G251X step drives.
We had gotten the NEMA 34s from China through Ebay, but in hind sight I wish we had gone with NEMA 34s through phidgets.com. Our current motors seem unhappy (noisy and lots of vibration) at certain speeds.