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TSAZ - proposed CNC replicating house
  • Hello,

    This is an awesome community here with tons of great work being done.  I've just recently become aware of this knowledge base but have been doing a lot of similar work.  I'm designing a CNC house.  The goal is to make it quick to assemble, with interchangeable parts, and an open source character that allows other people to develop and distribute modules for it's core structure.  Here's my site:


    and here's a video I made recently.  This is a sample complex.  It's pretty bare bones without any utility systems included...but I'm working on that as you read this.  It would be great to hear from anyone involved in Open Source Ecology.  Here's the vid:

    image
     
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  • Just put up some informal detailings on TSAZ's system.  These can be found here: http://tsaz.info/research/informal-diagrams/

    TSAZ Heart Module:
    image
     
  • What are the panels made of? Making houses out of CNCed panels seems like it would lead to some insulation problems. You'd need to put a layer of foam sandwiched between two boards. Or if you could figure out a cheap DIY way to make vacuum panels, you could have excellent insulation without changing the aesthetics.

    Kudos on your vision, plus bonus kudos for the Hakim Bey references.
     
  • Hey Conor,

    I've got some diagrams up on this page:


    The page talks about how composite materials are the necessary compliment to the whole cnc revolution that people are speculating about.  What do you mean by vacuum panels?  Like those vacuum press things for plastic?  Oh, also check out Gregg Fleishman.  He's doing notch assembly cnc structures for outside.  I think he uses a birch ply wood with the laminat already on it.  It's a furniture making material.
     
  • Ok, I hadn't seen that page. I think mycelial materials are very promising.

    By vacuum panels I meant panels with a hollow in the middle, and no air in the hollow -

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_insulated_panel

    That way you could have the thinness and easy assembly of panels, but still pack enough R-value into it to make a comfy home. It'd be like living inside a Thermos flask.
     
  • Vacuum panels are amazing!  I guess you learn something everyday.  I like the ones that have many vacuum pockets.  Otherwise I'd be afraid of popping it.  I'll have to ponder on these things.  They seem prohibitively expensive right now, but the idea is simple enough you'd think they'd be cheaper to manufacture.  Thanks.
     
  • On the other hand, more pockets could mean more complex construction and therefore more cost. This might not be an issue with some building methods, though. (I'm thinking about digital fabrication, where any level of complexity can be achieved without added cost.)

    When I was writing that last sentence, the idea-gremlins threw this one up at me. It's a concept for building VIPs cheaply  -
    Consider a fruit cake. You put it in the oven as soft, formless dough with small, hard raisins embedded in it. Then, while it's baking, each raisin expands and makes for itself a little hollow within the dough. The dough hardens around these raisins. Why is this awesome? If you said "because fruit cakes are delicious", that's a legit answer too, but my point it that it's awesome that pockets have been formed within a hard material from the inside. You don't have to hollow out these pockets with a knife; they are formed by the fact that things expand when heated.

    To apply this to building vacuum-insulated panels, you'd take two sheets of some thermoplastic building material, maybe metal or a hard plastic. In between the two sheets, put beads of some carefully-chosen substance that expands a lot when heated (i.e. has a very low specific heat capacity). Melt the two sheets together. During the melting process, the beads expand and fill up space. When they cool down again, they shrink and occupy less space than they did when they were hot. If the panels have sealed up before this shrinkage happens, no air will get in to fill this space. In other words, this space will be a vacuum.

    It might not work (most ideas don't) but I hate discarding ideas without due consideration. I call CC-SA licence on this. If it works, you've got yourself a way of making vacuum panels with no complex machinery, no precision work and it can probably be done with very cheap, or even salvaged, materials.
     
  • I don't know about pulling a vacuum that way, Conor.
    You could certainly make foam panels that way.
    But to get even a partial vacuum, you're going to have to vaporize something that is normally a solid at room temperature, and that's going to require quite a lot of energy to heat up in the oven.
    And that energy could be used for something else, instead.
    So maybe making "puff-pastry" panels that create a fluffy inner insulation layer might be a good compromise for total embodied energy.
     
  • Maybe you cut a complex shape then use a bigger version of a kitchen grade vacuum sealer to seal plastic around it.  Just heat and crimp the plastic sandwich around a pink foam or whatever.  if it pops, just patch it.  cool ideas.
     
  • New video of plastic model here:


    Thanks for watching.
     

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