Nick Lane: Iconic Construction director on the company building the first 3D printed show home

One New Zealand based construction company is working on the country's first 3D printed show home.

Iconic Construction has broken ground on the project - and the walls have already been made.

Director Nick Lane says the company has paired with QOROX to improve on traditional building techniques.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's been a while since we looked at the world

(00:01):
of three D printing, and no one loves three D
printing more than we do. Iconic Construction is in the
process of printing a whole home. A show home. Ground
was broken a fortnight ago. Already the walls are being printed.
Iconic Construction director Nick Lanes with us. Nick morning to you.
How big is the machine and how fast does it print?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
It's probably about the size of a half three ton digger,
and as the arm itself is moving at about half
a meter per second.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Well, so you're seeing a wall coming out. That's incredible.
What's it made of?

Speaker 2 (00:37):
The wall or the machine? The wall? The wolves? The
wolves made out of a concrete that we import thirty
percent of the dry product of the dry products locally
sourced and we batch it here in New Zealand.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
And so you just punch in the details of how big,
how widen hit go and it prints.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
The war all are quite fortunately. Architec actually does a
lot of that hard work for us, just in the
design of building the property. So we a home, So yeah,
we just we take their CAD files and turn them
into three D print files.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
How much can you print? Can you do the doors,
the door knobs, the power points, the kitchen beach well.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
We had a kitchen carcass before, or just the backside
of a kitchen bench. But at the stage we were
just sticking with the walls. Yeah, we're we're not quite
getting down to door knobs. They probably don't do this
so good out of concrete.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Okay, so you're just sticking. So you anything that's made
of the singular material, i e. This concrete, sort of concrete,
that's what you can print.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yes, so we're trying to take out all the structural
element from the beneath the ceiling line basically, so we're
going to be printing this whole house will have no
timber structure element to it until it hits the ceiling.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Gosh, is it solid in terms of it'll stand up
to you know, riggers and rules and red tape and
all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah. So we've been involved with cor Ox who and
been a part of the testing process, and you have
been there and witness the testing for these walls, and
they're pretty impressive.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
And so the cost as per doing it.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Normally, this house is working out probably slightly dearer than
a sort of cheap build it's sort of more in
your mid range price. I guess what's.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
That cheap builds four and a half five thousand a
square meter? Is that right or not? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Probably depending where you are, it's slightly cheaper in different areas.
We're probably sitting around that four and a half to
five thousand a square.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
With this one, Jeeves, that's not bad. Is this the future? Absolutely,
no question in your mind whatsoever.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Now you think about what construction looks like in twenty
thirty years, fifty years from now, this is definitely a
part of it.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Fantastic good as talk to you nex appreciate the inside
Nick Lane, who's the iconic construction director architectural Merit might
be a bit of a talking point of course. For
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