Dirk Vander Kooij’s Incredible 3D Printed Furniture from Recycled e-Waste

After watching endless videos of home 3D printers creating little plastic parts, readers seem to just eat up watching big giant 3D printers; for example one of our most popular articles is about 3D Concrete Printing for Construction. Well, we’ve got another “giant” treat today for those who like to watch 3D printing on a massive scale.

Dirk Vander Kooij, winner of the 2011 Dutch Design Award, has ingeniously reprogrammed an old industrial robot to extrude ground up and melted plastic from recycled electrical appliances like refrigerators, turning them into a tables and chairs. It’s just a surreal process to watch. Take a look at the video and see for yourself:

You can push your dropped jaw back up now.

The designer is going to unveil this procedure and his “Endless” line of furniture at the “The Future in the Making,” an exhibition that will take place during Milan Design Week 2012.

Yesterday, we published an article on the worlds first 3D chocolate printer. The Endless robot works in the same way, only bigger, much bigger. Instead of chocolate, it takes the ground up refrigerator plastic, melts it, and squeezes it out in a continuous stream, one layer at a time, building the furniture piece.

According to Inhabitat.com, “This kind of low-resolution 3D printing can produce a chair in just 3 hours. The technology also enables the designer to modify a model after a piece of furniture is produced – a bonus that the traditional injection moulding process doesn’t offer.” I’m not sure what that means, exactly, beyond being sanded and painted. but if you go to his site (where you can locate stores that sell his chairs), you can see all the finished products.

From nanotechnology 3D printers to building homes and the furniture in them, 3D printing is changing everything.

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  • Renee

    What I take it to mean when it’s said that the model can be changed after, is that after a piece of furniture is made, changes to the digital model can be made.

    If you want a piece to be slightly different after looking at the final printed result, it’s trivial to go into the computer and make changes. However, if it was an injection mold process, any change would have to be by tooling an entirely new mold, which is very expensive and time consuming.

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