With 3D house printer in mind. I've taken my time to study bricklayers while they are on the job. I got to note the time it takes to lay a single block using concrete. The result seems to vary from individual to individual. I've measured anywhere from 4 minutes, 3 minutes to 2 minutes for a single block layed. And i consider this a huge waste of time considering ...
the amount of blocks needed to build a house.
What i am trying to convey here, is a way to reduce the time it takes to lay each block to a time frame of 6 or 7 seconds per block.

The relatively long time it takes to erect a building by manual labour is evident enough to indicate a huge waste in time.

The 3D machine would be a cool solution to that. Lets take an example where 500 blocks was to be layed a manual labour, at the rate of 3 minutes per block. Then it would take 25 hours to do just that.

With my 3D house printer, laying each block at the rate of 6 seconds per block, it would take just 25 minutes to lay 500 blocks with concrete. Nice time recovered.

The market opportunity for this project is so large, because houses are continually bein built all the time, irrespective of the location. The project touches almost every life that wants to build a house.

With the rates estates and houses are springing up here and there. When we're fully into the market, the demand will be so high that even with a hundred 3D machines at our disposals, there would still be alot of clients on the waiting list.

The current market cannot be described as stagnant, neither can it be described as dwindling. Building takes place every day, every hour, every minutes, probably all the time. We can capture a gread deal of the market with the reduced time frame of building a house and the reduced price as a dangling bait. The only barrier to that, is gaining access to the capital that will move this project off the blueprint stage and into a working prototype.

The only competitors in the market is the Southern Californian Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis, whose 3D machine is undergoing laboratory test, and the Chinese firm Winson that went commercial with there 3d house printer in 2014.

These aforementioned printers share one thing in common; they use fast drying concretes and dont use pre made blocks to print a house.. Some houses are cast as a single piece while some are built by laying blocks and using concrete to hold them..

There might arise the need to print a house using blocks and non fast-driying concrete. This is where Professor Behrokh and Winsun's machine would fail to deliver. And this is where where my 3D printer would come handy.

You dont gain everyones trust when you tell them that you are going to print a house for them, when they know you will be using fast drying concret's, and a contour crafting technology, because it's in its infancy. But you can some reasonable amount of trust when you tell them that you are going to print a house for them, and they happen to know that you will be using the the conventional and traditionaly tried and tested method; by using concrete to lay blocks one after the other.

In my humble opinion, i think these factors would allow us to gain sustain and grow in the market.

The ability of the 3D printer to grip blocks, cut them if necessary and place them in the desired position, would be what makes this machine unique compared to its competitors.

The product can be mass produce if deemed so, and sold to the public. Or it can be leased out to other construction companies and real estate developers. Or it can be solely handled by us. Which i think will entail us having different branches spread out around the globe. With the platform and structures in place, having spread our tentacles thus so far, with a little campaign on advertization through the media, the internet and printing ad, we would have secured a large proportion of the customers in the market.

Ok Sirman. Thanks.

Here's the breakdown of the amounts and the materials that will be purchase:
350,000naira would be used to acquire 18pcs of small, medium and large stepper motors, 18pcs of stepper drivers, 6pcs of microcontrollers..
100,000naira would be used to buy an oxacetylene welder and a Tig welder machines.
50,000naira would be used to acquire a laptop for programing the machine.
Then 400,000naira would be use to buy the iron steels, e.g steel rails, steel girders, steel pipes of various sizes.
Then 100,000naira would be used for miscallaneous.

I am really interested, I would speak to you soon, just trying to organise myself.

Please remember that some blocks are hollow while others are full

kelvin1191:
Please remember that some blocks are hollow while others are full

Thanks, noted.

As much as I won't be able to invest in this program, I really admire your talent. I wish that you find the help you need and that your name be heard among the great minds that Nigeria ever produced.

I am also at the drawing board this moment trying to lay the plans of my own baby.

More grease to your elbow...

Nigeria... Great people ... Great Nation

Indeed you are wonderful, I don't have that kind of amount, but I would like to call you if I could be helpful to you in any way, I'm good in planning, and making research, as been said two head is better down one, I could be helpful in one way, I have a nice working laptop and. Pls can I call you bro?

Daniel2032:
Pls can I call you bro?

Offcourse you can Daniel. Two heads are definitely better than one. I appreciate your offers. Thanks.

Pakingzzz:
Ok Sirman. Thanks.

guy i just saw this thread diz night . yu are amazing
i wish i have such amouunt u mentioned here
when i first saw the topic i thought its wat hundreds of thousands can solve

i think u are wasting here .
if u can try hard and work yaself into abroad u might have better chance and opportunity to prove yaself.

if u can u all the things u said here then u are amazing

kudos!

If anyone is new to bricklaying, I found this video helpful for producing mechanical and computational automation and confronting constraints :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbOE1sFAvu0

Enbedding disabled
Running time 04:46

We can readily find algorithms to replicate horizontal and vertical spearing (box leveling and plumbing)
[img]http://cf.ydcdn.net/1.0.1.30/images/computer/_IFONLVL.GIF[/img]

The video was quite an interesting tutorial. I think mine is not an exception to plumbing.. But i figured a way to solve that problem long ago. In every site, the 3D would be erected and plumbed before beginning duty, that means all the blocks would automaticaly be plumbed.

So, most or all of the houses to be built would carry the plumbing inside their walls?

webizone:
So, most or all of the houses to be built would carry the plumbing inside their walls?

Not that type of plumbing

Vertical scaling ensures that as automation builds vertically, the bricks remain aligned as possible on y axis of any edge (wall). It would be like a human trying to draw a vertical line (or any line) as straight as possible without the use of a ruler or guide. The computation challenge is building on both axis at a defined length and ensuring straightness on vast scale in automation with the assistance of a mechanical component. If this is a non-issue, let me know.

I gathered from a previous post that this project aims to start small, perhaps a simple four-walled house initially. But leveling would be a challenge that we can start confronting as well as many others, computationally.

AAinEqGuinea:

The computation challenge is building on both axis at a defined length and ensuring straightness on vast scale in automation with the assistance of a mechanical component. If this is a non-issue, let me know..

Offcourse, it is a none issue. Not in the slightest.
What i just need, is for us to begin talking about how to generate pulses in one of the pins of an arduino with the necessary codes. After that, we proceed and you write a programe that would convert a pre-defined word and variable, into the above code. The variable would be the number of times to pulse the pin. How about that..

AAinEqGuinea:

But leveling would be a challenge that we can start confronting as well as many others, computationally.

Leveling won't be much of a problem. If you can recall correctly, i said; that the gantry would slide along rails. These two rails are similar to the rails you see on a railway station.
So before the 3D printer is erected, the rails are first laid, plumbed and secured to the ground with the necessary clevis..
The movement of the gantry along this rail is a leveled movent because the rails are leveled, so that solves the problem of the blocks being leveled..
When the machine is in operation laying blocks, the only condition that would cause an unleveled movement is when the command to move in the y axis (the up and down movement) is called up by the software uploaded into the arduino..

Parkingzz, you again? crazy dude at it again. I know a little about 3d printing industry. Your copter nkor?

I wish many Nigerians are like you, this country would have been a great play with innovations flying all over. In present wall... it much easier to tech up a country than it was in time past.

Since your machine is not like the Californian professor's, does it mean each building project site will have to purchase building blocks first, which will be stored inside your machine for deployment as the arduino code executes? Will the machine have compartment for storing and mixing concretes to be smeared or a bricklayer must first manually mix gravel and cement, which the machine will scoop up and use? With those four R plates stopping the falling of concrete flow from pumps A and B, what will ensure the same pumped concrete is not being wasted into the internal hollow of the block considering the discharge pressure of the pumps? Will this machine be able to handle structures that require curvy architectural design or it's only straight faced 4 corner buildings? Back to plumbing, how do you handle conduit plumbing on the y- vertical axis of the building since it's not only on the bottom smeared German floor you will have plumbing lines as you have done at the set up of gantry base initially? The Californian professor's can build a complete house in one day. How long will yours take considering the fact that you are using hollow blocks that may require manual feeding into your machine? Seeing those cost breakdowns, are there particular sellers you can refer investor to, to purchase them within or outside the country? Or rather can you get them cheaper if you source for them? Finally, how do we work together on this considering that you are Abia/Abuja based while I am in Lagos? One more thing, what is the legal framework going to be like as per whether the business will be running in your company name or the investor's or as a 50/50 joint venture to be registered in the two names?

arbitrage:
Since your machine is not like the Californian professor's, does it mean each building project site will have to purchase building blocks first, which will be stored inside your machine for deployment as the arduino code executes?

Nope. Each building site don't need to purchase their own build blocks. It would be part of the contract. We will have to cast our own the building blocks. Unless they already have their own building blocks and choose to.

arbitrage:
Will the machine have compartment for storing and mixing concretes to be smeared or a bricklayer must first manually mix gravel and cement, which the machine will scoop up and use?

A bricklayer must first mix sand and cement with a cement mixer, then pour it into a special tank. It is from this tank that the motar are pumped to the various nozzle.

arbitrage:
With those four R plates stopping the falling of concrete flow from pumps A and B, what will ensure the same pumped concrete is not being wasted into the internal hollow of the block considering the discharge pressure of the pumps?

We wouldn't be using hollow blocks. So the motar doesn't have any place to fall out from.

arbitrage:
Will this machine be able to handle structures that require curvy architectural design or it's only straight faced 4 corner buildings?

It will be able to handle structures that require curvy architectural design because the header isn't fix, it can rotate 360 degrees.

arbitrage:
Back to plumbing, how do you handle conduit plumbing on the y- vertical axis of the building since it's not only on the bottom smeared German floor you will have plumbing lines as you have done at the set up of gantry base initially?

I didnt mean plumbing as in; laying conduit pipes. I meant the plumb that is used to keep an object perfectly vertical.

arbitrage:
The Californian professor's can build a complete house in one day. How long will yours take considering the fact that you are using hollow blocks that may require manual feeding into your machine?

Even though the blocks are going to be fed to the machine in a semi manual manner, it would take a day. And i wouldn't be using a hollow block..

arbitrage:
Seeing those cost breakdowns, are there particular sellers you can refer investor to, to purchase them within or outside the country? Or rather can you get them cheaper if you source for them?

There are no particular sellers for now. There's no 3D house printer that's up for sale lately. Even the Chinese firm Winsun don't sell theirs, they only use it to build for customers..

arbitrage:
Finally, how do we work together on this considering that you are Abia/Abuja based while I am in Lagos?

You will have to come over to Abia every now and then, or But if you prefer it to be done in Lagos, then i will need where to stay, for i don't have some one in Lagos.

arbitrage:
One more thing, what is the legal framework going to be like as per whether the business will be running in your company name or the investor's or as a 50/50 joint venture to be registered in the two names?

The legal framework of the business is going to be running as a 50/50 joint venture, to be registered in the two names.

Great insight from Arbitrage.. mentioning USC's(?) current research on 3D house printing , there's also the company in China Pakingzzz mentioned as well, and I'd like to know what distinctive vision and key features for this project will distinguish it from USC and China?

Both USC's and China's implementation use a cement-like bond for the entire foundation of a structure instead of bricks or blocks, why do you think USC and China choice viscosity over bricks or blocks as the sole foundation element? We have to assume USC and China considered the traditional brick or block approach and dismissed it.

AAinEqGuinea:
I'd like to know what distinctive vision and key features for this project will distinguish it from USC and China?
.

The distinctive vision and key features that will distinguish this project is the ability to build a house in the traditional way..

AAinEqGuinea:

Both USC's and China's implementation use a cement-like bond for the entire foundation of a structure instead of bricks or blocks, why do you think USC and China choice viscosity over bricks or blocks as the sole foundation element? We have to assume USC and China considered the traditional brick or block approach and dismissed it.

In every 3D house printers, the operation starts by drawing the house in a CAD. The CAD then converts this into G-codes. This G-code is a language in which people tell computerized machine tools how to make something. The how, is defined by instructions on where to move, how fast to move, and through what path to move.
To cap it all; for the USC and China to build a 3D house printer that would be laying bricks, chucking mortar where necessary and knowing if a brick is due to be cut and to what length, would require a modification in the universaly accepted G-codes, and would require alot of sensors and feedback system.
USC and China choiced viscosity over bricks or blocks as the sole foundation element because they saw it would be very very easy to do it that, without requiring any feedback and sensors. Mind you, theirs are patented. So you can't make a copy of what they just did.