Grand Designs - CNC House

Basically it's a TV program about a house being built from cnc cut plywood. Not a ShopBot, but a similar size and style machine, and interestingly it was kept in a shipping container, delivered to site, and still in its container used to cut all the thousands of bits of ply needed in the house. The ply bits were assembled into boxes and the walls of the house built using these boxes. The boxes were later filled with recycled newspaper insulation (Warmcell I guess).

Image of house here and video explaining the process here.


Link to 4OD

I'm afraid only viewers in the UK can watch this (unless you can find a workaround).

"Kevin meets Celia and Diana, who plan a state-of-the-art home that will be the world's first computer-cut house.

University professors Celia and civil partner Diana want a modern home to retire to. Having renovated several older properties, they are now keen to build their home from scratch.

Not content with all the usual hurdles, they've decided to pioneer an entirely new way of building and will construct the world's first computer-cut house.

Celia and Diana are bravely acting as guinea pigs for a team of young industrial designers who came up with the system but have never built a house before.

Nothing these two have ever done can adequately prepare them for what lies ahead."

To be honest I didn't really see the point in them taking the machine out to site.

It would have been much cheaper and easier to make the boxes in a factory and then ship just the boxes out to site.

I was also a bit concerned over the lack of treatment of the wood and general weather proofing. I'd like to see how it stands up in 30 years time.

Cool! Several years back someone built an oversized bot to cut pre-insulated SIP panels for quick construction. I think with a blown in or poured in insulation used that way I would have a concern with it settling over time.

Adrian, I got the impression the cnc machine lived in that container permanently and was used regularly in London where the design firm is based. A workshop isn't cheap there and I guess they could keep a shipping container in a yard with no planning permission or business rates. Farming the work out may or may not have been cheaper, but the money would have gone to someone else. They were also able to cut spares and introduce some tolerance by doing it themselves.

I was a bit concerned about the quality of the ply and the settling of the insulation too.

Big mistake not allowing any tolerance on the build to start with. One soon learns that whilst CAD is very accurate, and CAM is relatively accurate for a tool, the real world isn't.

John

This is almost as exciting as Shopbot introducing a touch screen!