Trip to NC State Furniture Manufacturing Center

What an informative trip. Our tour consisted of four labs including rapid prototyping, furniture testing, woodworking and CNC labs. While all of the labs were intriguing, containing complicated machines for creating real world objects, I was most interested in the rapid prototyping lab. Here, large machines could turn plastic, powder, metal and even moon dust, into any imagined shape. The projects we saw completed and in process were titanium blocks for aircraft, models of chess pieces, objects d'art and small machine parts. Each machine worked with a different material and because of that utilized a different process when “printing.” For example, the machine that utilized melted plastic, extruded it through a tiny pin dot to build layer upon layer of melted plastic. It also printed a second material to support the plastic where the object was hollow beneath. We saw a 3d printer similar to the one used by Morphosis, that lays down a layer of powder and then moistens only what will be the final print or model. Because the layers of powder occur at each level, this machine does not use a second material for support. Most interesting though, was the machine that could work with moon dust to create objects from dirt. One day, perhaps it will be on the moon creating the first structure in outer space from the moon’s raw materials.