Will Sampson talks about a new way of woodworking and a new way of thinking called additive manufacturing. His guest is Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design and co-inventor of Forust, a new 3D printing wood product from a company called Desktop Metal.
This episode of the Woodworking Network Podcast was sponsored by the Executive Briefing Conference, being held September 8-10, 2021, at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, CO.
Woodworking Network is a home for professional woodworkers, presenting technology, supplies, education, inspiration, and community, from small business entrepreneurs to corporate managers at large automated plants.
You can find all of our podcasts at WoodworkingNetwork.com/podcasts and in popular podcast channels. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Thanks again to today’s sponsor, FDMC magazine. If you have a comment or topic you’d like us to explore, contact me at will-dot-sampson @ woodworking network dot com. And we would really appreciate it if you fill out the survey at woodworking network.com/podcast-survey. Thanks for listening.
Intro music courtesy of Anthony Monson.
Intro:
Welcome to this episode of the Woodworking Network Podcast. Join us as we explore the business of woodworking big and small and what it takes to succeed. I’m Will Sampson.
Today’s episode is sponsored by the Executive Briefing Conference. We’ll be talking with Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design and co-inventor of Forust, a new 3D printing wood product from a company called Desktop Metal. But first I want to talk about:
Are you ready for additive manufacturing?
I’ve been woodworking since I was about 6 years old, and all that time there has been one constant. You start with big pieces and make them smaller until you’re done. In the extreme, you start with a tree, make it into boards, then cut those boards into parts to make furniture or whatever. At the end you have your finished product and a pile of sawdust and chips that are waste.
Using a technical term, that process is called subtractive manufacturing because everything you do takes something away from the previous piece of material you are working with. The only exception is when you start combining parts you’ve made by subtractive processes to make something bigger.
But now, there is a new kind of manufacturing that starts building things up from the beginning and creates no waste. In fact, it typically uses waste from other processes. This new kind of production is called additive manufacturing, and it’s the basis behind 3D printing.
In its most popular forms, 3D printing typically squirts out molten plastic in layers to build up a finished part. It’s not unlike the process that goes on inside an ink jet printer where dots of ink are sprayed onto the paper with each pass of the printer head until an image or type is created. But there are other forms of 3D printing that have been around for a while, too.
In metalworking there are processes like Direct Metal Laser Sintering (or DMLS) that use lasers to bond metal powder to build up complex parts precisely. A similar process is now being applied to woodworking, using lignin and adhesives to bond wood dust and create solid wood parts from sawdust.
What additive manufacturing does is it forces you to think differently. It also opens the door to making parts and products that would have been impossible to make with conventional subtractive processes. Parts with complex internal structures can be made as a one-piece part without joining and assembly. That eliminates processes and waste and could make for stronger, lighter wood parts.
After decades of subtractive woodworking, my head naturally solves woodworking problems in a subtractive manner. How big of a piece of lumber do I need to make this part? What do I need to saw, drill, rout, shave, plane, joint, or sand to get to my finished part? Be sure to figure my waste into the calculations.
But with additive manufacturing, the focus is all on the part design and the 3D printing device that will make it. No additional tooling required. No waste. I’m not sure my subtractive woodworking brain is ready for that, but it is an exciting opportunity.
Before we get to our interview with Ronald Rael, let’s pause for a word from our sponsor.
Now let’s learn more about the brave new world of additive manufacturing in wood.
(0:07) Today, I’m pleased to have as my guest Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design and co-inventor of Forust, a new 3D printing wood product from a company called Desktop Metal. Welcome to the Woodworking Network Podcast.
Thank you, Will. Glad to be here.
(0:29) First off, I think a lot of our audience has the impression of 3D printing as something that squirts out little plastic items and has little to do with woodworking and wood products. You’re the co-inventor of a new wood-based 3D printing product called Forust, can you explain what exactly Forust is, and I should say Forust is spelled F-O-R-U-S-T, so it’s a little different than the woods.
(1:02)Well, Forust, I’ll talk about the name for a second. We decided to go with Forust with U-S because we believe that maybe we could preserve the forest for us, the planet and for the future. So, that’s the reason for the different spelling. Because what we do that’s very different from other forms of additive manufacturing is that, yeah, maybe many of your audience members have heard about 3D printing and think about plastic squirted through a little nozzle, and sometimes there’s an introduction of different kinds of materials like metals or woods with that plastic, but our process is very, very different. We use reused and upcycled sawdust, so we’re taking the sawdust powder and we’re spraying it with a biodegradable and non-toxic adhesive to stick it together, so we’re reconstituting sawdust to create larger wood products.
(1:57) That’s interesting. So, what kind of things could Forust be used for?
Well, it could be used for almost anything. It’s really up to designers’ imaginations, but we can imagin things like architectural products for interiors, any kind of wall claddings, surfacing, almost anything you can imagine, luxury interiors, consumer goods, furniture, so really we’re starting from the particle of sawdust, and we’re able to imagine if you grow that particle, those particles of sawdust and adhere them together to make any shape, you can really make anything that you might imagine. What’s very special about the additive manufacturing process is that because we are not subtracting, most woodworking is subtraction, right, you start with a forest and a tree and timber and lumber, and you carve it or you saw it or you mill it. Because we’re growing it additively, we can make shapes and forms that could not be made possible with other forms of tooling. That opens it up to new kinds of possibilities, maybe even products that are yet to be imagined.
(3:09) That was definitely a question I was going to ask you about because our audience is totally adapted to the subtractive manufacturing model, so what does it take to get them and their engineers and their designers to think additively and to be able to solve problems with an additive process instead of a subtractive process?
Oh, that’s interesting. I think that woodworkers or craftsmen begin to think based on the tool. They might think in terms of what does a chisel do or what does a bandsaw do or what does a CNC mill do. And craftspeople begin to think through those tools. I think one thing we have to recognize is this is a very new kind of tool, and that’s simply what it is. The tool allows us to produce new kinds of objects. So, familiarizing oneself with the tool, but also recognizing that – well I think in a certain way one has to abandon first what it means to subtract from wood and just to allow oneself to imagine what might be possible. For example, if you wanted to make a very large sphere or void inside a block of wood with a very small hole coming into it, I can’t imagine a tool that would do that very easily or if at all. But that could be absolutely possible with additive manufacturing. Allowing oneself to just challenge what one thinks of the tools that are available today and thinking about new tools is one way to get onboard. So much of design today happens through 3D design using CAD software or 3D modeling software that those kinds of tools as well, those digital tools are very much compatible with the additive manufacturing tools that we use.
(5:08) Now getting back to the material itself, how strong is this material? What are the properties of it?
Well, it’s an isotropic material and it has strength similar to if not greater in some cases than wood. We can make it very strong. It has structural capabilities. Our print sizes are limited to the size of the machine, so whereas you might be able to buy a piece of wood that’s as long as a semi-bed, our ability to produce objects are limited to certain machines that we have at our disposal. We have smaller machines and larger machines, but beauty of it is that most wood products if they are assembled, are made of smaller wood parts, so we can manufacture many parts to produce larger structural items. I don’t want to exactly say it’s like laminated timber, but in a way it’s laminated at the microscopic level. But then we can also laminate parts, but those parts don’t have to be flat like laminated wood products. They can be many different shapes and they can be joined together and connected and glued.
(6:24) Yes, you could have very complex joinery in additive process and put parts together. Now, natural wood expands and contracts over time in relation to moisture content. Does Forust do that or is it more dimensionally stable than wood products?
Well, like engineered wood products, it does have a greater dimensional stability, and like every wood product that you might find in one’s home, it’s often treated with some kind of coating to protect it and preserve it, so that helps that as well. We use biodegradable and non-toxic and sustainable coatings for our wood products so that also helps with the stability and the strength, but what’s interesting about that is that it’s infused into the layers, so it’s not just and exterior surface coating, it’s actually infused several layers in. So, rather than being sprayed on or painted as you might find in a piece of furniture, a table, this is embedded much more deeply within the wood particles.
(7:35) So you can actually have a more or less prefinished part when it’s finished and comes out of the 3D printer? Is that what you’re saying?
Umm, well we do what’s called a post processing, so there is some work afterwards, but it has the ability to exist within the network of layers within an additive manufactured part.
(8:00) Now I saw something saying that Forust can actually be 3D printed to show grain structure. Is that just cosmetic, or does the grain actually add strength to it as it does in a natural wood product?
There’s a couple of ways to answer that question. Because additive manufacturing is layer by layer in the same way trees build up layers as they grow, there is a certain directionality to the material. Those layers in some cases can emulate or appear to be like wood grain as if the product actually grew just like in the same way a tree grew. But we can do some very special things layer by layer as well, like we can introduce different colors into the layers. Because it’s printing and additive manufacturing is called 3D printing, we can not only print the wood particles but we can also print images onto or even into the wood. So, if you wanted to emulate a wood grain of any kind, you actually could do that within the wood structure, and it would be, as you say, cosmetic, but I want to take it a little bit further than that because it might be seen as a much more refined way of finishing a wood product as well because we’re applying a very hyper localized color to each layer. Imagine if you were using a particular stain, but you could take that stain with a fine paint brush and you could paint it through the layers or within the layers itself. So, that’s pretty exciting because what we’ve been doing so far is emulating different kinds of wood grains, but it could be actually anything or any image. That opens it up to new kinds of possibilities of what applying finishing to a wood product might look like, and that’s yet to be discovered.
(10:04) I think you know in my mind I just keep thinking new possibilities that come with all of this. Like one of the things that occurred to me while we were talking is that if somebody was repairing an old house or an old piece of furniture that had unique mouldings on it, it would be a heckuvalot easier to make a replacement part by 3D printing it because you could just draw the moulding profile in CAD. You wouldn’t have to cut moulding knives and all of that, and run a length of moulding to justify it. You could make exactly the right part that you needed exactly the right profile, just doing it on the computer then 3D printing it.
That’s exactly right, and that’s one area that we are really interested in. In a historic renovation, for example, you might have a particular moulding, and it might be rotted. So there might be a very small section or something. So, you have to go through all this custom tooling to replicate it, and that can be very expensive. But today, you can actually take a 3D scan with your telephone, with your iPhone, your smartphone, and you’ll have an instant CAD file that you can deliver to us, and it’s ready to print.
(11:30) That’s great. That sort of begs my next question. What kind of equipment and training investment does it take to get started? It sounds like you are going to be having sort of a service or have vendors that can provide this service so that somebody can outsource this process and doesn’t have to necessarily own it, although some might want to own it once they get going.
Right now we’re working as a service bureau, so people can send us files and we will make them for customers. We’ll see how we grow over the coming years, but the technology is a really interesting technology, and it’s one of the oldest forms of 3D printing. It’s been around over 30 years. It something that just hasn’t used many different kinds of material technologies. One of our innovations is that we’ve been able to introduce a new type of material to the system. Even though it sounds very futuristic and very novel, and it is, it’s also a technology that’s been around for quite some time but hasn’t been used in this particular way. It will be very interesting to see how we introduce this to the larger woodworking culture and how it’s adopted by that culture. I think it’s going to very exciting to see how that take shape.
(13:08) I think that’s going to depend a lot on what we were talking about earlier on subtractive vs. additive manufacturing and the thinking that goes with it. I know a lot of woodworkers will definitely have to do a mind adjustment when they are thinking about doing an additive process, but now with CNC manufacturing adopted so completely through the woodworking industry, I don’t think that the technology or the computer side of things is as daunting as it was once upon a time. But it’s just that the physical thinking. You know, I’m not going to remove material to get the part I want. I’m going to create this thing out of sawdust.
I think you’re right. There has to be a bit of a culture shift and a mind shift around thinking about what’s possible but what we want to do is we also want to make software tool sets available to customers so they can work through additive design and processes. In other words that I think what has been more accustomed to by customers or craftspeople in the woodworking world is that you work through drawings, and drawings are very 2D, so a CNC machine, for example, will take 2D drawings and cut them out out of flat stock material. And so how do we develop a tool that will allow those same craftspeople to think through something in three dimensions rather than two dimensions. That going to be a really amazing moment in thinking through how one designs or creates a product in wood.
(15:01) Well a lot of wood manufacturers these days are using 3D modeling. They got into it in some respects as a sales tool because it made it easier to visualize things for customers who weren’t use to looking at 2D drawings, but they are using it from relatively simplistic forms like SketchUp on up through most of the tailor-made design programs for woodworking all have 3D modeling built into them. That part of the process I don’t think is as daunting as just thinking additive manufacturing as a solution for some challenge that they are facing in manufacturing or the next step would be to think of additive manufacturing to create a whole new product. Things like we were talking about as far as restoration work, a repair, that probably is a foot in the door to convince them, but I think where you really get full adoption is when people start thinking, “Oh, I could make this product that I always wanted to make that I never could possibly make or couldn’t make profitable and easily, with an additive process.”
Right, and I think that has to do with a lot of the – There’s lots of ways to think about efficiencies in that way of making and the efficiency of the product they are producing or the efficiency of the process. So the efficiency of a product might be that it could be much more light weight or it could be a shell or it could be three-dimensional object that would be very difficult to make that works with sound attenuation. I think the possibilities are endless. A heavy piece of wood could be a light piece of wood. It can be perforated in ways that aren’t simply drilled through but in complex ways that are much more three-dimensional. So, the kinds of products that could be produced I think are yet to be discovered. That’s going to be pretty amazing. If we think about the moment that a particular woodworking tool was created like the CNC mill or the chisel or whatever, it expanded the possibilities of making. This is a moment where we’re just going to expand the possibilities of making. We could think about traditional wood processes like wood restoration for example might play a role, but we can think about the future of wood products and those are yet to be discovered and those are going to be the most exciting discoveries that happen.
That’s one part of the efficiency. The other part of the efficiency is the fact that we’re building from waste essentially. We’re building from the particles. Part of that efficiency is if you wanted to make a hole in wood, you’d be removing all that wood, and you’d be left with a pile of wood dust, of sawdust, of shavings. We’re starting from there. So, when we make something, we’re not left with a pile of wood dust. We’re only left with the product, and that residual waste can be recycled back into our system and we can continue to make objects that way. That efficiency is I think a problem or challenge that woodworkers face, right? At the end of the week or the end of the month they might have these enormous begs of sawdust and where do those go? What happens to those giant bags of sawdust? And that is a challenge for many woodworkers. Here’s a process where we’re beginning with that problem and we’re solving that problem and turning it into viable products.
(19:00) That’s pretty exciting. I love it. I definitely want to keep up to date with your progress on this and share with our audience things that are made with Forust and how the process works in more detail. I’m sure that everybody listening to this wants to see pictures and we’ll be posting some online. We’ve already had one article about your process online and some samples, but we’ll do some more. Maybe we’ll have you back on the podcast to talk about more details. This has been great Ronald. I appreciate you coming on.
Thank you so much, Will, I appreciate it.
That’s it for today. If you are looking for more of our podcasts, you can find all of them at WoodworkingNetwork.com/podcasts and in popular podcast channels. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. Thanks again to today’s sponsor, the Executive Briefing Conference. If you have a comment or topic you’d like us to explore, contact me at will-dot-sampson @ woodworking network dot com. Thanks for listening.