June 23, 2014

An amazing assortment of 3D printed home furnishings (chairs, lamps, tables) were showed off last weekend at Maker Faire Paris. The company behind it, French startup Drawn, has launched its own line of 3D printed furniture showing off its excellence technical know-how, aiming to inspire everyone to design and make their own furniture.

Sylvain Charpiot, and Samuel Javelle, founders of Drawn, met in 2012 during a campus FabLab creation project in Lyon, France. They both have a dream of producing locally-made, custom-built furniture. In January 2014, after Sylvain had sourced all the required technical data and equipment, the team printed out the first prototype in March - only 2 months later.

Their robotic arm 3D printer, called Galatea, was the result of 2 years of research. With the help of funding, they have built the Galatea, named after an ivory sculpture made by Pygmalion, a mythological Greek sculptor.

For now, the robot Galatea is one-armed but it is capable of 3D printing large-scale objects. The printer was constructed in collaboration with Laurent Martinez's team, and the building and installation was completed in a very short time.

Check out the first 3D printed furniture made on the Galatea:

"We'll soon be offering our own exclusive line of furniture for sale, and will be ready to make your interior design projects come to life." notes the team. "Our goal is to make furniture differently, by keeping it simple: 'To design is to make'."

The startup will soon launch eShop to sell its own line of 3D printed furniture. In addition, it will hold workshops to teach you what digital 3D design is all about, and how to print your own truly unique piece. And lastly they will offer 3D printing services to designers and artists to print out unique, custom-made objects or exclusive lines of products they have designed.

3D printed furniture is not new. In 2010, Dutch designer Dirk Vander Kooij acquired an old automotive assembly robot from China and reprogramed the machine and transformed it to a real 3D printing robot. His 3D printer robot is capable of printing furniture with material recycled from discarded refrigerators.

Kooij claims his 3D printer robot has a capacity of producing 4,000 chairs a year, using recycled materials. But those chairs, priced about $1,000 or more, are limited to the budgets of collectors.





Posted in 3D Printing Applications

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sltwin wrote at 1/5/2017 8:56:18 PM:Totally right. Chairs are a total ripoff...ganter/open3dp wrote at 6/28/2014 1:46:27 AM:Looks like most of the pictures from this article are taken from Dirk Vander Kooij's web site. I this group is ripping off his designs, I hope he is getting a royalty!



