This gigantic 3D printer could reinvent manufacturing

In a warehouse at the University of Maine, there’s a gigantic new additive manufacturing machine named Factory of the Future 1.0. And if its developers are right, it could become the new way that many things get built. Ostensibly, it is a 3D printer, with a complicated nozzle attached to a maze of wires that hang down from a long steel chassis near the ceiling of the warehouse. The machine is a supersize version of the kinds of additive manufacturing robots that build tiny plastic...