I remember seeing some honeycomb material at am aerospace surplus store when I was a kid. It looked like a bar of aluminum, but it was just a stack of very thin strips of aluminum, almost like foil. Each strip was bonded to the next at intervals of about an inch, and the bonds between successive strips alternated their placement so when you pulled on the top strip this pack of strips would expand into a honeycomb. Epoxy this between two sheet of aluminum and you have a very strong, very light flat panel. Great stuff.
Then there was the guy who made flat panels for building construction by epoxying aluminum cans between two sheets of plywood. Also very strong and very light.
Those two methods require a certain amount of mechanical fiddling, which could make them expensive. This business of making these lightweight nickel matrices looks to be very promising. I'm surprised more hasn't been done with it. I suppose carbon fiber kind of captured people's attention. Carbon fiber is cool, but it also uses epoxy and epoxy burns. An all metal structure wouldn't have that problem.
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He prints the lattice with photo resin, paints it with a graphite liquid, copper plates it, and nickel plates. That is pretty complicated, and time consuming, plus difficult on a large piece. The other problem I see is the copper plating. Chrome trim for cars and appliances were copper to make it smooth and rustproof, nickel to make it shine, and chrome to make it sparkle. Now anything with copper plating is imported or prohibitively expensive due to Federal Regulations on disposal of the left over chemical solutions.
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