MakerBot Industries

Roboteernat built a MakerBot from the ground up and he’s turned it into a PCB mill. He’s waiting for some better milling bits, but this looks very promising. Check it out!

At MakerBot, we celebrate whenever someone orders a machine. When a group of friends gets a machine, we get even more excited because we know the possibilities for awesomeness are directly related to collaboration. When a hackerspace gets a machine, the excitement level goes off the charts!

Batist says:

Ghent is awesome-town, we all know that, but without a Hackerspace it isn’t complete. This workshop was the first meeting of people that are interested in founding a Hackerspace in Ghent. A lot of tech people and artists joined the party and gave the Hackerspace@Ghent idea a boost. As from January we will meet on regular basis. First at TimeLab, later at our own space.

A hackerspace is starting in Ghent and they’ve got MakerBots! There also appear to be some RepRaps there too. Awesome!

A question we get a lot from folks, is “Who is buying MakerBots?” The answer I like to give is that it’s ordinary people who are willing to live in the future. Art Burns breaks it down in one of his recent blog posts.

If you’re primarily a designer, there’s a reason you should consider taking the plunge even if you think you aren’t the sort of person who is ready to build their own 3D printer: self-education.

I’ve learned a lot about fabrication working in the opensource 3D printing world that I was never exposed to using commercial systems. Learning how to use Blender to create models has been painful at times, but I find myself liking it more than Solidworks for simple projects. I’ve learned about bad STL code, the relationships between temperature and speed when laying down plastic, and more about the physical properties of ABS than I ever thought I would need to know. Assembling the MakerBot from parts exposed me to a few neat tricks you can use to make 3D objects out of sheets of acrylic, and some new joining techniques for thin surfaces.

This new knowledge is also helping my ongoing education as a designer. Now that I know some of the printing capabilities, I can change my sketching and ideation process to work around limitations or integrate limitations of the printer. I’ve also rediscovered the old metalworking path of designing a mold to create a basic shape that is finished on machine tools, but instead I’m printing 3D plastic that I can finish using hand tools or machine tools.

It hasn’t been the easiest tool I’ve learned to use, but building and using the MakerBot might be the “funnest” tool I’ve learned to use in recent years.

via ALL ART BURNS » Are You Ready to Own A MakerBot Cupcake?.

EricM made PERCIVAL (Printer Emulating Reprap to Create

Immense VALue) Great paint job!

via Percival1b on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Nate True is an old buddy of mine from Seattle and shepard of the great site cre.ations.net. He’s hotrodded his extruder! Check it!

After some failures Wednesday and today, my dad and I came up with some fixes to the extruder that have made it work fantastically now.N

The first failure was the PTFE barrier bulging out and leaking ABS all over the place – we solved that by using a new PTFE barrier and surrounding it with a 1/2″ copper pipe slip joiner with a slot hacksawed lengthwise into it so that it could change size and slip around the barrier.  Then we used hose clamps to clamp really hard down on the copper fitting so that it would not bulge out.  There’s a heat sink on there too but we are not sure whether it’s really helping any.  Sure looks cool though!

The other failure was the insulator retainer plate starting to crack due to the high pressures.  I had the genius idea to put the screws right into the plastruder body, rather than using the plate at all, and was surprised to find out that it all fit together just fine that way. Now the tension is on three parallel plates of acrylic rather than bending a single plate of acrylic around a bend.

The last fix is one that I’ve had on for a long time, that’s the M6 nut around the heater barrel which makes sure the heater barrel is pushed into the PTFE barrier threads, rather than the barrier threads being the only thing holding the heater barrel on. I didn’t have an M6 nut so I just used pliers to make a makeshift nut out of very small brass tube. It works fine!

I post hoping others will find solutions to their extruder problems and that others will suggest more solutions.

More info like this is awaiting your eyeballs in the MakerBot Google Group.

Hive76 has been playing with heated build surfaces! Check it!

So tonight we realized that the 4″ putty knife we had been using to scrape off objects from the makerbot build platform was actually perfect for addressing BOTH of these problems. We put the putty knife between the heat and the build surface… The metal surface conducts the heat evenly to about 80% of the build surface now. So how do you pick up this hot stage? A huge bonus is that even though the stage is now too hot to hold at the edges, we have a sturdy handle that doesn’t interfere with printing!

via “Handling” Hot Build Surfaces.

Pleasant Hardware has been rocking it lately by hooking up an LCD screen to their MakerBot. Check it out and then click on the link below to go check out their other work, it’s great!

Pleasant Hardware – 3D printing with MakerBot and other hardware.

Here’s are video from the early days of RepRap experimentation in 2007! Science!

Elijah Wood decided he wanted a RepRap, but you need a RepRap to make a RepRap so he made a RepStrap RepRap! Then he made a really nice site to document it all. Check it!

When I first met Zach Smith in the summer of 2007, I asked him what he made and he replied that he was working on robots that make robots and I remember saying something to the effect of “Count me in!” and I would go meet him in his very small little workshop that was on the catwalk of a video studio in Williamsburg. We were working on a machine to make machines that could make machines. We made a few videos together about it and then the rest is inevitable history.

Elijah says,

I started this whole RepRap project about a month ago. I got hooked on RepRap right when I saw the Make podcast that Bre Pettis did. I thought I could probably build my own for cheaper and maybe customize it better than I could from a kit. So, I set out to design a RepStrap with parts that I had lying around my house. I built my base out of PVC pipe (which I have tons of) and some basic steel pluming parts (the part that hooks the PVC into the back of the Z axis). I made the X and Y axis frame out of aluminum angle iron. I actually almost copied the McWire CNC design on Instructables Other than the Instructables design, I had to do a lot of research on the axis. I was curious what other RepStrappers were doing. I was deciding for days whether to use the threaded rod drive system or the belt drive. I eventually went for the threaded rod design because I had most of the materials I needed already and because in the podcast Bre used that method. For the electronics, I used the generation 2 Arduino equipment. I used this because I was already familiar with the Arduino way of coding. Some problems I faced were that there are so many versions of code out there so I had to try many different versions and eventually I had to ask on the forums for the correct firmware. Another problem was that the stepper drivers V1.2 kept frying. I’m not really sure why, but I would recommend either getting the newer version V2.3 or buy 1 extra just in case. Other than this, there were no more problems and after some time I did get everything working fine. The total price I paid for the whole thing was about $300. Compared to other designs mine is very crude, but for the price it gets the job done.

Seeing this machine takes me back to a time at the roots of MakerBot and trying to figure out how to make a cheap and accessible 3D printer by strolling the aisles of hardware stores! We still do that!

Bre Pettis of Makerbot Brings 3D Printing to ABC News Radio from ABC News Radio on Vimeo.

Dan Patterson interviewed Bre about the MakerBot on ABC news. Check it out!