Zurich MakerBot Meetup!
Bre is in Zurich, Switzerland tonight and if you’re in town, feel free to meet him for a beer around 9PM at Total Bar. He’ll have some Makerbot stuff to giveaway!
If you organize your own MakerBot Meetup make sure to drop a note and we’ll do our best to blog about it!
PLA is a material that we sell that is made of corn. It’s in the experimental stage, meaning that we did a bunch of tests and found it to be the best, but we haven’t found the best settings for it yet. One problem folks have been having is keeping it flowing!
Nick McCoy has solved one problem by coating the PLA with oil as it goes into the extruder. He’s put a piece of cotton and soaked it with oil so that it coats it as the filament goes into the extruder. Cool! We haven’t tried this out at the Botcave yet, but it’s refreshing to hear a cool solution! Learn more about PLA on the MakerBot wiki.
I am using engine oil, 10W-30, I believe. I bought the wrong stuff for my car once and so I have a quart of it lying around. I thought about using vegtable oil, but I think it would smoke at my working temperatures and I don’t need my reprap smelling more like waffles than it does just running PLA.
MakerBot needs you to make pulleys! We’ve done this before, but now we need your help again!
The 50 boxes for batch 7 are filling up and getting ready to be shipped out. Batch 8 is going to be 100 machines, our biggest batch yet. We need even more pulleys to support the community with MakerBots. The parts that go out in batch 8, could be your parts. If you’ve been looking for a way to make some money with your machine, this is it.
All you need to do is download the production file, test it with a bearing, and then crank them out and we’ll give you a for each one! You’ll be printing money! Besides making money, you’ll also be giving new MakerBot operators their first thrill when they open up their boxes and they find that they can make something just like the pulley you printed for them!
If you’re in, read this post, check out the production code and please email zach@makerbot.com to let him know you are going to be on Team Pulley and we’ll hook you up.
I heard you like front pages so I put a front page on your front page. What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
Photo Credit: That’s Becky Stern and her MakerBot!
Here we go! Batch 7 is for sale!
With every batch, we increase our batch size with the idea that we’ll sell a good chunk of the batch and then have some left over to have in stock. This has never happened because we always sell out before the end of the month!
We’re stepping it up again. Batch 6 (sold out) is planned to ship out on September 3rd and Batch 7 is planned to ship on October 5th, so if you’ve been waiting to get a MakerBot Cupcake CNC, now is the time to order to get yours shipped to you in October. We didn’t tell anyone that batch 7 was for sale and in 3 hours 3 MakerBots have sold. Now that the word is out, get yours while the getting is good!
There are a few options for making your own MakerBot Cupcake CNC. You can buy the Basic kit or the Deluxe kit. If you’ve got a power supply and the tools, you’ll want the Basic kit and just go over the list and order the things you don’t have already. If you want to set yourself up with a MakerBot and get all the tools with it, you’ll want to get the Deluxe kit kit.
The biggest upgrade ever arrived with Batch 5 and continues with Batch 7. All the electronics come pre-assembled!
100 Boxes for Batch 6 and 7!
In ReplicatorG 005 support was added for controlling multiple MakerBots from the same computer. On Windows and Linux it just involves opening more instances of ReplicatorG and assigning them to their respective serial ports but on a Mac it’s a little bit trickier.
The other day Adam showed me this cool trick for running ReplicatorG from the source in terminal and today I documented it on the ReplicatorG wiki. I’ve been using this trick the past few days to pump out pulleys for batch 5. It’s an awesome feeling to be surrounded by lots of MakerBots all humming away as they print out tons of parts for you. Yay for MakerBot threesomes!
Hey, we made a newsletter! You can check it out!
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that we recently signed a lease on a new warehouse which shall henceforth be referred to as The Factory. Well, we’re moving the entire MakerBot operation to this new factory. This is happening on July 20th. Unfortunately this means that a) we have to move a lot of stuff and b) there will be a few days of downtime as we move everything and get setup in the new factory.
We want to make the move easier on ourselves, so we’ve figured out an easy way to do it: the less stuff we have, the less we have to move! So, we’re doing a two day moving sale. Use the coupon code GTFO in the MakerBot store to get 10% off anything. We only have 1 deluxe kit left, so maybe you’ll be able to pick it up for cheap if you’re quick. All orders must be received by Midnight, Thursday 16th to be shipped out. Any orders received after that day will most likely be shipped out once we get setup in the new warehouse. We’re aiming to be up and running again by Friday, July 24. We apologize for the delay that this will cause, but this is just another one of those growing pains we’re dealing with.
Oh yeah, and check out the last clause in our lease (our landlords rock):
While at toorcamp, we made a machine. Matt, who runs the Metrix space, which will soon be a coffee shop/design workshop, took the machine off our hands and it’s making things like the D20 seen above!
It worked great in the desert, but for some reason, it needed to be tweaked a bit when it returned to civilization, the extrusion was coming out to fast and was squishing down each layer. We changed the speed from 26.5 to 29 to make it stretch out more and the layer hight from 3.75 to 3.5 and it seemed much happier.
This is pretty standard for occasional MakerBot maintenance and I liken it to the days when you got a car and you had to know how it worked because there wasn’t someone to change the oil, you had to do it! Because you put it together, you know how it works and you can tweak it! I’ve found that once a machine is printing happily, it needs very little maintenance to print happily for months.
You don’t have do tweak your MakerBot in a vacuum. The community is there to help. There’s a google group for those that have bought MakerBots and the Forums are lively and full of good advice. If those don’t work, you can always send us a note and we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction.
In the spirit of hot rods, here’s a video that the gang over at Metalab put together of a car!
Switched challenged Kegan Fisher and Liz Kinmar of Design Glut to design up some salt and pepper shakers to be made on the MakerBot and do it all in ONE DAY!