Vandebina found a way to turn MakeBotted objects into gold… well at least covered in gold! She did it at Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory at Metalab in Vienna. I asked her how she did it and this is what she said!
I demonstrated four different types of gilding a surface. The one with the makerbotted cup is a kind of oil gilding. You have to coat the surface with varnish or an oil-based gold size (oil/resin) that will dry and develop a tacky surface. The oil that i use is known as Mixtion. After the drying time (12 hours) you just have to apply the gold leaves. To protect the surface it can be painted with some acrylic finish, or whatever you want.
There are also other ways to gild the surface —> gilding milk as clay, it takes just 10-15 minutes to dry. The next weeks i will try to gild makerbotted things with galvanic method, the first tests failed. But i’m on it. heh!
Thanks Vandebina! Keep us posted with future experiments!
Nick Ames put a great photo on Flickr that really lays out the law with good rafting!
The left and right edges of the raft are good and will form a strong but easy to remove bond between the object and the build platform. The section in the middle is squished and will stick securely to the platform when nothing else will.
Last week I gave a presentation and demo of a MakerBot and I spent a few hours just doing snowflake prints over and over and tweeking the settings in Skeinforge until I got the optimum settings set up for this snowflake on that machine. For those that don’t have a MakerBot, Skeinforge is a program that slices an object and there are a lot of parameters, like infill and layer height and extrusion speed, to mess with in the battle to make a perfect print.
If you haven’t done lots of multiple prints with 1 Skeinforge change in between prints, I recommend it as a great way to mess about with skeinforge. The cool thing about the snowflake is that it prints in 3-9 minutes depending on infill and so it’s fast and that makes it easy to iterate. Also it skeinforges in just a minute or so, which makes for quick iteration as well. With such a quick turnaround that also means that I only change one parameter at a time since I know It will only take a few minutes. In the past I’ve just gone in and been like “I’ll change them all!” thinking that if it doesn’t work now, that changing more settings would help. (It doesn’t)
In retrospect I wish I’d documented the things that I’d changed as I did it, since now I have good settings but I’ve forgotten everything.
And so I present to you: Skeinforge Battle!!!! A Skeinforge Battle!!!!is when you print something out on your MakerBot and then change 1 setting and print it again. Take pictures of both objects and upload your pics to the MakerBot Flickr Group at and tag them “skeinforgebattle” to document the change. Can you resist the temptation to change all the skeinforge settings? Do you have what it takes to face skeinforge and only change 1 parameter, reprint an object and share pictures?
I’ll do this next time I do prints, but don’t wait for me. Go forth and battle with skeinforge! (And don’t forget the documenting part!) Skeinforge Battle!!!!
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!
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.
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!
The joy of R&D is that moment when everything comes together and there’s a shiny bit of goodness in front of you, gleaming with potential. This is not one of those stories. One of my research goals is to ‘close the loop’ on a few of the MakerBot subsystems. This is tech-speak for adding feedback systems so that you can know if your motors (or whatever) are doing what you tell them to do. In particular, I want to close the loop on the XYZ motors so that we know the exact position of the bot at all times.
My first crack at this is based on a cool chip by Austria Microsystems called the AS5304/AS5306. These tiny little chips are magnetic linear encoders (measures movement on a line). I’ve used the Austria Microsystems chips before and they’re really nice. In particular our magnetic rotary encoder board (measures rotation) uses the AS5040. The linear encoder chip has some really nice specs: resolution down to 15microns (0.015mm or about 1600DPI) As you can see, this chip would be a really nice addition to our MakerBot arsenal. What that means is that you put down a strip of adhesive backed magnet and then run this chip over it. It will tell you your exact position over the strip down to 15 microns. Hawt.
So, I modified the rotary encoder design for this new chip, including creating a new part in Eagle. I looked over the datasheet and everything looked good. I placed the components, then slept on it. I routed it, then slept on it again. I saw a few flaws and re-placed and re-routed it and then pronounced it ‘good’. I sent it off to the fab and moved onto the next board. Well, unfortunately I made some mistakes. First, the AS5040 chip which I copied for the footprint is wider than this chip, even though they have the same pin spacing. CRAP! The pads dont line up. The chip definitely still shows great promise, so I’m going to fix this mistake and send it off to the fab soon.
Moral of the story: always print your design and test the footprints against the real chip. I usually do this, but I was in Portugal at the time and wanted to have a bunch of goodies when I came back. Guess I learned my lesson.
Oh, and if you’re interested in this design… we always do our dev out in the open and this one is located in subversion.
One of our goals when we started MakerBot and designed the CupCake CNC was to automate one of the most tedious things of all time: frosting cupcakes. This incredibly difficult task has plagued mankind for centuries, but at long last we have found a reliable way to automate the process.
Our original design for a frosting extruder followed in the footsteps of Fab@Home’s paste extruder. They have a fairly elegant solution that uses linear actuators. Unfortunately, the linear actuators themselves cost more than our target price for the entire kit, so we attempted to come up with an emulated design that uses standard motors, lasercut gears, and some threaded rod to create a motorized plunger.
Well, this worked up until a point, but it was a pretty error prone and bulky solution. The gears were difficult to attach. The threaded rod based plunger required a design at least 2x the height of our desired syringe (60cc) and basically was heavy and didn’t work well. It was certainly an interesting design challenge for Bre, Will, and I that saw about 7-8 iterations and a failed appearance on TV, but ultimately it was fruitless. There’s a reason we never released the MK1 for sale.
Not only that, but the motorized piston based solution is an inherently flawed approach: The extrusion of a material is based primarily on the pressure, viscosity, and nozzle diameter. There’s not much you can do about viscosity and nozzle diameter, so we’re mucking with pressure. In the motorized piston approach, the pressure builds up gradually as you push the plunger down, and releases as the material either leaves the syringe or you back off the plunger. The result is that you either have extremely slow start/stop times or you have to deal with massive ooze problems.
Which brings us to the MK2. I was musing over the design failures one day when I had the idea that instead of trying to create the pressure in the syringe mechanically using a plunger, what if we directly applied pressure using air. I reasoned that we could use a commonly available air compressor and electrically controlled solenoid valves to push frosting out of a syringe tip. I had this idea for about 6 months, but it had to sit on the backburner for a while until I had a chance to work on it.
My first experiment was with some thick, chocolate frosting that you can find in nearly any grocery store. I simply wanted to see if it was possible to use air pressure to extrude frosting, so I wired up a solenoid to a switch and used that solenoid to turn the air pressure on and off to the syringe. I was using a 21GA (0.53mm) needle and a standard 60cc syringe. I hooked it up to the air pressure and opened the valve. Nothing happened right away, but I gradually turned the pressure up until about 50-60 PSI I started getting a frosting extrusion. I kept turning up the pressure to about 80 PSI where I got a really nice, very fast frosting extrusion that was about 0.5mm wide. Success!!!
Well, it wasn’t a total success: when I closed the valve, the syringe was still pressurized and continued to extrude. Obviously that is a problem, so I went back to the drawing board. I came up with the idea of adding a 2nd valve that would act as a relief valve and release the built-up pressure to the outside world. I grabbed a second valve and went back to the garage to experiment. The result was phenomenal! I was able to start and stop the extrusion at will, with zero oozing problems. This was excellent news. I soon had an Extruder controller wired up to the solenoids and a tester gcode script that would cycle the valves every 10 seconds. It was amazing to see a stream of frosting coming out and stopping every 10 seconds. I ran to get Bre and Adam to celebrate and we danced a frosting dance.
So: fast forward a few weeks and we’re gearing up for the Yahoo Hack Day in Times Square. We really didn’t have a solid game plan for what to do, but we knew we wanted to have fun and stay up all night hacking. I was really into the new frostruder design, so I brought it with us along with a portable air tank and a bike pump. We spent all night hacking on the frostruder and trying a variety of edible materials (frosting, peanut butter, and jelly). We ended up winning the Best Hardware Hack category with our New York Toast entry. It was a fun, fun hacking adventure.
The joy of R&D is that moment when everything comes together and there’s a shiny bit of goodness in front of you, gleaming with potential. This is not one of those stories. 
One of my research goals is to ‘close the loop’ on a few of the MakerBot subsystems. This is tech-speak for adding feedback systems so that you can know if your motors (or whatever) are doing what you tell them to do. In particular, I want to close the loop on the XYZ motors so that we know the exact position of the bot at all times.
One of our goals when we started MakerBot and designed the CupCake CNC was to automate one of the most tedious things of all time: frosting cupcakes. This incredibly difficult task has plagued mankind for centuries, but at long last we have found a reliable way to automate the process.
Not only that, but the motorized piston based solution is an inherently flawed approach: The extrusion of a material is based primarily on the pressure, viscosity, and nozzle diameter. There’s not much you can do about viscosity and nozzle diameter, so we’re mucking with pressure. In the motorized piston approach, the pressure builds up gradually as you push the plunger down, and releases as the material either leaves the syringe or you back off the plunger. The result is that you either have extremely slow start/stop times or you have to deal with massive ooze problems.
My first experiment was with some thick, chocolate frosting that you can find in nearly any grocery store. I simply wanted to see if it was possible to use air pressure to extrude frosting, so I wired up a solenoid to a switch and used that solenoid to turn the air pressure on and off to the syringe. I was using a 21GA (0.53mm) needle and a standard 60cc syringe. I hooked it up to the air pressure and opened the valve. Nothing happened right away, but I gradually turned the pressure up until about 50-60 PSI I started getting a frosting extrusion. I kept turning up the pressure to about 80 PSI where I got a really nice, very fast frosting extrusion that was about 0.5mm wide. Success!!!