This is the original soap dish from Pottery Barn. It rests in a fixture attached to the wall, from which it has fallen many times and broken. It can’t be replaced because the line has been discontinued, but I want to continue to use the fixture, since the pedestal sink doesn’t really have room for a soap dish.
Ian designed a replacement soap dish in halves, so it would fit on the MakerBot print platform and asked Will Langford to print the parts for him. He then glued the two halves together with black ABS drain pipe cement from the hardware store, dipped the dish in an ABS cement/acetone bath to smooth out the texture, sanded it smooth, painted it with his ABS dip to give it a glossy finish, and then gave it several coats of white liquid plastic. For more information on Ian’s exact process as well as his photos of the intermediate stages, check out his photostream.
You can still see the faceting on one end that was a result of my not creating my model at a high enough resolution. I could have smoothed that out with enough filling and sanding, but didn’t want to bother. It’s only a soap dish after all. An indestructible soap dish.
Until I saw Ian’s finished product, I had no idea just how good a MakerBot printed object could look. You can bet I’m going to use this process in the very near future.
Check out our Fail Force test rig at the MakerBot R&D lab- We test out the maximum push strength of the new MK5 Drive Gear! Watch the results in real time!
Hi Everybody- Some good news for all you people who love printing in color on the CupCake CNC! You can now get our full selection of colors in 1 pound rolls! We know that some people just don’t love red, or blue, as much as they love yellow, so now you don’t have to deprive yourself ever again! Buy all the colors, and then round it out with a 1 pound or 5 pound roll of delicious looking PINK ABS. For the first week we are also offering a special reduced price to get them out to you on the cheap!
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!
