MakerBot Industries

There are so many amazing things on Thingiverse these days for you to make with a MakerBot. Here are some that caught my eye.
Chess Set
Caterpillar Robot
Yashica D Lens Hood
Printable Desk Clamp

If you design something, we encourage you to share the design on Thingiverse so that others can benifit from your work!

Also, The Masked Retriever, AKA Allan Ecker is crushing the thingiverse blog these days with lots of great posts. Check it out!

We received some emails about missing pieces in the kits in early batches of kits. Making kits is martial art requiring the ability to both count and retain numbers in memory, which requires a relaxed and zen like vigilance. To make the whole thing more reliable, we’ve undergone some changes to our quality control process at MakerBot HQ. Each batch of kits is now verified for completeness before being shipped, and on the shipping end of things, each invoice is checked three times before going into an envelope. While mistakes are bound to still happen here and there (we are human, after all… for now), we are doing everything we can to make sure that if you buy something from MakerBot, be it a fully assembled Cupcake CNC or a handful of ethernet cables, you’ll be satisfied. Let us know if you there are any issues by sending us an email to contact@makerbot.com.

Up till now we’ve done all of our research and development at NYCResistor and then done all the shipping out of our friend Jake’s office. His lease is coming to an end at the end of July so we’re on the lookout to find a new place. We’re looking in Brooklyn for a location that is 2000-5000 square feet with benevolent neighbors/landlord and on our wishlist is a loading dock! Give us a heads up if you’ve got any leads! We’re excited to have a place where we can do research and ship things and have our warehouse all in the same place!

There have just been very minor tweaks to the machine for the first 4 batches. Batch 5 we’re going to be making a few changes. We’ve gone to thinner diameter rods and entirely pre-built electronics. Because you folks are buying enough machines that we can buy bigger quantities of things, we are able to keep the price at $750 for the basic kit and $950 for the deluxe kit even though the electronics will from this day forward come assembled! We’ll still sell electronics kits, but all the basic and deluxe kits from here on out will come with pre-assembled electronics! Go shopping now!

We managed to buy all the steppers in the world with the right diameter rod for our pulleys and when we went to get more and there weren’t anymore… anywhere! So we had them manufactured. We had planned to ship batch 3 on June 15th, but we just got an update that the brand spanking new stepper motors are not due to arrive until June 25th. We have the boxes all packed up and ready to go so when the steppers come we’ll ship batch 3 right out! We were clear in the description that they would be shipping “on or around June 15th,” but still we’re grumpy about it because we’re ready to ship out the machines and are just waiting on these motors! We apologize for the delay. We want to get these to you to make your machines!

The good news is that we’re getting ahead on batch 4 which is likely to ship a bit earlier than expected since we’re ahead on all the materials at this point! We can’t promise anything, but we’re optimistic about getting Batch 4 out early!