MakerBot Industries

Many design firms are using 3D printing these days to create prototypes. But the guys behind MakerBot are taking 3D printing one step farther, and envisioning a future in which everyone shops for products online and then prints them out right at home. They’ve developed a pretty inexpensive 3D printer for bringing this technology to the masses. At just $750, anyone can be an inventor. We tested the technology ourselves here, so we can vouch for how awesome these machines are!

MakerBot is a pretty new venture, right? How have you gotten so much traction so quickly?

We really just didn’t sleep properly for a few months, dreaming this thing up. When we started, we thought it would just be something that we’d do on the side. But no, it’s been like 80-hour weeks the entire way through! I’d go to bed and I’d literally be dreaming of the machine. My girlfriend would tell me I’d been talking about it in my sleep. Not exactly the most romantic thing!

We started our business in January. And then I took a prototype to SXSW in the middle of March. I would just go to a bar and set it down and start printing out shot glasses and 20-sided dies and giving them away. It was fun. People would come up and ask, “What is that thing?” And I’d say, “It’s the future. It’s a machine that can pretty much make anything you want. Right now it’s making shot glasses.”

3D printing has the potential to be pretty revolutionary. What’s your vision for the future?

Right now we have a way of distributing and manufacturing products that is completely alien, compared to what people were doing 100 years back. We shop for things, often online, and we find the thing that most suits us. We order it. It was probably built very far away, and it ends up getting shipped to some other place and some other place and some other place before it comes to you. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that. You could just shop for something online, download a file, and print it out at home on your 3D printer.

The MakerBot

What led you to developing this inexpensive 3D printer?

Zach Hoeken Smith and Adam Mayer and I knew each other from NYC Resistor, an electronics hacking collective here in Brooklyn. Zach had been involved in the RepRap project for a couple years, which is a research project to develop self-replicating rapid prototyper. Adam and I had both helped out on that.

A lot of energy had been put into being able to make a machine that could reproduce itself, but you have this chicken and egg problem. In order to make a machine that can reproduce itself, you have to HAVE a machine that’s reproduced itself. And so, we just wanted to make a 3D printer.

We looked at all the designs that were out there and mocked something up. I did the design of the body, Adam did the XY, and Zach did the plastic extruder and the electronics, and it all just came together. Most of the parts that go into a MakerBot are stock parts, so that if you need a replacement part, it’s very likely you could just go to the hardware store and get it. That was our focus.

How does it work?

There’s a plastic filament which feeds into the plastic extruder. It gets heated up and it becomes molten, and it comes out the bottom as like a very tiny stream of spaghetti. The machine builds up layers of that molten plastic to form an object.

MakerBot building a model of Walt Disney’s head.

Do you see the technology becoming more refined, so that the prints have a higher clarity to them?

Yep – we’re on the edge of that right now. Right now we get a layer height of about .375 of a millimeter, which is great. But we’d like to get down to .25 of a millimeter. We’ll get there. There’s another version of the plastruder that’s in development.

The challenge is, if you make that little tiny stream of plastic thinner, you have to apply more force. We have to build a slightly more robust, more powerful drive mechanism to get that much force. We’ve done it, but everything has to be completely perfect for it to work. With the layer height of .375, there’s more tolerance.

If someone already has a MakerBot and an upgraded plastruder comes out, can they just switch out that part on their machine?

Yeah, it’s totally modular. It would take you 5 seconds to undo the old plastruder and put the new one in. The cool thing is, because MakerBot is open source, it’s YOURS. You put it together, you know how it works, and you can modify it however you want. If you want to put it on wheels or something crazy, you can do it. We never know what people are going to do with these things.

Who are the people that are buying them?

It’s interesting – our kind of core audience is tinkerers, designers, architects, and just people who want to live in the future. You know what I mean? Where you can imagine something, and then walk over to your MakerBot and print it out, and suddenly it’s real. We’ve had someone at Microsoft buy one, people at Google and Disney, and we just shipped one to NASA.

What are the limits to what a MakerBot can make?

Right now you can do anything 100mm x 100mm x 130mm, which is about 4in x 4in x 6in. People always ask, “Can you make it bigger?” But most people aren’t even using that much space. Most of the things that will take under 3 hours to print will fit in that space.

The other constraint is that right now we don’t have support material. So when you make things that have an overhang, you have to keep the overhang to about 40 degrees. It’s turned out to be a really interesting design constraint. If there’s a box that you have to fit into, it makes your mind think that way. And we’re working on support material. We’ll get it eventually.

Plastic filament, which feeds into the plastruder to print 3D objects.

What colors can you print in?

We have three colors of filament that we sell – white, black, and clear. It’s ABS plastic, which is the same thing that Legos are made out of, so it’s strong and really durable. You can use it for making functional parts.

We can actually get any color we want, it’s just that it costs a bunch of money to have the filament made. We’ll ask our community what they want, but I think at some point we should do red, and blue, and I would love to see glow in the dark! One step at a time.

What has been the hardest part about turning this into a business?

The hardest part? Luckily all the problems we have are usually one-issue problems. We had a problem with missing parts in kits. So we just found a new way to make sure we had no missing parts in kits, and now we have a lot less missing parts in kits. I mean, we’re human, we make errors. Machines don’t do the whole thing. Yet!

What advice do you have for people who want to work on their own projects and turn it into a business?

First of all, do it because you love it. Put your heart into it. Spend all your spare time and energy on it. And commit to it – don’t just dream about it. Commit to doing something on it every day, whether that’s calling somebody to find out if you can get something, or doing design work, or making the things.

I would also say that you should get a community together. We had a community before we started, because we were part of a community of 3D printers before we were a 3D printer manufacturer. But connect with the community around your thing. If you’re going to make toasters, I’m sure there’s a toaster community. It might not be very big, but find them! That way you can learn from them about what works and what doesn’t. They’ll give you opinions and have discussions.

Salt and Pepper Hats designed by Design Glut, available on Thingiverse

Speaking of community, you guys started Thingiverse, which is another really important component of all this.

It is, actually. We’d been really frustrated because there was no place to download the files to make 3D objects. We had all these design files that we were generating, and people were putting them on their own servers, and there was no place to search them. So finally we challenged ourselves to make a site. It took a couple weeks for it to get up and running. It limped along for a while. But people needed it.

It sort of propels the whole thing, because that makes you more inclined to get a MakerBot, if there’s a whole library of designs available that you can download and make right away.

Yeah. Some guy had gotten some sort of medical scan of his skull, and then he uploaded his own skull to Thingiverse. Our intern Will designed some glasses. And now, instead of paying $300 for glasses, you can pay $750 for a MakerBot and print out as many glasses as you want! When he finishes the design for the glasses I’m going to get lenses put in them, just to confirm that they work.

What’s next?

Well, through the end of the year, our goal is to scale up the production of these machines. The holidays are coming, and we keep growing faster than we expect, so we have to be ready! We’re gearing up to get a couple hundred or a thousand machines out there.

Glasses designed by Will Langford, available on Thingiverse