Liberty – The Tall Machine in Prototype Stage
Update: Here’s the statue of liberty model!
If you are a regular of the makerbot soup or the flickr group, you may have seen the MakerBot Liberty Prototypes hiding in the background of photos.
Folks had been asking about a bigger machine and so I mocked up the Liberty to extend the build area to 100x100x300mm, which makes for a pretty tall machine.
The good news: it works.
The bad news: it needs a lot more improvement to work well.
My first print of this ended at 150mm because it fell off the XY stage. In the second print, as soon as it got above 150mm in hight, the weight of the liberty made the platform start shifting. There is a little tolerance in the bearings and with all that weight pushed around on the platform, it started rocking the platform back and forth. This resulted in very wobbly lines which isn’t super awesome. Total build time was almost 6 hours.
In future prototypes I’m going to address this by making a wider XY stage and finding an alternative to magnets that will hold the build platform to the base with more strength.
I had hoped that I could just put out an upgrade kit with a new front, back, sides, and long z-stage rods, but I’ve got to go back to the drawing board with the xy stage. My hope is to have this out as an option in 2010. Stay tuned!
Want to see the designs? Here they are. This DXF is best viewed in QCAD.
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11 Comments so far
Eric Smith
I don’t need tall builds, but I could definitely use 100mm by 200mm XY (or more, e.g. 200mm squre). How difficult would it be to modify the Makerbot to do that?
Luis de Rivas
As you’ve found, moving the platform (instead of the nozzle) will incur some mechanical stress on the XYZ shafts, and subject the table to the object’s own inertia. As you scale the machine for larger jobs, the speed/accuracy will be proportionaly affected by the mass of the extruded material. Eventually you would need a variable mass counter-weight on the Z axis to offset the extruded mass!
Why not move the extrusion, when you could simply move the extrusion head? The mass is constant and you can engineer it with lesser mass to minimize the effects of inertia. You could therefore, increase the speed of material deposition and decrease the deposition volume for greater precision.
Jeremie
Long makerbot is loooooooooong
(sorry i couldn’t resist.)
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[...] out this triple tall MakerBot, and its maiden print, the Statue of Liberty! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles [...]
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[...] out this triple tall MakerBot, and its maiden print, the Statue of Liberty! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles [...]
Liberty, the extra tall MakerBot | Diy all the Way
[...] out this triple tall MakerBot, and its maiden print, the Statue of [...]
Luke
That is pretty cool. Was the model hollow? If not, that’s a lot of ABS!
I agree with Luis de Rivas – your print result would be much better on larger jobs if you just moved the extrusion head instead of the platform. Couldn’t you pretty easily prototype up a ‘mobile extruder’ version by placing the extruder head on the XY translation mechanism?
Rhubarb
Forgive me for being a noob, but how does a 3D printer handle parts of the extrusion that are lower down than the part they are attached to, such as the bottom of the torch and the tablet here?
Liberty, the extra tall MakerBot | TuxWire : The Linux Blog
[...] out this triple tall MakerBot, and its maiden print, the Statue of [...]
fredini
Hey- are there any updates on this project? I really want to get a Makerbot, but the small print area is a bit of an issue for the project I ave in mind for it. I would be totally down for it if there were a mod allowing for a taller build area- I’ve been looking around the web for information and if people have successfully modded their makerbots for a taller build area. Are there any documented projects where users have extended the build height?
Xyberz
Yes, I’m wondering what the status on this is? I’m going to get a Makerbot but wouldn’t mind shelling out a few extra bucks to build bigger things.